A story about slow motion miracles.

Dear friends,

Today I’m inspired to share a bit of a longer story with you, a story I’ve shared in short parts before, but never quite in this way. Perhaps grab a cozy cup of tea or a warm delicious drink. Let’s gather by the hearth of our hearts and lean in…

From age 9 to 29, my biggest dream was living in London.

For a few years in my tweenage life, it was all I talked about, I imagined it before bed (before I knew visualization was a thing), and talked about it to my teachers, parents, friends—so much so that my 4th grade teacher signed my yearbook with, “Send me a postcard when you get to London!”

In previous romantic relationships, I’d privately yet sincerely question how we’d continue together in this US citizenship relationship when I was destined to live in London. (Spoiler alert: none of those relationships survived!)

I traveled to London several times in my 20s – each time giving me more and more evidence for why I should move there immediately. If it weren’t for visas and currency exchange and all the things that come with moving to another country, I probably would’ve done it earlier in my life.

Fast forward to late summer 2018 when I’d packed my bags, sold my car, moved out of my home in Los Angeles, and bought a one-way ticket to London. It was my dream finally coming to life. While I’d traveled to London several times previously, this was my first time fully committing to living and leading a full-time life there.

I had a lot of big dreams and hidden expectations around this move. Mostly that I’d meet the partner of my dreams, easily find a way to earn citizenship, and that I’d finally feel rooted in the place I belong – both inside and out.

If you’ve been here with me on these newsletters for awhile, you’ve perhaps read some of my previous writings when I lived there – sharing about the highs and lows, the glimmering goodness and the crushing disappointments. It was a highly polarizing experience for me.

An experience in which:

~I acquired second degree burns on my chest from boiling water. (They don’t mess around with tea temperatures in the UK, and I accidentally spilled it on myself.)

~Through a series of synchronistic events, I met one of my best friends, Freya (her name means fairy!), and upon meeting, it felt like we’d been friends for decades rather than days.

~I got massively attacked by bed bugs and had itchy welts all over my body for weeks.

~Being planted in a city again, I became more intimate with how much it matters to me to spend quality time in nature. Thankfully London has so many expansive parks – Hampstead Heath was my favorite, filled with fairytale tree forests. It’s on the north end of the city at a slightly higher elevation, so the pollution isn’t as thick. I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the park who took off my shoes and socks on an early December morning so my bare feet could feel the trunk of an ancient tree.

~I wandered through neighborhoods of London that felt eerily ancient, like I was walking as a past life version of myself. There were some parks (Grosvenor Square in particular) where visions of carriages flooded my consciousness, and my body broke out in hives. I sat on a park bench and wrote a poem about Grosvenor….I imagined he incarnated with a soul made of Fae blood, a majestic yet humble leader of the forest. Raised in a city of stone, he forgot where he came from and followed the discordant harmonies of the mainstream message of the day and died feeling like he still had so much unnamable goodness to give that was never encouraged.

~Mostly I spent a lot of time walking and wandering. I left the city for the countryside more times than I’d planned to, and towards the end of my stay (although I didn’t know it was near the end), I remember staring out the window on a train from London to Cornwall. I had to escape the city to return to the scent of the sea, to feel the clouds and horizons, to remember that I’m more than the stuffy smoke cinders of the city. After living in London for months, returning to the sea and forests felt like my real homecoming, like the treasure I’d been searching for yet insisted it took on another form.

I left London for what I thought would just be the holidays on the Winter Solstice of 2018 with feelings of both weariness and gratitude. Weariness because it was a challenging experience, it felt incredibly dense at many times – and because I didn’t receive what I thought I would upon arrival. My feeling of gratitude came not from a place of fleeting delight, but rather an acknowledgement of integrity within myself. Gratitude that I had the courage to follow this dream – even and especially because it hadn’t turned out like I’d hoped it would.

I didn’t meet a romantic partner. No doorways opened up for me to continue living there long term. My skin had been through it. My rose-colored glasses felt ripped off.

I left London not feeling like a dream had come true, rather like a dream had died.

When I returned to the US, I didn’t experience a flash flood of epiphanies about my life in London. Days and then weeks passed, and I followed what felt true for me at that time, which was to return to life in the Los Angeles area.

Even though I surprised myself by choosing to return to the place I had left, I felt in every fiber of my being that this was not a going “back” – it was a reorientation to the me who was here now. My pace slowed down, my roots deepened, and my suitcases tucked themselves away for awhile.

I let my London experience metabolize, and little by little, over time – I noticed that the lifelong itch of moving to London had been scratched. I no longer painstakingly pined for it. I still appreciate London … yet not from a place of I NEED TO, I MUST BE THERE. I surprised myself by how neutral I felt about it – and 3 years later, I continue to feel that way.

So what does all of this have to do with Slow Motion Miracles?

My prayer for partnership and a home that felt like home didn’t happen in London, but I needed to go there to get to where I am now.

If I hadn’t gone to London, I am fairly certain I wouldn’t have been able to fully receive and be present with the Love that has entered my life over the last year, which is truly an answered prayer in my world.

It’s also not lost on me that when I received the clear guidance to move to London in 2018, we were 1.5 years away from global pandemic restrictions. While I don’t believe what’s truly meant for us will ever fully go away, for me, this dream most certainly would’ve been delayed had I postponed, ignored, or denied it. I perhaps still might’ve been pining for it had I not taken the leap.

Slow Motion Miracles are seasoned. They’ve felt the relieving warmth of the sun just as much as the brittle cold of a relentless storm that batters you until it's ready to go.

Slow Motion Miracles don’t happen overnight; they’re layered like a labyrinth. Slow Motion Miracles likely won’t take you where you thought you wanted to go, and yet – there is such unconditional love and wisdom present in every step, even and especially the hardest ones.

Slow Motion Miracles are possible when we have the courage to acknowledge what’s within us. The dream seeds planted in the holy grove of our hearts are here for us to tend – even if they don’t fully make sense, if there’s absolutely no evidence of the “how” things will work out … even if they seem foolish.

Our life is incredibly precious – and the dreams we hold in our hearts are not by accident. This is a topic I continually return to in my personal life, as well as a topic that I’ve had the immense honor of supporting others with through 1:1 Mentorship, retreats, and classes over the past near decade.

For the first time, I’ve created a group mentorship in which we’ll be diving into the topic BRING FORTH WHAT’S WITHIN YOU. It’s a sacred space to somatically attune to your most heartfelt dreams – and every class invites you to lean into the landscape of nourishing what’s needed, setting healthy boundaries, and letting something bigger than you lead the way.

If this speaks to your heart, you can learn more and sign up for this offering here.

We begin on November 3rd!

Wherever this letter finds you today, please consider it an encouragement, a permission slip, to take a leap in the direction of what you want most. There are no guarantees things will turn out when or how you want them to—they rarely do—but your next step will take you to a destination that may be better than your wildest imaginings.

Love,
Madeline