A couple of years ago, when I was in France teaching, we gathered around a long dinner table on our first night together. Think flickering candlelight, a long wooden table, gorgeous views.
One by one, we each shared a question we were bringing into the retreat. Something to sit with. Something to marinate on while we were there. I love love love a good question.
Paige, a warm and vibrant soul, shared hers:
How good can it get?
She was a woman in that tender in-between season of midlife. Her children had recently graduated, and she was stepping into a new era of her life. This was the question she wanted to live into.
The spirit of her question became our group’s mantra for that gorgeous art retreat week in France.
When the food was unexpectedly delicious, we’d say, “How good can it get?”
When the weather turned impossibly perfect, we’d exclaim it again.
When happy accidents happened in our art, we’d look at each other, smile, and nod, “Yep… how good can it get?”
I think the best questions carry a kind of spirit with them. This one holds possibility, but also a deep invitation to savor what’s right here, and what’s been here all along.
Lately, I’ve found my way back to Paige’s question.
The last couple of weeks in particular have felt like a small window into my next era, with this question guiding the path forward. There has been more rest. More loose and fun art. More play. More dreaming. A sense of absolute ease and purpose that feels deeply right.
But underneath that, something else has been quietly unfolding.
For the past few years, I’ve been doing deep trauma work. The kind of personal work that bends time, where old experiences don’t feel like something that happened long ago, but something still alive in the body now – old patterns and stories quietly shaping how I move through work, relationships, parenting. All of it.
If you’ve been reading this blog, you glimpsed how tender it’s been (and wholly necessary).
AND it’s also been consuming at times. Feeling all the feelings. Showing up week after week to unearth and excavate and turn inward again and again with a singular focus to what needed healing, what needed tending, what needed to be understood.
But something is shifting and softening over here. I’m sensing how all of this heavy lifting is helping me move from a focus on healing into a focus on living into the next season, unburdened.
And Paige’s question, How good can it get, feels like a bridge into that life.
I love the idea of this new mantra being an essential part of the healing process. Not separate from it, but woven right into it. And I’m so grateful to have arrived here.
It’s already getting good. It always has been.
Here’s to allowing it to be good. To expecting tiny miracles everyday. To savoring the present moment while also holding space for the dreamy, imagined, and very real future that’s unfolding.
I am SO here for it.
Big love,
Kelly Rae
PPS: My new print, How Good Can It Get, is available over in my shop!
