The Vessel Comes First

When I came down with Covid this year, it was rough. I was sick, alone, and still had the responsibility of caring for my animals. At 72, the rebound is slower. The nights stretched long, and I had time to think about what happens after the illness. What happens when the body has been through fire and insists on rest, even when the world tries to drag you back into motion?

I’ve been putting off my life to allow my body to heal. That’s my focus now: listening, walking in nature, writing my Substacks, cultivating community and relationship in ways that nourish instead of drain. I notice my throat tight when I try to speak about this, as if my body is reminding me: I have something to say about healing too.

Because here’s the truth—our bodies aren’t just healing tissue and cells. They’re repairing the energy that surrounds us. And yet, most people don’t give themselves that space. Why? Because scarcity culture whispers that if we pause, we’ll lose our place. Systems built on productivity push us back into action before the vessel is ready.

I know this firsthand. In my career, I would sit at my desk through lunch, working 17-hour days, often without a real break or family time. The urgency wasn’t just from my employers—it lived inside me. I had to outwork, outperform, prove my worth. And in doing so, I neglected the very vessel that made any of that work possible.

Then came 2020. For a brief moment, I watched parents reconnect with their children, rediscovering the joy of being together. Time slowed down. People remembered what mattered. But here we are in 2025, and the systems of control have snapped back, stronger than ever. The machine is running again, and people are once more feeding it their lives.

If I had it to do all over again, I would choose differently. I would set boundaries. I would take more time with my family, and more time alone to contemplate the meaning of my life on this plane. Because without the vessel, there is no life to contemplate.

And here’s what I know now: when you are an empath, when you are a healer, it is far too easy to slide into those roles without noticing, until you’ve given yourself away. That’s why I’ve started installing what I call kill switches—internal boundaries that stop me from handing over my energy, even in subtle ways. They remind me: my vessel comes first.

As we move into this new human orientation, it isn’t productivity that will carry us forward. It’s presence. It’s tending the body, soul, and spirit as sacred. Without the vessel, we are nothing. With it, we are everything.