The Sacred Perimeter: 7 Lessons I've Learned from Salt

I keep a little wooden container of blessed sea salt next to my computer. Some mornings, I add a pinch to my first bottle of water of the day. It's just a quick personal ritual, but it still helps shift the energy and start the productive part of my day on the right foot. 

Other times, salt crosses my mind while cooking dinner. I think about how it's the one spice nearly every dish needs at least a little of to taste right. Yet you rarely think about it being there. When someone loves what you cooked and goes, "Yum, what's in this?" you usually don't even think to mention salt.

Salt isn't flashy or exotic. But it's always necessary. You don't always think about it, especially if it's present in a stabilizing, balanced way. But you certainly notice when it's missing.

It even showed up in my daily divination session this morning when I pulled the Salt card from one of my oracle decks. A perfect match. Because lately, salt has felt like more than an ingredient or a tool. It’s felt like a symbol of everything I’m learning about setting and maintaining boundaries, especially the kind that don’t necessarily need to shout to be heard.

So here are a few of those truths. Lessons from salt about boundaries worth preserving.

1. Salt draws a circle, not a line

It's taken me a long time to realize boundaries aren’t truly walls so much as they’re circles of protection. You draw a line to keep people out. But a circle invites what is sacred and beneficial to step inside, while keeping the rest in its own lane where it belongs. Salt taught me that a boundary can be generous and protective at the same time.

2. Salt preserves what matters

Before refrigeration, people used salt to preserve food. It held our nourishment in a state of stillness and safety until the right time to eat it finally came. I think some parts of us need temporary preservation, too, especially parts like unspoken dreams and painful griefs we're not sure anyone else would understand. Salt knows how to keep it all safe until you're ready to unpack it and find a use for it.

A Soft Thing Worth Protecting: Reflections on the Value of Empathy

As a relatively private person, there's a lot of myself I don't openly share. Not because those parts are shameful or broken, but because they’re delicate and too often misunderstood.

One of those parts has always been my sense of empathy. That's the part of me that has always listened too closely, noticed too much, and felt absolutely everything all the way down to the bone. It’s also the part I’ve learned to hide, shield, and sometimes even deny to survive in a world that increasingly treats gentleness as a liability.

But here’s what no one tells you. Kindness and justice aren’t actually opposites. Neither are softness and strength. 

The Myth of "Too Sensitive"

From an early age, I've been the kind of person who cries over movies and senses shifts in people’s moods long before they actually open their mouths and speak. Sometimes I deeply felt guilt or grief that weren't even my own, but I was also astute enough to realize that other people didn't have these intense reactions to things. 

For a long time, I thought something was wrong with me. I believed people when they told me I was “too sensitive" and took things “too personally.” I didn't yet understand that what they were really saying was, "Your softness makes me uncomfortable, and your empathy holds up a mirror I’m not ready to look into." 

And sometimes what they meant was closer to, "Your brand of softness makes it harder for me to control you, and I don't like that." Narcissists and opportunists have always been drawn to my openness and kindness. But when they tried to take advantage of me, I saw through it. If they hurt me, there were consequences instead of a truly clean slate, especially as I got older and more self-aware. 

Narcissists, abusers, and opportunists make life hard, so I eventually did what so many empathetic people do. I buried my empathy and built walls around my kindness. I learned to present something sharper, more prickly, and harder to reach — a version of me people were less likely to exploit, manipulate, or test.

But I never truly lost my softness. I just hid it behind the door until I figured out what to do with it. And I eventually came to understand that it was never the problem or even a shortcoming. It was actually the part of me most worth protecting all along.

Simple Meals, Simpler Living: What Bread and Butter Can Teach Us

It was just a can of lentil stew I had sitting around. Just a little butter on a slice of sourdough from a loaf I bought the other day, plus a few walnuts and a slice or two of fresh mozzarella to round things out. (No meat, because it's Friday –– a Catholic tradition I adopted years ago and held onto because it still serves me.)

It was the simplest possible lunch I could have made for myself on a weekday afternoon while trying to figure out what was next for my day –– nothing special. But I felt like making it into something more than just scraps and leftovers with a dash or two of intention. Not a gourmet meal by any means, but a deliberate one.

So, instead of absentmindedly cramming my food into my mouth while I continued to work, I lit a stick of pine incense, put on an old episode of Outlander, and took a moment to appreciate the grey overcast cloudiness outside while I ate instead. That choice changed everything and helped the rest of my afternoon play out better.

Simple Doesn't Mean Lesser (or Lazy)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about simplicity, and not just when it comes to food. But also my creative work and how I structure my days. I've been considering all the different ways people try to keep up with a world that never stops demanding more, faster, louder. There’s this pressure, especially online, to make everything into a big production. To over-engineer the sacred, over-style the beautiful, and turn even lunch into content.

But sometimes, the most nourishing thing we can do is return to something unremarkable instead, allowing it to be enough. 

Simplicity is so often mistaken for lack. A meal that isn’t Instagram-worthy is proof we didn’t even try. A short blog post means we didn’t give a shit. A walk taken without tracking our steps must mean we weren’t committed to our health that day.

But real simplicity takes presence and restraint. It takes the ability to know when something is already enough.

The Butterfly Is Watching: Dream Realities and Strange Watchers

Earlier, I was rewatching the wonderful Hugh Grant film Heretic while finishing up a client assignment. I found my imagination lingering on the moment Mr. Reed brings up Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream — the ancient Daoist anecdote where a man dreams he's a butterfly, only to wake and wonder if perhaps he’s actually a butterfly dreaming he's a man. 

It’s a simple story on the surface, but it echoes in a way that’s hard to shake. Especially at this point in my life.

As I sometimes do when watching movies, I also started messing around on Midjourney and quickly wound up with a series of surreal butterflies on my hands. 

One in particular stayed with me — dark, elegant wings speckled with pale bands, and at its center a single, all-seeing eye. Not painted or decorative but real, watching, and sentient. That eye made me feel like I wasn’t just looking at the butterfly. It was also looking back at me from God only knows where.

Zhuangzi’s dream isn’t about confusion 

It’s about reality as a question and a concept, not a conclusion. We tend to think of life in absolutes –– waking vs. sleeping, real vs. unreal, human vs. non-human. But what if those categories aren’t as fixed as they've always seemed? What if a dream isn’t the opposite of life, but simply another expression of it?

What if some part of us — the part that just might be ancient, instinctive, unblinking — is always dreaming?

The butterfly from my render feels reflective of that part of me. Not the transitory flicker of beauty most people associate with transformation, but something older. It's a witness, a seer. Maybe it's even one of the animal guides I've been thinking so much about lately.

Lately, I feel like I’m standing between two worlds

One of these worlds I'm all too familiar with. It's the one that asks for resumes, recommends routines, and demands hard proof of absolutely everything. It only asks me to show up — not to shine, not to share, not to become. But I have so much more to bring than just presence. 

I find that world disorienting and always have. 

Then there are the days I have time to write in a trance or contemplate the bigger mysteries of life. When I'm lucky, the right words come from somewhere that doesn’t feel like me –– the second world. 

Returning from that world feels like haunting my own house, drifting through rooms that no longer recognize me.

So when I see an image like this butterfly with its wings stretched wide while it watches from a place beyond time, it feels like a message. Or maybe just a reminder. Is some other version of me dreaming this life? And if so, why this life and this imagery? 

In spiritual work, there’s a concept called the “watcher self"

This is the version of you that observes your thoughts without attachment. Maybe that’s the butterfly. The one who flits from realm to realm, unbothered by binaries like truth or illusion, because it no longer believes in them. That butterfly knows both its wings belong to the same body.

Or maybe the butterfly is God. Or the soul. Or the quiet hum of consciousness itself, resting on a branch we can’t quite reach. Maybe the dream is just as important as the waking. Maybe they need each other because they only exist in contrast to one another. Maybe they are each other.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. 

* This freewriting exercise is part of this month's incarnation of the Feast of the Wandering Pen, a lunar deep dive into identity and self-expression in all their many forms.

When Time Stops Pretending It Was Gentle

The funny thing about aging is that you never actually feel time pass. You feel the things that occupy your consciousness for the most part, instead –– love, frustration, desire, and fatigue. You feel small but important details, like your favorite meals, the way your hair still won't behave in the humidity, and the weight of your favorite jacket on your shoulders. 

Then one day, you open a photo album or an old digital folder. You're instantly given pause. If you were a character in a movie, this is totally the moment where you'd hear that record scratch noise. 

Because a photo does a lot more than just show you what you looked like at a particular point in time. It shows you what you used to be... and it shows you what you no longer are, as well. You may see shades of who you’ve grown into and what you’ve had to let go of to get where you are. You remember the hopes you had in that moment that didn’t quite play out. The joy you didn’t realize you radiated. The pain you masked with a smile you now recognize as a little too careful.

That’s the strange power of still images in action. In a way, they actually collapse time. You go from experiencing subtle, unnoticeable change on a day-to-day basis to staring straight into the unfiltered truth of who you once were. And suddenly, all that change feels immediate. It's sharp, and sometimes even a little cruel.

My mother reminded me of an old photo from my 20s a while ago

It was from when I first got together with my partner 20 years ago, and just the experience of looking at it felt weird. It made me realize that while I reflect on my 20s a lot, I rarely actually see them with total clarity.

But there she was in the picture –– a completely different version of me, even though I would have told you five minutes before that moment that I hadn't changed that much. 

The hair I've always dyed red was five shades darker, because the hair underneath hadn't gone white yet. I hadn't truly noticed it getting lighter over the years because of the dye, but it really had. My skin was smoother, and my eyes were brighter. I definitely wished I were still as "fat" now as I know I thought I was back then. 

But what struck me most wasn’t what was different physically. It was more the emotional differences I knew were there by looking at things like my posture and my facial expression.

There was a kind of unearned certainty in Other Shannon's face. An undamaged expectation that life would be fair, and decent, and good from then on, because that's what the movies tell you is supposed to happen when you're young, smart, and pretty. She was totally confident that some big, beautiful future was not only possible, but inevitable.