SMALL PERMISSIONS

I wake before the world asks anything of me.

5:00 a.m., in the quiet safety of what I've come to call the Loveshack—a name that still makes me smile, as if I've built not just a home, but a permission slip for tenderness. The air is still. The house holds me easily.

The wood floors greet me with their soft, familiar squeak—an old language shaped by the weight and rhythm of another family who lived their lives here before me. Their mornings, their footsteps, their ordinary intimacies pressed into the grain. I walk across them without thinking, and then—more and more—I try to.

To feel the steadiness beneath me.

To notice that it's there at all.

Outside, this small house sits in its in-between place—between a liberal arts college and the predominantly white neighborhoods of North Asheville, all of it held in the soft, blue lift of these mountains. There is a kind of ease here that can pass for normal if I'm not paying attention.

I move into the kitchen.

Water fills the kettle without hesitation. I don't wonder if it's safe. I don't measure it out. I don't think about access or scarcity. I turn it on, and it heats.

Mushroom coffee. A small ritual. A choice. Something I picked up somewhere along the way because it felt like care. I sip it slowly—not because I need to stretch it, but because I can. Because there will be more tomorrow.

I sit.

Fifteen minutes of meditation—eyes closed, breath steady. I call it a practice. I call it discipline. But if I'm honest, it is also this: uninterrupted time. A nervous system that has space to settle. A life structured in a way that allows me to turn inward without fear of what might be waiting when I open my eyes.

By 6:00 a.m., I'm heading to the gym.

I choose movement. I choose strength. I choose health.

These are choices.

Sometimes I stop for a barista-made Americano, maybe a morning glory muffin. I hand over money without counting it twice. The exchange is easy, almost invisible.

The baristas—piercings, tattoos, dyed hair in colors that don't exist in nature—move with a kind of freedom that feels built into the air here. Expression without apology. Identity worn outwardly. There is space for that.

And I realize—there is space for me, too, in ways I didn't earn.

Somewhere between the first sip of coffee and the mirror, I begin to feel it more clearly.

Not as an idea.

As a series of small permissions.

To wake up safely.

To move slowly.

To choose how I spend my morning.

To trust the ground beneath me.

To be largely unquestioned as I move through the world.

And I try to breathe that in—not to diminish it, not to feel guilty for it—but to actually see it.

Because this kind of morning…

this kind of life…

did not appear out of nowhere.

Here, this land was once Cherokee—Shaconage, the Land of Blue Smoke. In southern Indiana, where I grew up, it was Shawnee and Miami and Lenape land. Different places, same quiet truth: the ease I move within now came after something else was moved aside.

And not just that.

The systems that allow me this independence—this ability to live alone, to choose my time, to build a life around preference and reflection—were shaped, in part, by labor that was not freely given. By lives constrained so that others could expand.

I don't feel that every moment.

But sometimes, in the stillness—between the kettle and the cup, between the breath and the next thought—I catch it.

A widening.

A remembering.

That every small, ordinary step I take in the morning carries something larger beneath it.

The safe water. Someone fought for that—and not everyone won.

The gym I choose. A body free to move where it wants—a freedom that was, for others, a fantasy.

The coffee handed to me without suspicion. A face that doesn't trigger hesitation—while other faces still do.

The meditation. The luxury of turning inward when the world isn't pressing in—because the world has decided, for now, not to press.

Even the Loveshack itself—this small, affordable house in a neighborhood where I was welcomed without question.

And I don't quite know what to do with that, except to keep noticing.

To let the awareness stay close.

To not rush past it in search of resolution.

And maybe that changes the way I move through the rest of the day.

The way I meet people.

If so much of my life has been shaped by unseen permissions—space given, assumptions made in my favor, a kind of default belonging—then what does it mean to offer even a fraction of that to someone else?

To let them arrive as they are…

without placing them too quickly into a story I've already written.

To notice the impulse to categorize, to define, to make sense of someone in a way that makes me more comfortable—and to pause there.

To leave a little more room.

I think about the baristas again—the ease of their expression, the way they move through the morning without apology. And I wonder how often that ease is hard-won. How often it depends on the space others choose to give—or withhold.

I can't undo the past that made my morning possible.

I can't step outside the systems I move through.

But I can pay attention to how I inhabit them.

I can choose, in quiet moments, not to reinforce the same boundaries that once decided who belonged and who didn't.

And so I finish the coffee.

I rinse the cup.

I step outside into whatever the day is asking—carrying the morning with me. Not resolved. Not absolved. Just a little more aware of the weight and the gift of each ordinary step.

The squeak of the floor. The warmth of the water. The ease of the door opening outward.

All of it given. None of it guaranteed.