“The beauty of all of this is that you already have everything you will ever need.”
From Donovan Beck’s upcoming book, Sun-break: Notes on Hope.*
*The following newsletter is an excerpt of an essay from my next book! “Sun-break: Notes on Hope” will be out in 2023; until then, I recommend checking out my first book, “A Fool’s Guide to the Universe!” I will be sharing a few more excerpts and updates about the book in the coming weeks both here, on Instagram, and on my Patreon!
I once met a palm reader, and after departing with the last 10 dollars left in my wallet, she left me with a piece of information that I've held onto for several years. "The palms are just a map; I am here to help you read it." Now I am sure her wording was meant to add to the mysticism of the moment as she traced the lines from one end of my hand to the other. Luring me through the story of how this line shows my inevitably short life (yes, she really said that.) or how this one meant that I was able to leave an impression on the people I met (I think she was trying to make up for the earlier comment.). Still, I was mainly impacted by her earlier six words,
"Your palms are just a map."
Engraved in your very skin are the secrets to your life, to the wholeness that is you. No new job, new set of clothes, or fancy car will help you understand the things that are inside you.
Having spent the majority of my life in Southern California and, more specifically, in the warm sage-blessed air of Venice, lined with Blue Bottle Coffee stains and $30 farm-to-table vegan pasta. I've gotten to meet a lot of people on or returning from "their soul-searching journeys." Having sold everything to "go find themselves" in the warm waters of Bali or some humanitarian project in Latin America. And if you haven't been able to feel my sarcasm in the earlier words, I will openly say I never really understood what they meant. Always thinking that their actually running away from all of their problems and that eventually they will still have to come back to something. Bills to be paid, relationships to manage, jobs to take, and the unfortunate, heart-wrenching waves of life to handle. All the bad parts of this existence would still be here, and they would eventually have to come back to being like the rest of us, albeit maybe with a better tan. It wasn't until I heard those six words that I slowly began to connect the dots of what my soul-searching friends already understood. "Your palms are just a map." Finding yourself was never meant to be finding a way past all of the bad or hard parts of life. Finding yourself was meant to be finding the way you will handle them, to know and understand your map so well that you will learn how your body will navigate the waters.
My friend Sarah was one of these soul-searching people, coming from a Latinx background but raised in the United States her whole life. As she herself would say, she was "blessed and cursed with lighter skin and wavy hair." Allowing her to scurt by some of the racism and prejudice her siblings weren’t able to in their upper Playa Vista neighborhood. Nonetheless, she felt just as targeted, not fitting the mold of her traditionalist family while still not being light enough to blend into the crowd of her friends. She left California immediately after high school to teach English to school children in Peru, the land where her blood knows its origin. A few years later, we met for coffee when she returned to the states for a family holiday. I noted that her hair was longer, tied together with Peruvian watana and beads, and she remarked her skin was darker. But most notable, her voice was fuller, both of us sharing a level of "Fu-fu"-ness rejoiced in her newfound energy. And then, with the same clarity of the palm reader, she subtly spoke, "it took awhile, but I finally understood what my body was needing of me." Over the years, I've reworded the palm readers phrase to "finding blueprint to the breakthrough," Meeting more and more people who have been on the journey of discovering that the answer, will always be themselves. That nothing will give you more clarity than taking the time to understand yourself, to see and witness the way your emotions fold and flow together, to know what moves you and what sets you back. My therapist calls this "knowing your toolkit," To be aware of what your body has available to respond to all that life throws your way. To know full-heartedly that things don't just happen to you and stop, they happen, and you use the map you have to navigate around, through, or over them.
Sent with love,
Donovan A. Beck
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