love – Page 2 – Katie Kearns

Smoke and mirrors

A blue, green, and yellow flame with burned branches around it

First, I want readers to notice how we currently serve as smoky mirrors to each other in many of our communities, from Don Manuel Ruiz’s The Four Agreements. Second, I want to offer a strategy for being a truer mirror to people in your communities, from Ora North’s I Don’t Want to Be an Empath Anymore.

Surrender

A road map of Illinois. There is a red flag below Champaign-Urbana.

Despite the chaos and uncertainty of my health at that moment 20 years ago, I allowed my colleague to attune to me. I allowed his protection of space around me to create our own little bubble world that was perfectly quiet, still, and safe.

This moment of letting go was completely contrary to my default way of walking through the world, where I _always_ masking myself, attuning to others, and acting as their caregiver.

Magic items

I have a childhood memory of owning a “Barbie suitcase.” It was a small case that could hold two Barbies and clothes, shoes, and accessories. The Barbie suitcase held the objects that mattered to me at that age and that I tended carefully. Its magic feels like tenderness, serenity, innocence, play, care, and reverence.

Follow the Bubbles

A photo from underwater. At the bottom, the water is dark and at the very top center is brightest. There are bubbles in the center.

What if, instead of drowning in everyday life of productivity and competition, we did what lights our spirits, brings us meaning and purpose, and puts our gifts in service to others?

Journey back to integrity: Therapeutic relationships

A black and yellow striped butterfly with long tails, perched on a long green stem. There's leaf litter and green woods in the background

My current role in a graduate school doesn’t automatically have direct, community-building work in it (which opens up lots of questions for me). As I went on my leave of absence in April, I knew that when I came back I would need to deliberately engage in work that is in integrity with my heart and spirit: community-building with graduate students.

Guardrails and bowling bumpers: Reframing boundaries

I’m starting to reframe boundaries now as the abundance of time, space, and energy I need to bring my love-based self to the table. Instead of boundaries, I’m thinking about guardrails and bowling bumpers – adaptations to my life that make it less likely to get off track or fall off the cliff into fear, shame, and scarcity mindsets.

What’s love got to do with academia?

“Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” In All about Love, bell hooks “Graduate school should be hard,” a faculty member said bluntly in the summer of 2020 during a meeting of an ad hoc committee I participated in on graduate student mentalContinue reading “What’s love got to do with academia?”