On Going Into Business At The End Of The World

So, hi. 

I’m Kaeti, and I’m going to be running the blog here for a while. 

My hope is to do the usual blog things, sharing information and resources, but more than that - to really reflect and share about the process we’re going through here.

The process of building the physical business as well as the relationships that bring it to life.

The process of landing and rooting and growing and branching, flowering and fruiting and shedding and wintering and budding and growing some more, all of it. And I’m going to just jump in and start with wherever I am, and we’ll go from here. I’m so glad you’re here too. 

Something that’s come up for me this summer - I imagine for a lot of us - is the idea of safety. And specifically for me, leaning into what feels safe, while also leaning into being brave. Leaning into opening a therapeutic business during a global pandemic definitely is requiring both skills.

It feels scary to even talk about this right now, because there are so many intersections here. Pandemic, of course, and all the various threats of collapse that entails. All the various intersections of justice and privilege that make many of us far more vulnerable or far more safe than others. All the ways those realities challenge how we think about safety, and whose. 

All of which is certainly informing our process here in designing and envisioning a healing center that is actually accessible, and where healing can actually happen, individually and collectively.

But this thing about safety has kept buzzing at me, on the personal level.  

Over the last weeks, I’ve found myself talking about two kinds of safety.

One, a fantasy: that it is complete, and that within it, if we can just achieve it, we will not be vulnerable. Life will be comfortable. I am not hammering on this fantasy, by the way - it serves all kinds of purposes and we are often in places of our own healing where we need to bang against it or cocoon ourselves within it. We may need to veer toward a more absolute version of safety, something whose rigidity can truly house and support the level of pain we’re in. We may need a lot of control after being without a sense of control. We may need the kind of isolation or solitude or protection that approach tends to sustain. 

And then. Number two. Maybe another fantasy, but one that feels closer to reality to me now: that safety is about being safe-enough - safe enough to be vulnerable, safe enough to built trust to navigate dangers and demons in relationships, safe enough to be brave. Safe enough to not be in control. 

When I came across the term “safe-brave spaces” as an alternative to “safe” or even “safe enough” spaces, I gave a little squeal of delight because that, I feel, is it.

The moving target, the enlivening dance.

A keystone foundation to what I think of as the golden question of my life and of this time in humanity: how do we stay in relationship amidst so much trauma, amidst the process of healing? Even in a pandemic, how do we stay safe enough and keep healing, keep building community? How do we honor the needs for all these different kinds of safety and still find bridges between us?

Even knowing this about myself, it still comes as a bit of surprise - or maybe I’m just laughing at myself a little bit - to acknowledge that my move is, wholeheartedly, to go into business at the end of the world. 

And not just any business. I mean, it’s a big one. The Dream Business. The one I imagined out loud and quietly to myself for years, laughing at my audacity because, where am I going to find the money to open my own trauma-informed healing clinic, with multiple modality practitioners supporting clients and each other, and a bath house, and space for kids to run around, and a land restoration component where I can grow a relationship with an actual place that is also healing, a place whose existence is itself eco-therapy and sanctuary?

Keep dreaming, Kaeti!

But this is what happens when you’re a powerful dreamer.

The short version of the story is that I moved to Kitsap, met Frances, discovered that not only did she have essentially the same vision and mission, but she had acquired the land and was looking for someone to help with the business. I wish I had taken a picture of the look on my own face. 

Now, I had literally just had a baby. And spent the last four years on hiatus from business as I became a mother to a son, moved a ton, and navigated a whole new wave of trauma territory that I’d foolishly hoped would recede from my life as I took a step back from work into new motherhood. Let’s all just pause have a laugh at that one for a moment. 

But now: cue my dream job, all the threads come together. Then, cue coronavirus. Cue no childcare. Cue societal economic free fall. Cue the biggest wave of new trauma yet in a generation of big trauma waves. Cue a massive opening of the wound of racial oppression across the country. Cue more to come. Cue more steps on what Deena Metzger calls the bridge to the fifth world. 

My cue to trust that, in all the work I’ve done, I’ve learned how to make it safe enough for me to be brave.

Brave enough to do the work I’m called to do at a time when I know it is deeply and utterly needed. Cue a business partner in astounding alignment and complementarity with my vision and my nature, who has learned how to do that too. Who is here, like me, to keep learning how to do this together as we build the kind of business we’ve both dreamed of running. The kind of business that knows “business” is just the framework we have to work with here in the Great Turning that keeps one foot in the world of the old economy, and one foot in the world of the new, walking that bridge. Building it with every step and misstep and the next right step after that. Remembering that economy just means the flow of meeting all the needs, and busy-ness is about the sacred work that calls us.

So here we are! It’s honestly so exciting I can’t take it all in at once. I mean, also because I am taking it in while the baby snuggle naps on me and my four year old plays crazy games with my husband in the next room for forty minute increments. But what I’m feeling right now is the blessing and the magic of that it is happening at all. That it is possible, that we can choose it, even when, true to trickster form, it shows up at the unlikeliest of times, which can of course also be the perfect time.