Summer Tweed

Facts.

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Have I gotten weak? I wondered. I watched the woman walk across the train platform in a beige tweed blazer.

You have to understand, the day has 100% humidity, and it has rained on and off. It’s not cooling rain; it’s steaming rain. The air is sticky, or as Theo Von says, hot like it just ate a damn soup. Just looking at her makes me fidget with discomfort.

I saw a recent article that said that some train stations underground rise up to 132F degrees. It is humid outside and sweltering underground.

I spent summers in the roasting belly of humidity of the United States— no, not my home state of Florida, but the Washington D.C. area. Ahhh the DMV summers. The hottest internship summer wearing blazers that stuck to the back of my neck. Soaked in sweat. At least for camp, we had to wear skirts (church camp), so that kept us sticky but surviving. Catching a breeze, so to speak. These days, I would rather go to work in a light sleeveless blouse and linen shorts. I cannot be bothered.

At least in Florida, there is central AC everywhere. NYC doesn’t have blasting central AC everywhere. You are always sort of warm.

Who wears tweed in the dead of summer? I didn’t even know that was a thing. Maybe it only works in LA or Sweden? The tweed-clad woman looked like a wet puppy. But is it worth it? Or, to borrow a line from The Office, is it classy enough?

I looked around. Another woman had on a linen button down that was half open and haphazardly tucked into her blue jeans. Her hair was frizzy and hanging like yarn— still, she was very pretty and classy. I preferred this look to the tweed. Just looking at the tweed made me feel like I was suffocating.

Are we less formal now? Do we care less? Remember being a kid and dressing up? What did I wear as a kid in South Carolina? Did I run around half naked? I do remember running through sprinklers. I remember hot summers, even hotter than this one. And yet I tolerated so much more. Is that what youth does to us? It makes us tolerate more than we dreamed imaginable?

One thing is certain— you will not catch me in summer tweed. Because summer tweed shouldn’t exist.

Grace for the Pilgrimage

“Because the Christian life isn’t just a beautiful beginning. It’s a pilgrimage.

There are stretches of joy, but there’s also struggle, weariness, temptation, and moments when everything in us wants to turn back. That’s why remaining in Christ requires perseverance.

It requires remembering, again and again, where the journey began: in grace. It was grace that awakened us, grace that set us on the road, and that same grace will sustain us to the end.” Glorify Devotional

What Faith Feels Like? (Mosaic)

Image via Charles Metcalf.

By: Gabriela Yareliz

This message by Charles Metcalf III at Mosaic was fire. 🔥 If you are looking for a message to inspire and shake you, look no further.

So many important insights on what it means to live by faith and not feeling, and following the truth no matter what the season.

“Sometimes, you haven’t realized it yet, but you are already free.”

A lot of life is lived between verses seven and eleven. Don’t miss it!

Image via Charles Metcalf.

Asked for a Sign

And got it.

Dr. Edie Wadsworth, a mentor and hero of mine.

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Yesterday, I heard Dr. Edie speak, and her words touched my heart. Deeply. I went out for a walk, and I had that warm feeling— that feeling when you go, I think God just spoke to me just now.

It stayed on my mind. Sometimes, we are faced with opportunities that stay on our mind, for seasons. We keep coming back to that part of the road or back to that door, wondering what lies beyond it. We wonder if an opportunity could open other doors and even layers inside of us. It happens, sometimes.

God has spoken to me many times through Dr. Edie. I found the physician-turned-life-coach a few months before a time of deep loss. Her words guided me through that emotional season. To the degree I was ok during that time, it was because of God’s presence, my family, and the Life Mentoring School community. I felt God near, and I will never forget that season. The calm poured over me; the wisdom strengthened my resolve. So, all this to say, it’s not the first time I have heard God’s voice in her sweet southern drawl.

I thought about her when I went to Nashville this summer, knowing she was closer than ever and going through her own difficult season with her husband’s cancer treatment at Vanderbilt hospital. I prayed for her and her husband continuously and have felt a connection to her, since the beginning. Since I read her book All the Pretty Things, even before I joined LMS.

I mentioned the opportunity to my husband, and ever the encourager (he always tells me I can achieve something), he said I should. I wondered if that was God, too. (Answer at the end).

I prayed a simple prayer to God. I asked him to speak to me again. Pretty annoying, I know. I told him I apologized if I had missed him speaking to me twice already, but I told God that I didn’t want to open a door of possibility unless I knew it was from Him and not led by emotion. I knew what I had felt in my heart, but was I mishearing?

We never know where an opportunity might take us. Sometimes, the endgame isn’t what others may think. It may be deeper than that. It’s a portal to an unknown.

So I said my prayer. I don’t ask for signs often, but this time, I did.

Asked for a sign and saw these words in the wild:

“What a waste it would be to die curious about who you could have been.

Many repress their calling because they do not know how to defend and protect it from the judgment of others.

How many times do you need to hear the whispers of your calling before you surrender to it?

There is no path without audacity.”

All righty, then. He spoke to me thrice. I am certain of it in my bones.

It’s a good thing I can be annoyingly audacious. We’ll see where the path leads. Ready.

This Week’s Favorites 08.28.26

A snap from a rainy day, this week.

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Next week, we’ll start September. Everyone keeps asking where summer went. I don’t know. My seasonal transitional cleaning is underway. Yesterday, I wiped down the kitchen cabinets, sorted through cans and refreshed extermination tools. I am satisfied with what I accomplished this week.

This week, we lost many people, including the legendary Dolly Parton. This week’s song is in honor of her (one that always moves my heart and soul). Also part of our loss were those who lost their lives in Nepal and Tibet. The footage is haunting and heartbreaking. To think that life can just end like that, as you are running. It leaves me with the same pang in my chest as 9/11. The idea that you just start your day, and you don’t get to come home. Tragic.

In the same vein re a new season— if you have been around the past few months, you know that I am working out consistently with Ladder. Right now, we are completing an interim season before MAX starts in early September. It’s been a lot of fun to work on mobility and standing core. Ladder has taken so much brainwork and thought out of working out. It has simplified everything, and given me visible results.

Today, I completed my Function Health blood draws. Let me tell you something— testing a million biomarkers can be terrifying. It’s like, what will we discover under the hood? And those of us who have dealt with chronic pain and feel that anxiety around health stuff that we so desperately try to control in an effort to be well— these tests can make us spiral a bit. It’s important, though, to look at a snapshot in time and start developing a baseline of data. So while it’s a little stressful, I am also excited to see what comes next because I know that this won’t be my stopping point. It’s actually a starting point.

As a river, we are always evolving and changing and refining. I am in a refinement era. I am entering a next season of being.

Along with the changing season— I am seeking more tiny delights.

I started reading Death on the Lanai, and while I don’t read fiction often— it’s absolutely delightful.

Is it me or does fall make us want to explore makeup again? It’s something about the dark moody tones of the season.

I laughed with my hair stylist about getting Ella Langley bangs while it poured outside. Don’t worry guys, I am not going down that path right now.

Here are some of the favorites of the week:

These glittery fish are everything.
Image via What is New York?

“The truth is everywhere, waiting to be written.” Bertie Brandes

“What you heal in yourself, your children don’t have to carry.” Nicole Sachs and Danielle Shugg

“It’s like she came from a different realm to audit humanity.” Theo Von

“Because the smooth, textureless life is the forgotten life.” Sahil Bloom

“Sometimes, our hardest seasons are our richest seasons.” Edie Wadsworth

“But God, in His sublime goodness, has always sent others, mysterious others, to walk with us — prophets, preachers, friends, teachers, artists, storytellers, wives and husbands, children, songbirds and rivers, even hardship and loss — to help us see clearly. They are ones who make our hearts burn within us, who call us out of our indifference, our lethargy, our death and defeat. They call us to be fully alive, or at least more alive than we were before we met them.” Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

Who are your mysterious others?

Accurate.
When he says fire has chemistry with gasoline— that cracked me up. It’s a message for young people and adults alike. Some adults really haven’t learned this lesson, and it shows. Free PSA from Davide.
An important and vulnerable conversation for all.
A dream world for the soul.

Song of the week:

Looking Around the Salon

By: Gabriela Yareliz

“Did I tell you about the drugs?” the elderly woman under the hair heat lamp asked her stylist after a long period of silence. Her stylist, an older Italian gentleman, moved the cart with the foils and bowl of creamy goop he had just placed on her head.

“Drugs?” He asked as he continued pushing the cart. I raised my eyebrows wondering where this was going.

“For the pancreatic cancer and melanoma,” she said.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” he said shaking his head grabbing his comb to clean it.

“I’ll tell you later,” she said flicking her wrist and waving him off.

In another corner, a girl that looked about twelve was being held down by her older sister and mother (a regular) for what looked to be her first eyebrow wax. “Sit still. The unibrow is coming off!” the mom declared triumphantly. The twelve year old squirmed. “I want a haircut,” she said emphatically, hoping someone would take her up on a change of plans.

“It’s pouring out, baby, take this,” one of the stylists said while she offered a plastic shower cap to a client whose blow out was threatened by the insane outdoor deluge.

There is something comforting about a neighborhood salon filled with faces you recognize, but few names, on a rainy afternoon.

River Water

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says that we should see ourselves like a river.

We shouldn’t overwhelm ourselves with shame over what has happened when we were ignorant, but accept that if we reflect and learn, we are like moving water. We become new.

The person we are today is different from the person we were yesterday. And tomorrow, we will be different yet again.

If we renew our minds each day, we get to start anew. We can reset in a moment. I find this comforting. God has granted us the ability to grow, renew, and change. What a gift to be able to start again.

Our inner and outer worlds shift like seasons. New water pushes through our river of consciousness. We renew.

For the Dandelions

By: Gabriela Yareliz

My favorite flower as a kid was a daisy. I loved a wild daisy. They were sunny and bright. I never discriminated against a sunny and bright dandelion, though. If there is a flower I touched a lot in life, it was that one.

I have memories of playing house or wedding with childhood friends, and we would gather the dandelions, which were abundant in Michigan, and make bouquets out of them.

At recess, just as I sat chewing on honeysuckle flowers and picking clovers in a patch, I also spent time blowing dandelions into the wind a million times.

There is something special about a dandelion. They can grow through a crack in concrete and thrive. They go from sunny yellow to fluffy white bulbs of confetti magic.

Apparently, psychologists even call some children “dandelion children.”

From Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett, Ph.D.:

A University of California-San Fransisco study split children into categories to see how:

“‘sensitive’ children (re-ferred to as “orchids”) respond to environmental changes compared with how ‘resilient’ children (who they call ‘dandelions’) react.

Dandelion children may thrive in most any condition, whereas orchid children tend to be more fearful and overwhelmed in uncertain social situations. Whether an orchid or a dandelion child does better or worse likely has to do with how families, teachers, and peers support their emotional development. If neglected, orchid children promptly wither—but if they are raised in supportive conditions, they not only survive but flourish compared with dandelion children. Emotion skills are likely the antecedent to building resilience.”

I was a dandelion child, and maybe you were, too.

When I read this, I thought of the Ella Langley song— couldn’t help myself:

Dandelion born to live free, ridin’ on a breeze
On a summer night
Tucked back in the weeds, guess that’s just me
In a bed of red roses, I’m the one growin’ up on the wilder side
So if you’re tired of thorns, I’m a little more dandelion

No stranger to a dirt road or a country muddy river bank
If you’re pickin’ me, you oughta know
I wasn’t made for a fancy crystal vase
A mason jar and old blue jeans, from my roots to my boots, I’ll always be

Stay resilient. This one goes out to all my fellow dandelions. ✨