A Threshold of Completion

This week, I crossed a threshold I’ve been writing toward for what feels like lifetimes, to me. On Monday morning, I sent the completed manuscript of The Mother Ache: Healing the Wounded Daughter Within to my editor. Yesterday, almost on cue, the cover design for Integration Alchemy: The Real Ceremony Is Your Life arrived in my inbox, inviting me into the next phase of bringing that book into the world.

Two books, two journeys, two threads that somehow wove themselves through the same year of my life. Although they explore different landscapes, plant medicine integration and the mother ache, they rise from the same stream of healing. Both are rooted in embodied presence, learning to listen inwardly, and the lifelong work of becoming more fully ourselves.

Although I completed both manuscripts this year, I had been carrying these books inside me for years. I began rewriting my original integration book five years ago, sensing that it wanted to become something deeper than what I had first self-published. The Mother Ache had been forming for more than two years, revealing its shape one paragraph at a time, in a myriad of word files on my laptop.

When Sentient Publications offered me a contract to publish both books earlier this year, I felt both terrified and deeply motivated. Suddenly there were deadlines, but there was also the extraordinary experience of someone outside of me recognizing the value of the work. That invitation called forth a discipline I didn't know I had. At first, I signed on to write The Mother Ache. Then I was invited to complete the rewrite of Integration Alchemy as well, and together we decided that book would come first. I am grateful we did. Finishing Integration Alchemy brought forth insights I carried directly into The Mother Ache. During a retreat in Peru last summer, after finishing the integration manuscript, the metaphors of basket weaving and the feminine archetypes came alive for me and became part of the architecture of the second book.

For much of the past year, my days began in the dark, at 3:30 or 4:00 a.m., when the house was silent and something within me felt most awake. I wrote for hours before the day began and returned to the pages whenever time opened. Seven days a week. What surprised me was how little this felt like pressure. Most of the time, it felt like devotion. There were mornings when I didn't know how I would keep going and others when entire passages seemed to arrive as gifts. Writing these books changed me. They asked for honesty, humility, discipline, presence, and more trust in my own voice than I knew I possessed.

Now one manuscript is in the hands of my editor and the other is preparing for the world with its new cover. I find myself standing in that strange space between completion and becoming. There is still editing ahead, design ahead, and eventually the work of releasing these books into the hands of readers. Today, though, I am allowing myself to feel the fullness of this particular moment: relief, gratitude, and the satisfaction of having stayed with something for a very long time.

So many people and experiences have accompanied the writing of these books: friends, teachers, sisters, elders, the lands I have traveled through, and the plants themselves. The books carry threads of wisdom I did not weave alone. For now, I am simply letting myself stand at this threshold for a moment and take in how far these two books have traveled before they have even left my hands.