The moon whispers her deepest secrets
as the tide eagerly awaits tonight’s news.
The stars hold their breath.
And so do I.
Something spectacular is stirring.
Something vibrant and alive
is ready to burst forth
as if from a cocoon.
I can sense it.
The pulsating.
The flurry of excitement.
A hundred secrets that can no longer be contained.
The moon grins
as she stretches the tension of our collective anticipation
for one more moment.
She already knows the pure delight of what is about to be revealed.
Can you feel it?
Do your cells tingle with giddiness?
Have your toes left the ground, defying the pull of gravity?
Can you sense the magic that is swirling
just out of your intellect’s grasp?
Do not consult your books of knowledge.
Do not bring forth your facts and figures.
We do not need measurements and arguments.
Leave all that has been learned behind.
If only for this moment.
I only ask:
Can you FEEL IT?
The moon is whispering now.
She is ready to tell her secrets.
Open your belly and listen.
This was never meant for your mind.
Don’t try to put words around it.
And for one breathtaking moment,
Let your deepest being remember:
Everything is more Ok
than you can even imagine.
~Missy Maiorano, 2026
I wrote those words Saturday night right after a walk on the beach with Lacey. The Harvest Moon was shining brilliantly over the ocean, and I wanted to soak in every ounce of her beauty and radiance. The beach was remarkably quiet, and Lacey’s energy seemed to match my reverence and awe.
At one point during our walk, the moon appeared to have cracked open the sky and poured a long stream of light all the way down to the water. The tide was moving toward her as if it knew something. And before my mind had formed a single coherent thought about any of it, my body felt that little flurry of anticipation.
Something was happening. Something was stirring. The moon knew exactly what was needed, and she whispered something only my belly could hear.
I still don’t know—intellectually—what she said that night. And somehow, that feels like the most beautiful part of this. I did not need to understand the message for something inside me to stir; to know. I simply stood there with Lacey, the moon, the tide, and a knowing that had no words.
For those few moments, the world felt much bigger than whatever my mind had been able to see five minutes earlier.
My favorite poet, Mary Oliver, wrote that the world offers itself to our imagination. I have read that line so many times, but on Saturday night it felt less like a beautiful line from a poem and more like a description of what was actually happening—what is always happening if we have the openness to sense it.
Saturday night on the beach with Lacey, the world was offering itself.
The moon. The water. The secrets. The breathtaking possibility that the stars were holding their breath.
None of it asked me to make anything happen. Something simply became available. And my body, with the tiniest little exhale, seemed to say, Ahhhhh. Yes. Stay here for another second. Feel the truth that has no words.
And so I did. For a few more moments, I simply basked in a truth deeper and more stable than human words can describe.
That feeling was not new to me. I have known it since I was a very little girl.
Back then, I had an entire elementary school classroom that lived in my imagination. Every child in that magical classroom had a bubble of their own, like the enormous pink bubble that carried Glinda the Good Witch through the sky in The Wizard of Oz. The bubbles hovered just above the ground. Each child could move around inside their own, and all of the bubbles could float around the classroom and visit one another.
I knew that classroom. I knew how it felt to be inside it. It was bright and alive and unbelievably fun, more Disney World than school. Children laughed and played and learned, and every morning they could not WAIT to come back. I spent hours there. Hundreds of hours over the course of my childhood. I could hear the children talking. I could feel the room moving around me. And even now, all these years later, I can still feel in my belly those bubbles floating with children inside playing and laughing.
Many years after that magical classroom was born in my imagination, I became an actual elementary school teacher. And what I wanted more than anything was a classroom that felt like that one. I wanted children to move and laugh and learn and feel safe. I wanted them to wake up in the morning and want to come back.
Imagination had introduced me to something long before I had the words to explain it. It let me live for a while inside the feeling of a classroom I would one day love.
And I wonder how often the world offers itself to us this way. Before we know what we are seeing. Before we know what it means. Before the logical mind can catch up and turn it into something sensible.
Of course, our minds already know how to imagine.
Logical minds can imagine the phone call, the medical test, the rejection, the empty bank account, the terrible conversation, the future moment when everything finally becomes too much. They can build an entire unbearable life out of something that has not happened yet, and then send the body running through every room of it.
What an astonishing imagination.
What a brilliant, devoted mind, spinning stories at lightning speed, reaching in every direction, trying so hard to find the danger before the danger can find us.
And what if none of that needs to stop for something else to appear? What if we do not need to fight that imagination or even replace it? What if the scary or desperate story does not need to be evicted?
What if, every once in a while, another little story simply wanders in and sits down beside it?
I have always loved the words WHAT IF. And if you have known me at all in the past five years, then you have heard me use those two words thousands of times.
Those two magical little words—what if—throw open every door and window in the house. What if has no idea what happens next. It is not asking for a five-year plan. It does not need to be defended or explained. It simply opens the sky and lets something beyond our conceptual understanding float down into our midst.
What if there are colors all around us that our eyes have never learned to see? What if there are songs moving through this very room right now that our ears cannot hear? What if the rock that sits so perfectly still is dancing wildly beneath its own skin? What if the world has always held far more than our human senses can detect?
And then, what if we can come back to one ordinary human moment? The diagnosis. The sensation. The relationship. The grief. The thing someone said. The thing that happened that our minds insist never should have happened.
AND…somehow, by grace, we remember.
What if.
That’s the portal to the other side of imagination.
What if…
What if this thing…this diagnosis, this bank balance, this heartbreak or this fear…is not the whole picture?
What if, beyond my mind’s ability to comprehend, there is something happening right in the middle of this experience that is essential for my path?
What if this thing that feels so hard is just one color in a sky full of a zillion colors we cannot yet see? One note in a song wider than our hearing? One tiny slice of something too enormous for the mind to hold all at once?
For a lengthy season of physical suffering, imagination became my respite from the challenges that seemed never-ending. I would imagine realms in which my symptoms were my super powers. I would bask in daydreams of alternate timelines in which my suffering was the portal to my connection with God. And, every once in a while, in the midts of my imaginary realities in my mind, my entire idea of who I was would vanish. I would have this sense of being One with Life itself. Complete bliss that was impossible to explain or describe.
And I would linger there a few extra seconds. Just long enough for my body to feel the possibility: I can have these symptoms AND bliss. I can have terror AND peace. In those moments, I knew deep down that I was OK.
Last week, one of my beautiful clients was describing the heartbreak she felt about losing the physical ability to knit for very long periods of time. Knitting had brought her so much joy and peace for such a long time. And then, in the middle of her story of heartbreak, she said the most incredible thing.
“Sometimes, I knit in my mind.” My incredible client imagines her hands knitting, step by step, and without any instruction, her body begins to feel a little of the rhythm. Not fifty percent lighter. Maybe two.
But two percent is freaking HUGE.
That tiny 2% bridges the imagined distance between what appears to be the problem and what is possble beyond our logical mind's stories of lack and limitation.
There is what appears to be here in this world of form, AND all that has not yet revealed itself.
This is not an invitation to imagine better or think prettier thoughts.
It is simply a little opening. A little whisper: "Oh. This is apparently here. AND it may not be all that is here. "
The moon is still whispering.
The tide is still listening.
The stars are still holding their breath.
And there are still a hundred secrets that can no longer be contained.
Open your belly.
Let them in.