Befriending Edge
I’ve been banging my head against a wall—trying to neatly organize all my thoughts, quotes, and dreams for Edge Collaborative into tidy little sections with perfect little headers. Trying to classify, contain, and make sense of something that refuses to be boxed.
And today, it hit me: this tension isn’t a side-effect of the work. It’s a mirror. A message from Edge herself.
I realized I was treating Edge like a project to manage, when really, she’s a presence to be in relationship with—asking for reverence, not refinement. This impulse to neatly organize, to categorize, to polish are the echoes of the very systems I am stepping away from. Systems that demand clarity over complexity, order over emergence, hierarchy over interconnectedness. It’s a system that demands a perfect pitch deck instead of the unfurling of imagination, becoming and the constant dreaming into ‘What if?’. But Edge, she is wild and regenerative, unruly and alive, relational and mysterious. She resists containment because she is the place where forms are composted, where new life stirs in the cracks.
I now find myself sitting with a hard but necessary question: Where am I unconsciously replicating the very systems of harm I seek to transform? Where am I still operating from the ingrained patterns, worldviews, and internalized rules of capitalism, individualism, and extraction—ways of being that constrict me, and in turn, constrict the becoming of Edge?
It’s humbling to name these places, but I sense this naming is a kind of liberation.
I notice it in my relationship to productivity and rest—the false idea that I should be “on” for 8 hours a day, as if my value is tied to how much I can squeeze out of myself in a given block of time. As if what’s worth doing is only what can be measured, ticked off, delivered.
I notice it in how I try to compartmentalize my life—as if I can separate soul from strategy, Edge from motherhood, dreaming from doing. I find myself slicing my days into tidy little boxes: Now I mother. Now I work. Now I meditate. Now I create. But life doesn’t unfold in boxes. It spills, weaves, overlaps. And the more I try to contain it, the more distant I feel from its aliveness.
I notice it in how I sometimes rush past nourishment, launching into the work without checking in with my body, my heart, the land, or the spirit of the day. I fall into task mode—what needs to get done—instead of asking what wants to emerge? What’s alive right now?
I see now how these patterns dress up as care, responsibility and professionalism. But beneath them is an old fear: if I’m not producing something polished, visible, and coherent, will I be seen as lost or lazy? The fear that if I don’t control it, it will fall apart. That if I don’t prove my worth through visible outputs, no one will understand what I’m doing. That if I don’t package this work into something “clear and comprehensible,” it won’t be taken seriously. This is capitalism in the bloodstream. Perfectionism as survival strategy.
But Edge isn’t meant to be tamed. And neither am I.
So I am slowing down, breathing and beginning again. And perhaps my beginning today is simply watching the clouds and calling Edge in, or breastfeeding my son, or planting seeds in the Earth, or…
I am softening the structure. Letting go of the need to get it right. Replacing my list with listening and trusting that honoring what calls to me right now, honoring what’s alive in the moment is alignment. I sit beside Edge as she unfurls in her own strange rhythm.
May I have the courage to follow what’s alive.
May I trust the chaos more than the calendar.
May I remember that mystery is not a flaw in the plan—it is the plan.
