The Luminist
The Luminist provides a guiding light for navigating loss, transition, and the struggles of daily life.
In 2016, without warning my healthy, unstoppable, singing-while-he-made-pancakes husband died at 50, leaving me and our two pre-teen kids shattered… But that turned out just to be the beginning of our story.
Over the next six years, with grief as my teacher I learned what really matters in life, how to be present with the little but amazing things, why human connection is worth any and all vulnerability, and so much more… In other words, loss taught me how to live a better life — a life that is bursting at the seams with love and depth and mystery. (All while holding down a c-suite position at an international corporation and getting my babies through high school. Turns out grief made me a better leader too.)
The Luminist is my love letter to this way of living, and Mike’s final gift to us all.
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(Now also available as a podcast)
excerpt from post #13
Releasing the myths of avoidance and isolation.
Grief is a brutal emotion to carry around. No one can “fix” it. So it’s easy to feel like the best thing we can do is try to protect everyone else from our raincloud. And if in the meantime we figure out how to avoid or ignore the raincloud ourselves, even better!
But it doesn’t work that way!!
Denying painful emotions not only separates us from others, it separates us from ourselves.
excerpt from post #16
A new definition of personal power — rooted in humor and humanity.
Because turns out power — at least the kind that humans can sustain, versus bulldozers — is not about control or perfection. It’s about being imperfect, acknowledging your limits, leaning into love and compassion, especially for yourself.
Then it becomes absolutely clear what’s non-negotiable for you. What’s worth fighting for, changing, pushing through in this one wild and precious life. Not because you have anything to prove. But because that’s what your life is for: showing up for the people, communities, causes, adventures that light up your heart.
In this new understanding, exerting power gives you life rather than taking away from it.
excerpt from post #19
Ritual and the human need to relate.
To be human is to have an interior life and a soul that needs witnessing. Needs acknowledgement. Needs connection.
Needs to stand side-by-side with another soul, hip-deep in the roiling river of life, wide-eyed and wordless, taking it all in, knowing the other is with them, experiencing it too.