Hide & Seek;
Waterfalls & Wildfires

One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was playing hide and seek in our big childhood home.

We'd wait until nightfall, turn off all the lights after my parents went to bed, and scatter. One person counting at the kitchen counter while the rest of us disappeared into the dark. I remember crouching in corners, heart pounding — that particular mix of excitement and fear. The running, the screaming, the race to base.

And sometimes just staying hidden. Savoring the solitude. Letting them look.

Sometimes I didn't even let them find me.

Seeking was another story. Sometimes fun, sometimes anxiety inducing. When I get caught in a lot of seeking energy I am sometimes crippled by fear that I won't find what I'm seeking — and I forget what is already here.

There was a waterfall on the land where I grew up.

Hidden. Quiet. It knew me, and I knew it.

I was a wild little thing — catching toads, rolling in grass, making medicine from plants, disappearing into the trees, playing under the waterfall. My body knew things my mind hadn't learned words for yet.

Including pleasure.

I discovered it young, the way children sometimes do — innocently, curiously, in the privacy of water and imagination. It felt like something. It felt like a lot. And then came the shadow behind it — the sense that something that felt that good must somehow be wrong.

So I hid it.

Then one day a company came to run a pipeline through that land. Right through my waterfall.

It was never the same.

I would one day understand what that's like. But for now, I took what I'd found there and hid it away for a later day.

I got married at 20. Changed my name. Stepped into the roles that were waiting.

Much of it was genuinely beautiful — real love, real growth, real effort. But somewhere in that stepping, I also stepped over some parts of myself I wasn't ready to look at yet.

Then came the years of trying for a baby. A miscarriage. The grief of that. And then someone said to me — your babies are already with you. You just have to call them in.

Something opened when I heard that.

I made my first vision board to call my baby in. But a few things landed on it that surprised me. A woman with her arm raised — Never hide beneath her. And a gentle reminder to embrace imperfection, to smile from knowing how to laugh at myself.

I sat with it every night. Breathing in the life I wanted as if it were already real.

And then this precious little baby boy came and made me a mom.

But those other things I was proclaiming on that board — not so much. Not yet.

Proclamations, I've learned, know something we don't yet. They arrive before we're ready to live them. Seeds, not harvests.

Something kept stirring. A pull toward creativity, toward teaching, toward sharing what was moving through me. I'd feel it and take a small step out — and then retreat. Hide again and again. Because coming out and being seen proved to be scary. Once, when I shared something that felt true and alive to me, I was called a raging lunatic by my in-laws. For finger painting. For talking about flow. It felt awful and it caused me to really go into hiding for a long time.

There was far more life in me than I was allowing myself to feel. I knew it. And I was hard on myself about it. That pressure — the weight of the not yet, the stops and starts, the retreating — it was building.

The proclamations were still waiting.

In many ways, so was I.

Until, something cracked open.

I had been longing for it for a long time — a community where my weirdness was welcome. Where magic was real. Where people talked about energy and embodiment and aliveness not as abstract ideas but as lived experience.

And then I found it.

There was a person at the center of that awakening. Someone whose wildness met mine — a real life lion. Together we tried to build something real — events, community, a gathering place for people ready to come alive. Celestial Movements. A kind of temple.

I was coming out of hiding in ways I hadn't known were possible.

Within that time I also found the waterfall — what had been hidden inside me. A great capacity for pleasure and aliveness. And while I let her come to life, she was part of a wildfire. And that came with a price.

Wild fire moves fast.

Awakening and integration are not the same thing. When long-suppressed parts of yourself finally rise, they don't always rise gently. Mine rose like a wildfire. And wildfires, for all their beauty, don't always protect what's precious.

I lost things. My family was impacted. There was grief and shock and betrayal — some mine to own, all mine to carry forward.

For a while I wasn't ready to see my own part. I moved from grief into blame and then turned it inward — into shame.

Nothing was working the way I'd envisioned.

The fire was real. And so was the cost.

I had even found a new way to play hide and seek — sardines, where instead of hiding alone, we hid together. Both of us tucked away from the world, calling it closeness.

It was, in its own way. And it also kept us both small.

I felt called to go to Peru.

To do deep work. To shed what needed shedding. To find my way back to something underneath all the noise and grief and shame.

Before I left, I wrote.

It was meant to be a declaration. A goodbye to hiding. An arrival into myself. Never hide — finally lived, not just proclaimed.

And it was real. I meant every word.

But I've learned that declarations, like proclamations, sometimes arrive just ahead of the truth rather than on top of it. I was telling myself where I was going before I fully understood where I still was.

The wildfire wasn't finished.

And neither was I.

I went to Peru.

And I came back. Then I went to Bali — and found something there. Freedom. Passion. The power of my own magnetism. A capacity to live fully and let go.

And then I came back again. To the relationship. To my life.

But the path back wasn't clean. I made choices that cost me — in more ways than one. I reached for things that promised rebirth and instead burned me down further. I lost money. I lost footing. I lost closeness with my children as they grew and naturally pulled away — and the grief of that was its own kind of ash.

I lived for a while in that ash. Waiting for growth that wasn't coming yet. Using the energy of renewal for things that couldn't hold it.

And somewhere in all of that, I had to face something I'd been circling for a long time: how much was I willing to love myself? Even here. Even after all of this.

That question became its own kind of practice.

I began doing deeper energy work — what I call F'd Up Alchemy. Clearing what wasn't mine. Giving back what I'd been carrying that didn't belong to me. And fully feeling what was mine — not to wallow in it, but to harness the life force underneath it. The life force from self love. From listening to my own intuition. From following my instincts. From surrendering to the mystery again and trusting my own magnet.

In the year of the Wood Snake, the biggest thing I shed was punishment. The pattern of punishing myself. The pattern of punishing others. Layer by layer, that skin came off.

And now, this spring, in the year of the Fire Horse —

something is different.

The work isn't finished. It still isn't. But something has shifted. The shame is loosening. The blame is quieting. And in the space that's opening up, something more authentic is growing.

I am learning the difference between a wildfire and a hearth.

A wildfire moves where it wants. It burns what's in its path. It can clear ground and crack open seeds that nothing else could reach. And it did that for me — I won't pretend otherwise.

But a hearth is different. A hearth is tended. It's built with intention. It warms the people close to it without consuming or burning them.

I am learning to tend.

My relationship. My children. My creative fire — the one that has been seeking me since long before I was ready to respond to it.

I am also finding my way back to pleasure. Not the wildfire version — all consuming, then gone. And not the diminished version either — that long season of ash where I blamed my pleasure for the price the wildfire cost. Where I set aside my connection to my own body, my own enjoyment, my own right to feel alive.

Some of that was a natural reorganizing. The kind that happens when life moves through you as intensely as mine did. Things finding their right place.

And underneath it all — fertile ground. Because what is growing now is something I couldn't have predicted. Pleasure not as wildfire but as life force. As creativity. As the current that moves something real and beautiful forward into the world.

That is what I am tending now.

I am also learning something about myself that I have perhaps always known but never quite trusted: that I am fire. Not as destruction. As life force. As warmth. As alchemy. As the thing that makes creativity possible and connection real.

The proclamations are no longer waiting.
They are becoming.

I used to think never hide meant being fully seen. Always. By everyone.

But that was scary for me. Not always attainable. And maybe never will be.

It was safe to be seen sometimes. But other times it wasn't — not in my authentic self, not in my full creative expression, not in the parts of me that colored outside the lines of what was expected or understood.

Hide and seek is not just a fun childhood game but an effective survival strategy. And never hide — an unattainable proclamation.

There is beauty in privacy. In holding something close. In being a hermit sometimes, tending your own flame quietly. I'm not going to force myself to live up to it all at once.

But there are things I am done hiding from.

The pattern I am learning to break is not just the wildfire. It's also the dimming. The shrinking so small I almost disappear. For a long time it felt like those were the only two options — burn everything down or vanish.

What I am finding now is something steadier. A devotion to what is calling me. A willingness to let what wants to emerge come through — not all at once, not perfectly, but consistently. Gently. With care for the people I love and the life I am building.

Recently I was sitting around a fire with my partner and friends, making music under the night sky. He asked for paper bags and we fed them to the flames. And the fire turned turquoise.

That exact color — the one I see when I connect to my own inner flame in meditation. I had wondered if it was real. If turquoise fire actually exists.

And there it was.

In that moment I knew — the game is different now. I'm feeling much more secure and much less anxiety, because I know what I'm seeking wants to be found. It exists both in and around me and in fact — it's seeking me.

Recently at a women's retreat called Women Who See in the Dark, a sister looked into my eyes and said: "I see a woman naked, riding a horse. She knows where she's going. She's one with the horse — and it's carrying her forward where she wants to go."

In the year of the Fire Horse, I'll take that.

I am standing at a threshold now. And it's an F-ing WILD Creation — the work I am here to do — that has been seeking me for a long time. Helping people feel more alive. In their bodies, their hearts, their creative force. In their pleasure. In their wildness.

I am not done with hide and seek. But I am done hiding from this.

Ready or not. Here I come.

And bring on the waterfalls!

— Kelci Heart