I Sat Out
“Tolerate the sometimes unbearable joys of embodied existence.”
This month I participated in a land ceremony from the Norse tradition of my ancestors called Utiseta, which literally means “sitting out.” For a long time, and especially over the last two years, I have been trying to reconnect with the Indo-European roots of the Celtic isles, Norse and Germanic lineages I carry. Working with Native communities in my mid twenties pushed me to ask uncomfortable questions about my own background, to trace the threads of who I am, and to learn how intergenerational stories and traumas shape the ways I move through the world.
In the ceremony I felt the pull to reconnect to land. I grew up in rural New Jersey in a dense forest. As a child I was isolated and the adults around me were often neglectful or cruel. The forest was my refuge. It loved me without condition. When we moved, I grieved that loss in a way I did not understand then.
After that I lived mostly in cities and slowly developed a kind of disdain for the woods. Forests felt messy, lower class, buggy. That discomfort aligned with a broader misanthropy I carried, a hardening against people and the world. For years I lived from the premise that people are cruel and the world is a harsh place. That belief felt like safety. It explained things. It was confirmed again and again, so it became a reliable way to make sense of life.
And still. The cracks appeared. People have shown me unexpected patience and love. I have been taught my own blind spots and privileges with compassion. Those gifts unsettled the story I kept telling myself. They showed me how my expectations shape my experience, how a world curated from suspicion can become a self fulfilling prophecy.
The ceremony did not bring me back to an exploration of more shadow only. I went in prepared to meet the messy, taboo, and shameful parts of myself and my lineage. I expected darkness and initiation. What emerged, strangely and powerfully, was an insistence on love as practice. Not the kind of naive forgiveness that erases harm, but a steady ability to hold what is there: the grief, the rage, the small mercies, the ugly parts, the tender parts. To sit with all of it and to allow the love that holds it to be the container.
When I drew a card for my new altar it said something that has lodged itself in me: stay present with your experience in order to complete a process, tolerate the sometimes unbearable joys of embodied existence. That has been a doorway. Staying present looks nothing like a tidy resolution. It looks like feeling things fully even when they make you dizzy. It looks like letting joy and grief occupy the same room without collapsing into one another.
There is a strange tension I am learning to live in. As I open toward a baseline of love and belonging, the world often reads as more sinister and more violent. The two truths sit next to each other and feel contradictory. I am learning to keep both in my hands. I am learning to let the love I have been given change the way I perceive the world while still keeping my eyes open. I am learning that love can be a radical stance, not a softening into naivety but a grounded practice that makes transformation possible.
These are baby steps. They already matter. They are changing how I move, how I show up, and what I am willing to build toward. I am sitting with the threshold and paying attention to the work required on the other side. If anything is clear, it is this: the work of showing up in love is both the most vulnerable thing I have done and the most necessary.