To Remember Is to Return - A sacred invitation back to wholeness

Lately, I’ve found myself using the word remember more and more. It weaves itself into my conversations, my writing, my prayers. It’s become the foundation of how I understand healing, growth, and the possibility of a different future for us all.

But when I say remember, I don’t mean recalling a fact or a name. I mean something much older, much deeper.

I mean re-membering — as in reassembling what has been dismembered. Putting life, soul, body, and spirit back together again. Rejoining what was never meant to be torn apart.

This is not about going back to the past. It’s about finding the truth that never left us — the one that waits patiently beneath all the noise.

What Does It Mean to Remember?

To remember is to return to ourselves.

To remember is to return to each other.

To remember is to return to Earth, to Spirit, to the pulse of something older than empire, older than fear, older than separation.

It’s a homecoming.

It’s a quiet, radical act in a world obsessed with progress, improvement, and control.

It’s an act of resistance to the belief that we are broken, lacking, or need to become someone else.

Remembering, to me, is sacred because it speaks to wholeness. It doesn’t ask us to fix ourselves — it asks us to see ourselves again.

Why I Believe Remembering Transforms Everything

For years, I searched for transformation through strategy, effort, doing. I thought if I just learned enough, healed enough, worked enough, I would arrive.

But the most powerful moments in my life didn’t come through striving.

They came through surrender.

Through stillness.

Through hearing a song I hadn’t heard in decades that brought tears to my eyes before I even knew why.

Through the way my children’s laugh echoes something in me I didn’t know I missed.

Through standing barefoot on the land of my ancestors, feeling the weight and warmth of memory in my bones.

Transformation, real transformation, doesn’t come from adding more.

It comes from remembering what we already are.

What We Have Forgotten — And Why It Matters

We have forgotten our belonging.

We have forgotten that we are nature, not separate from it.

We’ve forgotten the wisdom of rest, of slowness, of the body’s rhythms.

We’ve forgotten the power of stories passed by firelight, of community, of grieving together.

We’ve forgotten the ways our ancestors dreamed, danced, and prayed.

And maybe most heartbreakingly — we’ve forgotten how to listen.

To each other.

To the land.

To our own hearts.

This forgetting is not our fault.

It was taught, enforced, inherited.

Colonialism, capitalism, trauma — all systems built on disconnection.

But it is our responsibility to remember.

Because forgetting has a cost:

We burn out trying to prove our worth.

We numb ourselves to survive.

We build walls between us in the name of safety.

We turn sacred things into content, culture into commodity.

We lose ourselves trying to fit into someone else’s map.

The Sacredness of Remembering

To remember is sacred because it is an act of reverence.

It says: I am not separate. I am part of something vast, alive, and mysterious.

It is not about perfection.

It is about intimacy.

It is about coming close — to life, to truth, to each other.

Remembering makes room for grief — for what was lost, for what we never got to know.

It also makes room for joy — the kind that bubbles up when we feel connected again, when we’re no longer carrying everything alone.

This work is not just personal. It’s ancestral.

It’s communal.

It’s planetary.

When we remember, we don’t just heal ourselves — we ripple that healing backward and forward in time.

A Soft Invitation

So if you’ve been feeling tired, or like something is missing you can’t name…

If you’ve been longing for something but don’t know what it is…

If you’ve been trying to “fix” yourself but it’s not working…

I want to offer you this:

Maybe there’s nothing to fix.

Maybe you’re not broken.

Maybe you’re just being called… to remember.

Remember the way your grandmother’s hands moved when she cooked.

Remember what the ocean sounds like when it’s only talking to you.

Remember the rhythm of your breath when you are not trying to be anything but alive.

Remember the version of you that was never afraid to dance.

Remember the world before you were told who you had to be.

This is sacred work.

And it begins, simply, with the willingness to come home.

Welcome back.