The Frequency Changed
Notes on spiritual awakening when I was expecting a career breakthrough
Here’s what I expected in 2025: that flow would return to my life in the form of career clarity, the right opportunity, luck, some external validation that I was on track.
Here’s what arrived instead: a spiritual awakening - I think? At least that’s what it feels like.
My grandmother died five days short of her 98th birthday, sharp as ever, still intellectually curious. She was known to share articles she’d thoughtfully clip for each of us based on our needs and interests. As an atheist, I don’t say the following lightly - I’m certain she’s still doing it from wherever consciousness goes when bodies cease.
In the months after her death, during what has been an incredibly disappointing year by conventional measures, I have been inundated (without looking) with information about the afterlife, universal consciousness, and the sources and power of creativity. It started with binging The Telepathy Tapes series which have utterly disrupted my understanding of our brains, non-verbal communication, consciousness, and how we might heal ourselves and the planet. Do NOT sleep on this series and then let’s talk about it :).
I listened to Meggan Watterson, feminist theologian, sharing the stories found in recently discovered gospels of women leaders (torn out of the Bible and buried/saved by monks) which normalize and explain how to connect to our divine feminine power. Kara Swisher’s interview with Tig Notaro about poet Andrea Gibson’s life, death and communication from beyond. In the podcast series, Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, Jad Abumrad (Radiolab) tells the incredibly timely story of Fela creating a new musical language of resistance. I just finished Patti Smith’s latest memoir Bread of Angels where recounts A LOT of love, loss, navigating grief and the magic of making art with others.
When grief flowed through me, I turned to small creative projects. Not because I had a grand plan, but because my nervous system needed to create. I baked and cooked. I dyed things. I purged things. I stretched. I walked. I meditated.
I returned to the elemental. Made small, beautiful things. Tended to what was in front of me with the kind of care that capitalism calls inefficient but that my heart recognized as essential.
My grandmother understood this. She expressed her love through handwritten cards, through food made with attention, through a life spent reading and learning and staying curious about everything. She taught me that beauty—real beauty, not the commodified kind—is a form of intelligence and care.
Designer Mara Hoffman recently wrote about returning “again and again to this understanding that this current and next chapter of my life is about being a satellite. I envision a huge silver satellite positioned in the cosmos, yet tethered to Earth. Open for reception.”
100% this.
That’s what’s been happening. Not producing my way into relevance or clarity. Just... receiving. Letting things come through.
In this state, a book, podcast, art, wisdom finds me. Where beauty, encountered or created, becomes a form of knowing that bypasses language entirely. Where being receptive, like a satellite, means I’m positioned to receive what’s meant for me. I want to be emptied, ready and emotionally strong enough to receive.
I’m writing this for those of us who feel both uncertain and hopeful right now. Who are grieving something—a person, a year, a version of ourselves, the state of the world—and finding that the grief has made us unbearably sensitive. Not fragile. Sensitive. As in: able to sense more. As in: our receptors have been turned all the way up.
What felt like aimlessness might be attunement. What felt like failure to launch might be a refusal to launch into systems that don’t honor what you know to be true. That the “next chapter” might not be a job or a milestone but a different way of being awake in the world.
Late-stage capitalism wants us to believe that spiritual awakening is a luxury or an experience to be bought. That tending to beauty is frivolous, that being a satellite - open, receiving, tethered but not trapped, is irresponsible, not productive.
Beauty is not a break from the work. Beauty is the work.
There’s science behind this, too. Psychologist Rhett Diessner’s research has shown that engaging with beauty can increase our sense of hope. When students kept weekly beauty logs—writing brief descriptions of beauty they observed in nature, art, and moral action—they gained significantly higher hope by the end of the semester. Beauty restores what disappointment depletes.
Receiving is not passive. It’s a practice.
In 2026 one of most revolutionary thing we can do is to refuse to produce on capitalism’s exploitive and ugly terms, and instead become satellites receptive to the messages and creative inspiration meant for us, open to what wants to come to us, move us, collaborate with us, create beauty with us for the benefit of all.
This is beautiful Caroline ❤️