My little brother got married last Friday. I was planning to write him a letter with words of wisdom (as if I have any) before his wedding day, but thankfully I refrained. He joked with a friend how someone told him he’ll get a million people giving him advice about being married even from strangers, and when I heard that I laughed because it was exactly what I was going to do.

We arrived home today after being away for a week. It’s especially sweet these days returning home to the quiet and peacefulness of our ranch. There were a few surprises in the mail including a letter from my herbal teacher Donna D’Terra and photos of our herbal class. In her letter she included an excerpt from Clarisa Pinkola Estes’ book Women Who Run With the Wolves. It is one of my favorite books, but I had forgotten these lines that Donna included in her letter:

We women are building a Motherland, each with her own plot of soil eked from a night of dreams, a day of work. We are spreading this soil in larger and larger circles, slowly, slowly. One day it will be a continuous land . . .

This world is being made from our lives, our cries, our laughter, our bones. It is a world worth making, a world worth living in, a world in which there is a prevailing and decent wild sanity.

If there is to be change, we are it. If there is to be inner change, individual women must do it. If there is to be world change, we women have our own way of helping to achieve it.

So no words of wisdom for my brother, but for my niece who turned 6 today, my niece who is 4 and to my daughter, I’ll say–keep dancing, keep dreaming, and stay close to the earth.