It's The Body

I recently spent three days in solitary retreat after a several-months-long intense experience of downloads, flurries of synchronicity and small and large miracles which completely consumed my life, and it was both just fine and also completely destabilizing. Years worth of work has been downloaded and I have clarity and direction and more information for my mission than I’ve every had. It was a wild experience where I had easy access to guidance and connection with the Four Who Are One and others on my “team”.

I have landed now as much as I think I’m going to, and find myself in a new normal where my dreams are clear and strangely thematic, continuing in the same dreamscape night after night, and where I still have that clear access to guidance and connection. One of the biggest messages that came through during this time, and particularly in the solitary retreat was:

It’s the body.

That was a weird message to get in the midst of not seeming to have control over the fact that I was ignoring my body’s needs; not eating, not sleeping, caught in a manic, ecstatic, overwhelming wave of energy that literally was moving through me. I woke up every 2-3 hours to journal pages and pages of information streaming through. I had to carry that same journal with me everywhere I went so that I could catch and record everything that was arriving. It was like a radio playing in my head. Loud, disruptive, and full of what felt—and feels—like (r)evolutionary directives and truths. And maybe most importantly, this entire experience happened in relationship with another person. It was witnessed, shared, and developed not in solitude, as these experiences have so often come through in my life, but with another. And thank god for that, because at least if I was going crazy I wasn’t going alone.

And, back to main message I received, I attribute my ability to ride that wave and not (completely) blow out my circuits to my several-years somatics education and practice. In other words, I attribute it to the body, to the container I’d built where I was able to be with arising sensations and energies and emotions. This experience tested the edges of that capacity and I did, a few times, feel overwhelming sensation spilling out of the container completely, and in those moments I found myself literally laying on the floor, holding on for dear life, connecting with the pressure and presence of the Earth and gravity.

Somatics is a huge topic, and I’ll talk about it soon in a long podcast episode. At its core it’s about the experience of and in the body, without necessarily connecting to a story around that sensation and emotion. It’s pure experience; a happening, and the ability to "be with” what is arising. And to get to that experience, we need to go slow and feel and experience the sensations we’ve held in the body a little at a time. This process takes education, patience, the ability to hold complexity, and knowledge of how to tend to and go at the pace of the most vulnerable part.

“… it is universally true that the renegotiation of trauma is an inherently mythic-poetic-heroic journey.”

— Peter A. Levine

And after years of engaging with this work, I’ve come to see that just like the psyche has shadow aspects that are like programs running in the background—influencing and coloring the way we see and engage with the world—our bodies also have shadows. And when we’ve done the hard work of clearing up and releasing some of that shadow, we experience the body no longer living out that program from the past. We can literally come into the present moment, and feel what is alive and arising in the now.

And let me tell you, it’s fucking psychedelic.

Sitting in the liminal, holding the tension, not collapsing the narrative, becomes boiling discomfort. A soft and strong and trustworthy container allows surrender as it becomes a somatic release. Moving and shaking and quaking and rocking my body, freeing cells and the emotional body and some intangible etheric self from the past. And then, Life Herself. Here, now. Moving through like a hurricane and then a swelling of heat and ecstasy rising from my chest and then stillness and silence, and the mind can’t make sense of any of it, but I am with the experience itself and know that I am different than I was.

If you want to engage with somatics, check out Irene Lyon. Check out Peter Levine, Gabor Mate, Scott Lyons at The Embody Lab (where I got my education and certifications) and others in this emerging field. Expect some science and research, but mostly expect something more alive. Something wilder. Something connected to the mystery of the body, that is just beginning to be revealed to us. It is from the Earth Herself, activating the Earth of our bodies. Something new is arriving or we are remembering, or it’s a combination of both and some secret third thing. It’s scary and hopeful and real and (r)evolutionary. These times are not for the faint of heart, and thank god we don’t have to do it alone.

F*cking Around and Finding Out

Hey HoneyHearts, EarthALoveStory-ers, Fellow FuckAround&FindOut-ers, Scrappy Brave Kids Breaking Out of the Overculture While Trying To Stay Grounded-ers:

I don’t know about you guys, but the last few weeks (months, maybe… years? what is time) have been really wild for me. It’s like eclipse season got together with the new moon in Taurus and had an aurora borealis baby. Just me? Ok.

I find myself in an entirely new landscape where my work, podcast, practices, and self are going through a monumental change. I haven’t had a threshold crossing like this in a long time. And honestly, now that I know how these go and have faith that there is something extraordinary on the other side, I am deeply enjoying it, even with the discomfort that necessarily arises in such things.

This threshold crossing is burning away anything that does not resonate with the new space, frequency, center-of-self that I’m inhabiting. I am standing in the fire, doing my best not to squirm (but definitely squirming).

What all of this means in real-life terms is a few things. And I’m going to use bullet points to express them. Those of you who know me well, know that if I’m using bullet points shit is most certainly getting real.

• First, the podcast is shifting frequency. There will still be interviews with amazing people who I find interesting and inspiring and whose voices transmit something that I can feel in my bones needs to be transmitted. And also, I will be doing more solo episodes, creating a clearer context about this journey that I’ve been on thousands of time, which continues to reveal itself to me as a deeply human, radical, (r)evolutionary blueprint for how to navigate this time on the planet. I’m going to do a lot less caveating, and a lot more speaking plainly about what I believe and know to be true for me and for a collective of us. I’m collapsing the narrative, just a little. Not down into a solid belief system that will concretize and die, but into a lens, a focus, a living portal, so that we can get our bearings. Stay tuned for those episodes and that new energy in the podcast.

• Next, my audiobook. As many of you know, I read my entire book Earth: A Love Story in the first 15 episodes of my podcast. I have something big coming up in July (tease! can’t tell you!) and I was going to put the audiobook behind a paywall in preparation for that. And then the last few weeks happened and I was shown clearly that my work will need to edge into a new way of doing and being in the world. Because I have the absolute gift of living in an off-grid dome with minimal expenses, I can afford to experiment—to fuck around and find out, if you will—with radically different ways of “doing business.” And this is what came through loud and clear: Give it away, AND give people an option to buy it. Radical generosity, radical trust. And it really is radical because - and here’s some radical transparency - I’m pretty radically broke. Again, I have the utter wealth of a place to live that I built and is paid for on land that my family has been on for nearly fifty years and that is a mix of true prosperity and Grace and it feels like if I don’t do this radical experiment while I have the opportunity, I’ll regret it on my death bed—hard. I have this prosperity and opportunity and also, the grocery store doesn’t trade in those so… money, you know? I’m experimenting with how to generate money while actively deconditioning and dissenting from the parts of the Overculture that I don’t feel will be sustainable or supported (frequency-wise) in the long run. I know, I sound like a hippie. But I feel like I’m embodying a Fuck the Empire vibe. So more like a gentle grounded anarchist hippie who doesn’t want systems to fail if that will bring more suffering and doesn’t believe we have to burn it all down in order to transform it vibe (also Fuck the Empire). This stuff—money stuff—is so charged and nuanced and complex and most of us have some kind of wounding/shadow around it, especially if we’re “spiritual” or helpers or whatever, and as I live into it I’ll talk about it more. If it works, I’ll teach you how to do it and then none of us will care how it looks or sounds. We’ll just be living in Superabundance and giving away our money to help people and it will be rad as fuck. And that will feel awesome.

• Finally, the Bridge Collective has been and is being completely transformed, reborn, as well. At first I thought that in order to transmit the blueprint that I know in my body and bones, I needed to teach you guys something. That felt really stressful, actually, and like a lot to hold. What I’ve been shown is that the Collective itself will inform us all, and you guys don’t need to be taught anything. It is already alive in you, just like it is in me. What I will do is hold the framework, the context, so that we can travel into these Other and Edgeworlds together as safely as possible, while building true connection in the We Space that we can feel is arising on the planet right now. Moving from Me to We is a piece of this work, and in order for The Bridge Collective to be authentic and powerful, it necessarily has to contain the seeds of that.So, if you’ve already received your invitation to The Bridge Collective and signed up, thank you!. If you haven’t signed up, please do so before June 15.

If you are interested in being a part of The Bridge Collective and haven’t received an invite, please contact me directly via email at honeyheartLLC@gmail.com. We start in July.This offering is still in the fire, getting tempered and strong and lithe, and it is speaking to me every day as I feel into the group that has already signed up. I am beyond excited to see what we will create together. The stories we will tell and live through our bodies will seed the future that is yet unwritten. So many thresholds to cross…

One final thing that is coming through and feels like the most important thing. Everything that we experience comes through the body. So even in heightened times, even when we’re getting downloads and having wild experiences and feeling like we have a 30,000 foot view, we can’t forget the body. We can’t forget the unsexy work of drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, holding paradox and liminality while eating nourishing food, and remembering to human with other humans. (All of this is just me to me. I’m sure you guys are doing great.)

Okay. I could talk a lot more about what is alive for me right now, but that’s already quite a lot, so I’ll leave it there. Thank you for being, thank you for reflecting on the podcast episodes and my book. Thank you for the engagement and relationality and reciprocity.

Morning Walks Bring Poetry

It’s early and I’m walking the dogs
and the air feels cold and thin
and the sunlight feels cold and thin
and it’s filtering through wispy clouds
mare’s tails and angel wings and all sorts of other beings
up there
the Cloud People catching the slant of the early morning light
and making the almost-winter world look almost black and white.

I’m thinking about the women I know
how strong and wise and wild they are
and how I was told long ago
that I should orient towards them
and learn from them
and circle with them

But oh, I also love the men
the men I know are wise and kind
and strong with tender love
for the Earth and us
(the wild and wise women)
and it gives me hope that together we’ll find
a way through this mess to the other side.

Together, all of us
individuating into our most authentic selves
unique and beautiful and whole
not like a monad
(although underneath that’s what we are)
but like a forest with trees and shelves
of lichen-covered stones and and grass
and mycelium all stretched out
in the soil down below
each of us playing a perfect role

An ecosystem of all of us and the planet and sky
and beyond, even, into the great unknown.

Anyway, I digress.
the point is, I love us.
and I love the thin cold air
and the thin cold sunlight
and the Cloud People making
mare’s tails and angel wings
and all sorts of other things
up there
catching the early morning light
and making the almost-winter world
look almost black and white.

Us Against Them VS We ARE Them

I wrote this before the events that are unfolding in Israel began. It’s more light-hearted than this moment in time deserves. And I’m sitting with the grief. And what I wrote is still true, for me. Maybe for you, too.

The wild thing about what is going on in the world right now with the Right vs the Left, Blue vs Red, Conspiracy Theory vs Rationality, Woo vs Mainstream, etc etc etc, is that they, whoever they are to you and where you are oriented, think that we, whoever we are and where we are oriented, don’t know what’s REALLY going on. That we each have a view of a correct, real and undeniable reality, and the Other side is stupid, uninformed, malicious, dangerous, and misled. And there is no way that I’ve seen to convince one side that the other is wrong. Or right for that matter. This is what Naomi Klein talks about in her book Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Listening to a conversation with her talking about her book, and my recent conversation with Samantha Brooks, is what brought up all of these thoughts this morning.

I don’t have any big answers for solving any of this, and I’m not going to dive into the political arena, trying to convince anyone of anything. Don’t worry. I know by now that reality is real for each of us, and is different for each of us. There is a “there” out there, I’m pretty sure, and also all of our particular lenses color that “there” almost completely. Our beliefs, our past, our traumas, our family cultures growing up, the media bubbles that we immerse ourselves in, and what meaning we make of all of it are overlaid onto the “there” out there, so that we end up with two people having the same experiences and coming out with vastly different memories and interpretations of the same event. Want proof of this on a small scale? Next time you’re with your family, ask them about a particular memory from earlier in life where everyone was involved. If all of you come up with the same exact recollection of that experience, look a little deeper. Ask a couple more questions. I would be astonished if you didn’t find discrepencies in the story. And don’t get me started on memory itself – how it’s been proven that every time we remember something it changes slightly to conform to the story that we’ve told ourselves around it.
These questions and many others can bring us to the edge of what the fuck is reality and how do we navigate it. Just look at the Mandela Effect… I’ve had my own experiences with this: certain that I experienced reality one way, but when I go to the all knowing Google to confirm, finding that I am simply wrong. And a bunch of other people are with me. Some folks remember the past one way, and another group remembers it a different way. What can be the meaning of this? If we take our experiences seriously, which is a touchstone of my work – take it seriously and hold it lightly – we tend to start taking other people’s experiences seriously as well. Once we believe ourselves, it is easier to believe others, even if we just believe that THEY believe what they believe.

All of this serves to bring us closer to a new and weird ontology, especially if we’ve been immersed in and served by consensus reality for most of our lives. It’s easier when consensus reality wasn’t ever super solid to begin with, or didn’t ever serve us or work for us anyway (think experiencers people who have seen ET’s, UFOS, had prophetic dreams, mystical experiences, seen ghosts, people who’ve undergone reality-shattering trauma, shock or loss, huge groups of people who are not served by the systems in place – impoverished, BIPOC, queer, neurodivergent or otherwise unheld, uncentered folks) to see the world behind the world in all of its multilayered realities, from the mundane to the supernatural. I think this is where it’s easy to start to wonder if we’re in a simulation, wonder wtf is actually going on around here. Or we just double down on our version of reality and make sure we’re comforted by being right, by being in the know, safe in the certainty that our reality is the real one, and that everyone else is a fucking idiot.

Maybe, though, there is a secret third option. An option that lives in the land of paradox and both/and, and bring-it-in instead of kick-it-out.

Maybe reality is both objective and subjective. Maybe this place is like a simulation, a honeycomb matrix, and maybe that doesn’t make it any less real. Maybe, as Morpheus says when Neo asks “But wait, I thought the matrix wasn’t real,” the mind makes it real.

So this is the real world, and it also seems to shift based on where we place our attention and that quality of that attention, as the FWAO have said. And the way they delivered that didn’t feel at all that it was just true for me. That’s how it is for everyone. And if that’s the case then we are both living in an objective reality, and a subjective reality that shifts and responds to each of us individually.

All of that to say, we’re all living in our own realities that are no more and no less real than anyone else’s reality. So this fighting over who is right, who is wrong, is pretty useless. Ultimately, if what all of the spiritual teachers say is true, stay with me here, we’re all just one thing, right? And that means that this mirror world of the quote unquote “Other” that we’re witnessing is part of us, too. We are each other’s shadows. Each other’s mirrors. We are each holding an unseen, unloved, unwanted, unacknowledged piece of the other. We hold each other’s dark shadows and golden shadows. Anyone who has ever done shadow work and been horrified/astonished to see themselves in the person that drives them the most batshit crazy knows what I’m talking about.

That happened with me in my two most recent relationships, and I can feel that there is some remaining work to do there because I still feel some activation around it. In the first of these relationships, it was just a shit show of blame and shame and spiraling and finger pointing and trauma and despair. It was YOU are wounded and need to get your shit together, and I would NEVER treat me the way you’re treating me, and him saying, YOU’RE the one who needs to get her shit together, YOU’RE the one who treats me like shit, and if you would just accept me as I am, and me saying, no, you accept ME as I am.
The second relationship was a healing ground for lifetimes of that cycle, and lots of painful realizations. One of the most hilarious and most tender and most shocking was that in this second relationship I had labeled him as Avoidant Attached, and me as Anxiously Attached (so a lot more consciousness and kindness around these patterns – we were really trying) and then realizing one day with a sick rolling stomach that oh fuuuuuucckk, I actually have a DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT style, which means I was both Avoidant and Anxious, so that when he finally came close to me, I pushed HIM away, and what a mindfuck that was for him. (Since those days, I’ve come to understand a more nuanced idea of attachment styles thanks to the world of Dr. Scott Lyons and others – that we are all actually somewhere on the spectrum of securely attached and insecurely attached and that it can change based on the kind of relationship we’re in, or even if we’re resourced on a particular day or not. So massive compassion for us all on these edgy fronts, figuring out how to human together through this messy time on the planet.)

At that time, though, with that realization of a disorganized attachment style (which is, I assure you, the worst one – so much so that many books and lots of research just skip it altogether because it’s so confusing and difficult to deal with – lots of thanks here to Diane Poole Heller for including that in her book so lovingly and helping to bring it out of the shadowlands), I was the thing, in part, that I had labeled him. And when I realized that, something in me broke and I stopped pointing the finger and just lived in the confusion. Through acknowledging that, though, and seeing my shadow (80% of the work, in shadow work, after all), it was brought into the light and healed and integrated and I stopped projecting those qualities onto him and owned my shit. And he went through his own process with that. I saw all of the ways I was projecting both my own unloved and unclaimed (dark shadow and golden shadow) qualities onto him, and that changed everything. I also saw the ways that he labeled me that were his own projections. I worked through those as well, and those that weren’t true, that were placed on me and didn’t actually belong to me, but came from his own unhealed stuff, I gave back and let go of. I stopped internalizing the ways that other people saw me that just weren’t true.

This is all incredibly deep and tricky work and it is only with the help of wonderful teachers that I was able to navigate it all. But it does work. Shadow work is real and it can free up so much tied up energy from our psyches and then we can use that energy to improve our health, or go on crazy OBE journeys, or write books, or practice lucid dreaming or just finally rest. And it offers another gift – that of massive compassion. When we stop separating ourselves from the other, and see that we are mirrors, when we see that it is a big we instead of an either/or, this huge love rushes in and what the Buddhists call Bodhichitta is activated. The wisdom that arises from compassion, the wish to reduce suffering, and that wish in action.

So yeah, that’s what I’m talking about when I’m saying that “they” are the mirror of “us” and “we” are the mirror of “them”. Shadow work, baby, but on a vast collective, political, cultural, global scale.

It’s not us or them. It’s us and them. We. Fighting over which reality is real is gonna get real old, real fast, as we watch the world burn around us. If we don’t remember we belong to each other, that we ARE each other, we’re gonna be in a world of shit that we can’t even imagine. The medicine, the balm, the salve, the fix, is to be courageous enough to let reality expand to include more, not less. Let compassion arise as we realize that we are truly all in it together. Do our own personal shadow work. Become safe for ourselves, as my teacher Sarah Durham Wilson says, then for the room, then for the world.

THEN we can all rise up together and eat the rich.

Just kidding. “They” are “us”, too. Let’s love ourselves and each other back to wholeness instead.

What I Wake Up Thinking About

These are the things I wake up thinking about, in no particular order:

Forest fires, lights in the sky, the military/industrial complex, Starlink satellite trains, the honeycomb matrix, AI, my dog, flooding, TikTok and the move from connection with place and the land and our people to connection with short form video on tiny screens in our hands, what we are losing as each species die, the Gulf Stream shutting down as early as 2025, the war in Ukraine and the unthinkable horrors that are happening there, housing costs, UAPs and congressional hearings, the dramatic rise of orbs and sightings and contact with other beings, public disclosure and the other disclosure that is happening or has already happened through the bodies and psyches and lives of regular folks, the rise of fascism, racism, how someone asked my yoga teacher if she would turn him into a snake if he did yoga, how someone asked my yoga teacher if she would start worshipping the devil if she did yoga, what it must have been like to be so connected to the Earth and our place in it that we could track the subtle 19 year Metonic cycles of the moon and make little altars to that on hidden hard-to-get-to cliff faces, the Grays and Mantis beings and out of body experiences and ontological shock, how it would be easy to think these are the End Times if I was a Christian, how humans are incredible creators and want to be good and do good and how hopeful that is, how men are coming to work with me now to journey down into their own soft bellies and how beautiful and tender that is, if the rain will come today and quench the thirst of this land, unhoused and drug addicted and mentally unwell people, the FWAO, how our natural magic and intuition and trance states and animism and mystical birthright was squashed and shamed and called primitive and uncivilized by rational materialism and patriarchy and now we have to claw our knowing back even in our own minds, the subjugation of the feminine and how totally successful that was and how it wasn’t just the feminine that was subjugated but deference to the cycles and the seasons and the rhythms of the Earth and also grief and rage and complexity and softness as strength and Death as a natural part of life, the fear and sadness I see in people’s eyes, and back to Death - if we could just face the fact that we will die then maybe we would see the simplicity of how it could be here on this planet and maybe we would remember that we belong to each other, how I love the smell of roasted green chiles and peaches in late summer in Colorado, what is going on with that trash island in the ocean, that I’ll have to pick tomatoes again today, how it seems that since I’ve been eating food from my own garden I can feel the nutrients and minerals returning to my body and blood and bones and I’m not as hungry anymore, how there’s no such things as an inanimate object, the kindness of those who have walked me through this hard life and how I want to repay that kindness, how I have work to do - clients to see and things to write and I need to meditate and make offerings on my altar and catch up with my friends and take my dog for a walk, how we don’t have a community structure to process grief so shattering that it kills us so we have to go through that alone, how I should work on creating that community structure because if I don’t or if you don’t or they don’t no one will and it just won’t exist and how all of these things need to move through each of us and that’s how change happens, how maybe I should get a book launch together, how and finally, again, about those Starlink satellites and what must the oldest living culture on Earth—the Indigenous people of Australia—who have lived in that place for nearly 60,000 years… 60,000 years and we can’t even remember 15,000 years back to the Great Fall and what happened and why it was all lost… I think of those people watching and feeling the sky fill up with a network of satellites and how that decision wasn’t made by the people of Earth but by just a few guys, and I think of how there are tens of thousands of pieces of space junk up there now and what in the actual fuck have we done.

I wake up thinking about this stuff, and then I get up and meditate and make offerings on the altar and try to feel the air on my skin and try to remember a time when we were so connected to the land that we could track long cycles and the Ravens spoke to us and we listened. We are not in that time, now. We are in this time. This place, and this way of being. And it is heartbreaking. That’s why the feminine and the Goddess and the things that were shoved into the Underworld with her are important to this time on the planet because I believe—-and this is a hill I will die on—that before we can stand up and rise and make different choices and save the Earth and remember who we are and what is important we must go through what Frances Weller calls the Gates of Grief. We must feel the weight of loss. We must feel, somatically in our flesh and blood and bone bodies the truth of suffering. We must let it break us and rearrange us and we must be initiated back into our bodies, which are the bodies of the Earth, and become tempered and strong enough to bear the unbearableness. We die before we die, and then we have nothing to lose. No reason not to stand up for the vulnerable. No reason not to let our wide open hearts full of fierce softness be our strength. No reason not to stand up for the animals and plants and water and skies and all of the other beings, seen and unseen, with whom we share this planet. No reason not to move from “me” to “we”. With relief we see that we are not separate, solitary things. We are communal, relational, shivering and quivering with each touch on the web of life that we are enmeshed within.

snake woman, snake woman, snake woman

I’ve seen her lately, dancing slowly in a dark doorway. Parts of her body are revealed in a shaft of light, and her hips and lips are iridescent like raven wings and scarab shells. Or is it like they’re made of scales? Is that what I’m seeing there, as she writhes and dances, her eyes locked on mine?
Oh yes, I remember now. I remember her. She is Snake Woman, and she is dancing and slithering her way out of a too-tight skin. I’ve heard of her, and seen her in other women as they come to life, and I’ve definitely sloughed off my own outgrown skins and bodies and towns and strife, but this is different. This isn’t a metaphor. She isn’t in my mind. She isn’t an idea I can mine and frack for a way to claw myself back.
She’s real, her own animate self, and she’s here for me now.
And I have to say—she is enticing, with those dark eyes and that dark writhing that’s not performing for a male gaze (she’s annoyed I’ve even brought that image in and she rolls those dark eyes at me again).
At first I thought I was supposed to draw her out of the dark into the light, but now I see she loves the night.
It’s me who’s been up above too long. She’s not coming out, she’s drawing me down and in. Time again to go within. Time to get low and slow and muddy and bloody, belly on the Earth, Time to find out who I am, again, time to show my worth. Who am I without that part of me that’s clinging to a false, fleeting ease? Time for another round of deconditioning and a deeper release.
I can’t be what anyone else wants me to be. I am dying, once again, dying to be me.

I've Fallen In Love...

With the body. My body, your body, the body of the earth. All the bodies.

I am attuning to something at a deeper level lately. Attuning to the world as animate and alive and I’m feeling into the vast web of relationality that is us, and that connects us.

I’ve had two state experiences in the last month where I felt myself not as a singular thing, a distinct me with only Robin-shaped edges, but as a node of awareness situated in a vast network of other humans, animals, entities seen and unseen, plants and sky and trees and hearts and minds and it was cacophonous and riotous and almost overwhelming. I was saved from drowning in the vastness of it all by the familiar faces around me, and by the fact that it was all held in this physical, meat and bones and blood and tears and feet on the ground body of mine.

This is coming to me in dreams, too. In the first dream (surely sparked by the recent wildfire just 2 miles from the valley) I was in a village and there was a fire racing up the ridgeline. I watched as the people of the village split in two - half, mostly men, mobilized to move toward the fireline, fighting it with shovels and water and chainsaws and bodies, bodies, bodies, sweating and lungs searing and beating back the edges. The other half, mostly women, formed a circle and joined arms and hands, and flesh on flesh began swaying and chanting and stamping and calling on the Cloud People and the Fire People and forming an energetic pulse of cool blue light that wrapped around the men and the village and it was deeply understood, in this dream, by these people, that both of these actions were equally valuable and needed and formed a bigger whole that linked everyone in holy Life as we faced what She brought us, together.

A second dream with the same theme, in a little house on a beach with the whole community gathered and a storm coming in, roiling the ocean and lashing us with rain, and we joined together and swayed and hummed and prayed and banged drums and stomped floorboards and spoke to the Water People and the Sky People and knew that we would hold this communion until the end came - until we were obliterated by the storm or until she raged over us and away. It was again deeply understood, in this dream, by these people, that these actions were valuable and needed and formed a bigger whole that linked everyone in holy Life as we faced what she brought us, together.

We are linked to the Water and the Sky and the Clouds and Fire and to all of the animate forces here, and we are less individual things and more the space where relationships live. I can feel it in the garden. I can feel it when I sleep, windows open to let in the cool night air, and the forest alive and watching. I can feel it when my friends and I gather to have deep conversations about Death and Life and why we’re here and what we need to do. I can feel that cool blue pulse of energy surround us and expand and join the collective that is bigger than us all, and of which we are all a part.

”It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

Not out and away and over there. Down and in and right here. In our bodies, through our bodies, with our bodies, down here in the mud and the blood. There’s nowhere else to go. There’s nothing else to do. We are here, we are here, we are here.

The Somatics of Embodied Mysticism

It’s come to me in a massive moment. An overwhelming and all-encompassing fullness of knowing that includes both light and sound and now specific information, pulling together everything that I’ve spent the past 43 years living and learning.

As I approach the Sacred Interior space (which includes dreams and out of body and contact with non-human and sometimes dead human beings, and altered states of consciousness and that feeling of being so deeply in my own skin that I can only let so much of this human experience in), I heard a deep internal whisper… what is an Embodied Mystic? I wonder.

I know it has to do with meeting my guides and developing those relationships, honing and understanding protection practices (not from a state of state of fear and cowering, but empowered and full of my own agency), listening to my dreams, and cultivating a safe, wise orienting aspect of self that can hold all of my still shuddering and scared parts and pieces and help them move on, evolve, grow up and go on their own journeys. This all moves through deep gateways of grief, the Grief of Things Lost and the Grief of the Way it Could Have Been, and the Grief of Injustice and finally the Grief of Letting it All Go that leads to the Relief of Dying to it All to be reborn in service to the other self (all beings everywhere) and suddenly the world is alive and glowing and full of animate enchantment.

Unexpectedly, I have fallen away, slowly and carefully but still full of trepidation, from the stark, dead, reductionist machine of materialism-only thinking and being into an animate cosmology so full of life and connection and relationship and pleasure that now I deeply trust my own animal body. I’ve decentered “normal” waking consciousness as the only reality and have found a magical world behind the world and it blows my mind (in a good way) every day.

Emerging from those Sacred Interior depths are my dark and golden shadows (both loved into wholeness), lucid dreams where I fly and commune with beings and see that my dreams are like my life and my life is like a dream.

All of a sudden I see my North Star (my soul work, my vocation, my calling, my heart) and she’s perched on the horizon, drawing me on both up and out and down and in, a wholeness that emanates from without and within, The Somatics of Embodied Mysticism, a whole body glow as I walk down the road in a little valley I call home, joints swinging and free in my grounded and flying alive animal body.

This will be the stuff that fills up the days of the rest of my life. Glory be.

Is That the Skylight or the Moon?

Is that the skylight covered over with snow so that I feel tucked in and blanketed from the world, or is that the moon? Am I outside floating above and away, or I am down here feet on the ground anchored looking up?
It is my skylight and my feet are on the ground, and it is the moon and I am skyward, as ever, split between the two. Tonight there is nothing to hold onto except for that familiar suffering and tonight I welcome it because it is familiar and it makes me feel alive. I spent the day reading about bodhisattva vows and regret as a necessary ingredient for authentic desire to purify negativities and cultivate true compassion and as I was reading it I couldn’t feel it but tonight with my friendly suffering it’s here with me. Regret and compassion and an intimate pain rippling through flesh and bones and joints and hips and breasts and thighs and stomach lining and guts and heart and womb, and I know I will sweat and twist in my sleep and wake at 3 with that rolling ache and I’m looking forward to it because it’s how I know I’m alive.

I know that joy is next to grief and they are both next to love and I am told that unconditional joy exists just like unconditional love and I come up against the edges of my desires and the only place left to turn is towards regret and compassion and I know tonight will bring me back into the heart of my vows.

Feet on the ground looking up at my skylight, not the moon, covered in snow and tucking me in and blanketing me from the world and I will suffer. It might be dumb suffering or the kind of suffering that is natural here and makes sense, I don’t know. But I will be down here feet on the ground covered in snow with the heartache rolling through my hips and bones and sometime around 3 I will remember that there is nowhere else to go. There is nowhere else to be. I am here. I am here. I am here.

My Manifesto

It’s the time of year when the veil thins and shit can get very weird. That happened for me this year, with strange visitations, dark dreams, wild out of body experiences (some that were actually quite pleasant and exciting), and many nights awake and moonwatching instead of sleeping soundly. In response to these sometimes scary, sometimes wondrous experiences, I often end up contemplating the deepest questions of my life. Why am I here? What do I want? What should I be doing between now and my ever-approaching death? What should I do after death? What the holy hell is all of this? What’s the most important thing, right now, that I can cling to, to navigate the weird and wild, the mundane, the exalted, the terrifying, the otherworldly, and the thisworldly?

These questions caused me to remember and revisit the Manifesto I’d written about a year ago, with the help of a trusted mentor and teacher, while I was right in the middle of claiming my sovereignty and agency in the face of difficult and confusing experiences. It has changed very little between then and now. It feels timely and important to publish the Manifesto, both as an act of strength and clarity for myself, and as encouragement and support for others who may be navigating their own claiming of Self.

———————-
My Manifesto
I vow to honor, respect, engage with and take seriously my own sacred interior, the sacred interiors of others, and our shared collective worlds. To strive in all things towards the ideals of healing and evolution, for the benefit of myself, and for the benefit of all. I am in service to the Earth, and to our human relationship with Her and all of Her creatures, seen and unseen. I accept the gifts, blessings and responsibilities that come with being a human on this planet in this life, and I take my place in the primordial human lineage, using creativity and joy to dream a better dream. I acknowledge and accept the help of my bright ancestors, allies and guides on this journey, both incarnated and disincarnate. I vow to strive for loving kindness, compassion, fierce boundary and discernment, clarity and peace within and without. I am in devotion and service to the well-being of all sentient beings.
I dedicate my life to the study of skillful means and helpful ways to achieve my devotional aspirations, and vow to use those teachings and means to be of service to others. I will not walk this path alone, but honor the ideals of reciprocity, regenerative practices, and communal teaching and learning with others who walk the path of highest service. I respect and honor the many ecosystems that surround and hold me and acknowledge the deep interconnection that exists in all things.
I orient towards gentleness and care, and strive to heal all of my own unhealed and wounded parts and pieces, so that I may be a safe, kind, and effective, first for myself, then for the room, and then for the world. I strive to hold all that arises in my field, within and without, with loving awareness and healing attention. I strive to create peace and healing and to bring safety and love to all of my interactions.
There is nowhere else to go.
There is nothing else to do.
I am here, I am here, I am here.

Stacking Firewood is Holy Work

And honestly one of the most satisfying things in my life, for so many reasons.

Summers are spent culling dying ponderosas from the forest, cutting them up with the chainsaw into woodstove-length bolts, stacking them in long snaking stacks to dry and cure, splitting last year’s now cured bolts, and moving that ready, split wood in another long snaking stack, this one closer to the house.

This culling of trees sighing towards the end of their lives helps the health of the forest. Or sometimes it’s a little colony of mistletoe that’s taken over a half acre up on the north facing ridge behind the barn, and those trees need to come down before it spreads too far. Whatever the reason, the trees are chosen carefully and thoughtfully, and this work is tending to the land, not extracting from her.

I’ve always had a hard time getting on a treadmill or picking up heavy weights, but huffing and straining and pumping my lungs and muscles pushing the wheelbarrow up the road and lifting and stacking and splitting feels vital and natural and great. It’s a useful use for my body’s strength. In winter, I know exactly where my heat comes from, and exactly how much work it took for my human body to harvest and process and produce. And that is deeply satisfying.

It’s been years since I’ve lived this close to the land. I kept trying other doors, throwing myself down on other floors. Now I can’t seem to leave her. I feel tethered, bound, and promised. There is the deep call from the Earth herself, and even the ET’s told me, when they came to me and shocked my ontology, that in order for me to stay well (as in, not sick, cancer healed), I needed to return to the blueprint of me. That I came in with a specific frequency and it has to do with Nature and slowness and peace and connection to trees and bees and animals and the blue southwest sky, and I should return to that, sooner rather than later. And of course since I was 5 they’ve been telling me that the Earth is in trouble and to do something about it, always urgent, always dramatic, always pushing, leaving me sweating and heart-pounding and mission-focused but unsure of the mission.

They tell me now, just yesterday, they said it’s urgent and I must stop doing anything unsustainable. That the world is crying and dying and burning and so now all I want is to be with her and do what I can. This is my calling and mission. And I’m deeply aware that I only get to do it here in this valley where I grew up, because my parents heard that same call almost 50 years ago and came to this raw land and built from scratch a garden and a dome and with their own hands, and that it all moved through their physical bodies, those acts of creation. It was all huffing and blood pumping and muscles pushing and trying and failing and trying again and now I get to walk in and plant in their already-fenced garden and I don’t have to draw water from the well, just flip a switch that turns on the juice from the solar panel and the little pump does the work. I can only be here because they started something. They created something real and true and I’m the next generation. It feels like real wealth to me, and I’m so very grateful for my close and bright ancestors who bore me into their future and gave me the gift of this valley and this life.

I am here with my feet on the ground, living on her and with her, as close to regenerative reciprocity as I can get. There is nowhere else to go. There is nothing else to do. I am here, I am here, I am here. And stacking firewood is holy work.

Every New Beginning

I’m sweating, straddling the footboard of my bed, straining to turn a screw that will barely move. If I push all of my weight against it, it will budge an eighth of a turn. I need to break it down, the bed frame that is, into its smaller parts so that it will fit in my truck and then I won’t need to rent a U-Haul for one dumb piece of furniture.

This is why I stopped buying furniture. Because of this, the end. Another ending. Another death and letting go and birth and finding the courage to start over. Another move. I’ve lost count, let’s just call it Number 30. And I fucking hate moving.

I’m groaning and wrestling with my bed on the floor of my bedroom and remembering the day we set it up together. All that hope. It seems like it hasn’t been long enough since that day, to this. Four years in a blink.

The impersonal gods of this weird ephemeral world, the ones that are only here for a laugh, start playing in my head that 90’s rock song that I haven’t thought about in 20 years … ‘every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end’… It’s almost unexpected enough, trite enough, and sad enough to make me laugh.

Those lyrics, whoever sent them into my taking-things-all too-seriously brain, draw me up and I get a breath of clean air, up above my sore wrist, above my grumbling and above my heartache. And I have a better view of the truth of that… how four years have truly gone by in just a blink. How it really doesn’t feel like time has passed at all from that day to this. It feels like just a moment ago. Putting the bed together and taking it apart don’t feel that far away from each other, in either time or quality.

A voice, maybe the voice who shoved Semisonic into my head, says “All moments pass. Everything ends (except that one thing that doesn’t). Maybe that’s why your life has been like this. To acclimate you to what it feels like to let go. To experience the death and birth and death and birth over and over until you really, really get it that it’s always a both/and. You die, but don’t die. Every new beginning,” says the voice, very serious now with just the tiniest glint of a smile, “truly does come from some other beginning’s end.”

I roll my eyes and sigh.

”The trick is”, the voice continues, “to realize so deeply that everything (except that one thing) will end, that it makes you really, really alive for all the in between parts. What if you loved this moment as much as you loved the putting together the bed moment? Love it even with the grief and struggle (both/and), because it is your life and this is an ever-changing, split-second, snapshot reality that is nothing but endings and beginnings forever blending into each other like a flipbook of images and sensations and experiences. What is the moment, that faster than light moment, in between one thing and the next? Pay attention to that bright little empty heart and time stops. Everything becomes a miracle.”

I feel a little better, and stop struggling. Maybe I can enjoy this. Maybe even this, me a sweaty mess on the floor, wrestling with myself, is a miracle. This ending is safe and amicable. Kind and loving and full of the intimacy of shared grief. Maybe I do love this moment, the taking the bed apart moment, just as much as I loved the putting the bed together moment. The beginning that is coupled with this ending is full of promise, full of love, and full of hope. And if I look hard enough, I can see that bright little empty heart of paradox in the center of it all.

So gather up your jackets, move it to the exits
I hope you have found a friend.
Closing time, every new beginning
Comes from some other beginning’s end, yeah.

In A Trance

I have been thinking, lately, about what it means to be entranced. To be hypnotized. To be enchanted. I’ve been thinking about how for most of our long history as humans on this planet, the state of trance was sacred. Trance was entered into consciously, on purpose, likely with equal parts fear and desire. Trepidation and hunger. Because we knew the power it held.

We entered into trance in community. With a wise woman or shaman or with our peers, the men and the women, or with the entire village. We entered into trance with dance, or drumming, or plants, or hunting, or weaving, or humming. We knew the drums or the dance or the hunt could drive us into a frenzy or deep into the underworld. We approached the mystery, and it was dangerous.
Wild. Mystical. Alive.

We are entranced now, too. We are entranced with Instagram and Netflix and advertisements and podcasts and shows and our phones. We are entranced by memes and ideas, thought forms, the egregores that we accidentally created, accidentally worshipping hollow gods.

What to do? Our brains are wired for trance. Our brains are exhausted from being in a constant state of tracking, scanning, analyzing, sniffing for danger, for a tiger that never comes. There is no tiger. But we can feel that something isn’t right. We feel the planet burning. We feel war and injustice and children suffering, and we feel, even if we can’t name it, that we’re supposed to be deeply connected to it all, but how? How? How can we bear it?

So of course we entrance ourselves. Of course we find an ideology or a show or a podcast or a screen to turn our attention to. We don’t know what else to do.

We need trance. We long for it. We evolved to feel the day that the season changes, and to smell on the wind a bear on the ridge. We evolved to experience the forest and the ocean and the mountains and each other as wild, ecstatic, overwhelming mysteries. We needed to know where we were in relation to it all. Our bodies are thirsty to attune. Where to turn when the world around us is only dead materialism. Reductionist, dry, hollow, consumerism. Where can we quench our thirst?

I recently experienced being in a circle of women. We were chanting and dancing, drumming and sobbing, laughing and touching. I found myself enchanted. Entranced. And when I woke from the trance I was on my knees, and there was a woman to my right and my left and my arms were around their shoulders and their arms were around mine and around the women next to them and we were a holy circle of ten.

On my knees, in this circle, the wild cries and dances now complete, it was still. Quiet. It was all bright eyes and parted lips and the thin sheen of sweat and our chests and breath rising and falling in unison. The air was thick with us. A mist hung among us and we breathed it in through our skin. Alive, caught in the mystery of the trance we’d been in.

Something deep inside of me was healed.

Francis Weller says that there are 5 Gateways of Grief. One of them is: The Thing I Expected And Did Not Receive. My skin grieves for the village I did not receive. My heart longs for the trance that comes with ritual and drumming and dance. My eyes are hungry for unmasked faces. My body longs for people and spaces and places to contain my unfettered grief and my ecstasy.

I am hypnotized by the world. I can’t help it. I’m human. But I can choose what I will let entrance me. Not technology and media, so good at giving us just the right hit so we keep coming back. Not dehumanizing ideologies that separate us from ourselves. Not endless lines of endless things to buy. I don’t want to be hypnotized by the parched, barren world.
My teacher, Sarah of Magdalene, uses the phrase Plastic Spring. The fantasy. The illusion that everything is okay. The illusion that what we are doing can be sustained.

I want to be entranced by poets and artists. I want to be entranced by the wind in the grass. I want to lose myself for half a day, writing this essay. I want to watch a ladybug make its way through the constellation of freckles on my arm. I want to listen to a woman speaking wisdom, lulling me into finding my own conviction. I want to be enchanted by the distant thunder and by my dreams and by the people I love.
I want to awaken, alive, panting, on my knees.
I want to be hypnotized by the hum of the bees.

What If This Is What Awakening Feels Like

What if we go through this journey,
So excruciatingly slow
Because as we’re feeling
And as we’re healing
As we’re learning to let go,
We anchor it through the physical self
So that it becomes real
This feeling and healing.
Real, and not something that happens somewhere else
Outside of us
In the sky
No beings coming to rescue us
from elsewhere, away and high.
Instead it is coming up through the soles of our feet
From the earth Herself
Showing us how feel and how to heal
Showing us a new way to be.
Showing us what it means to move from
Evolution through Suffering
To Evolution through Joy and Creativity.
(Don’t abandon the Great Round, the uncried cry
Or you’ll be stuck forever in the illusion
Elsewhere and high).

We

If you want to grieve, but don’t want to grieve alone, know that I am grieving with you.

If you want to pray, but don’t want to pray alone, know that I am praying with you.

If you want to cry, but don’t want to cry alone, know that I am crying with you.

If you want to drum, but don’t want to drum alone, know that I am drumming with you.

If you want to dance, but don’t want to dance alone, know that I am dancing with you.

If you want to be joyful, but don’t want to be joyful alone, know that I am joyful with you.

If you want to love so deeply that it breaks you open, but you don’t want to be broken open alone,

know that I am loving deeply with you.

There are countless beautiful, caring, dedicated souls (like you)

who are holding it all, too.

We.

Tips For When You're Ready to Leave the Underworld

Remember when you started the journey? Remember how it felt, the call? Remember that thing that started it all? You said yes because you’d tried every door. You’d flung yourself down on every floor, waiting for someone to come along and rescue you, but no. You tried booze and smokes and beds (just go listen to Miranda Lambert’s song Vice, sums it up nice).

Or maybe you went the other way, maybe you went all the way to the top, climbed the ladder all the way up until you could see as high as the false gods and realized they didn’t have any answers, what then? Maybe you went to the gym and ran ‘til your feet bled (how did your old pair of sneakers turn into the red shoes you can never remove?), starved yourself, sacrificed your life on the altar of being a wife, mother, career woman, empty, help me, what are we all doing? But you kept climbing and pushing and finally made it, up there breathing the rarified air with the hollow gods and you looked around and saw, shit, they didn’t have the answer after all. They were part of the game, too, just like you.

Eventually you answered the call in your own hollow belly, went down and in, Inanna and her descent, removing veils one by one until she reached the end. You walked into the door of your own anguish, and Ereshkigal, down there, holding it all, slaughtered you where you stood and hung you dead on a meathook on the wall.

But then, then, maybe you got comfy down there in the dark. Maybe you started to see how beautiful it is to have it all stripped away. Maybe you learned to cry, learned the wisdom within your own bones and then maybe you died and realized that death was just a letting go, so you did, you let it all go. Maybe you learned to respect the wisdom of your own pain, the wisdom of the unheard, rejected parts of your own tender heart, and maybe that became your new best friend. Maybe now you’re leaning against the wall, drinking a spicy sweet tea with Ereshkigal, laughing like sisters, bonded down there in the dark, knowing there will come a time when you must rise and return to the world with what you’ve learned. You know you will be back. You know you can listen now to your own deep-in-the-belly self. In fact, you find yourself pregnant with it all. You find yourself full, soft, luscious, juicy, and now you’re getting a new call to return to the world, return to the up above and the tell others what you’ve learned.

So you begin the journey back, but find that none of the old rules apply. The booze and the running and pushing and climbing for climbing’s sake simply would not fly. You found that the machine is still all too happy to pull you back in, grind you back up, spit you back out. The world hadn’t changed (yet), but you had. How to come back to world, once you’ve been in the underneath, how can you invite the new little seed of you to sprout?

Here are my tips for emerging from the Underworld. There aren’t many. I’m still learning how to do it myself. But so far, they are plenty.

1. Get yourself a playlist that feels like joy and helps you dance in the morning.

2. Find friends who are not afraid of their suffering or yours.

3. Sleep as much as you want.

4. Orient your pace to the pace of Life Herself.

5. Learn to move the miracle of your body in ways that feel nourishing instead of punishing.

6. Keep having tea with Ereshkigal whenever she calls.

Reclaim the Sacred Interior

I spent most of my life having incredible, transcendent, terrifying, deep, ecstatic, amazing experiences.
I had a profound dream. The overculture said, that’s just your brain sweeping up the day’s useless thoughts.
I had a visitation by a non-human being. The overculture said, you’re crazy.
I had a somatic, psychic, full bodied multi-body experience. The overculture said, what?
I had an out of body journey. The overculture said, that’s just your imagination..
I had a download of profound, personal, life-changing information. The overculture said, you should see a therapist.
I heard voices. Had visions. Felt everyone’s feelings. Knew things before they happened. Communed with Gods and Goddesses and Aliens and had profound rearrangement of my own sacred psyche. The overculture said, shut up, get a job, homogenize, consume.

Hard to maintain faith in the external run us off a cliff money-focused power-hungry machine, when I respect my own inner landscape and the deep inner landscape of others. Hard to serve the gaslighting narrative of a dead, reductive, materialist system when I finally respect my own glorious alive multitude of a self.

Hard to hear the voice of the overculture once the sacred interior has been reclaimed.

“Once we get used to listening to our dreams, our whole body responds like a musical instrument.”
- Marion Woodman

Resistance, Thresholds, and the Relief of Both/And

I have accepted it as a truth of my life that thresholds will continue to appear, beckoning me to step across. While I have a long history as a risk taker, a cliff jumper, a leap and the net will appearer, I am also truly and deeply a lingerer. I am a toe dipper. A dawdler. A loiterer. I know how to hang out in doorways, not fully in, not fully out.

Thresholds are scary. We approach them because we are called to. It sounds like a big fun adventure, or it feels like a pressure that won’t relent, or it is bringing us to the thing we can’t not do.

These are some of the things that the crossing of the threshold contains, in no particular order:

Loss
Transformation
Letting Go
Death
Birth
Fear
Courage
Grief
Joy
Shedding
Growth
Pain
Ecstasy
Gifts
Novelty
The Unknown

So, you know, lots of things. Now as I approach thresholds, I at least have a framework for this familiar/unfamiliar territory. The fact is that much of our culture exists in the false certainty of either/or. In truth, this is the land of paradox. It is the realm of both/and. As I stabilize the space inside of me, as I strengthen my container through honoring my body and my nervous system and my soul work, I am more able to peacefully and gently hold that paradox. Steady as she goes.

I know I will step over the threshold. I always do, eventually. I know that I will work with my resistance. Safely, slowly, at the pace of my most vulnerable self, I will ready myself for this next threshold that is beckoning. I know that it will likely contain all of the things, in varying degrees of intensity.

It is a deep relief to experience the both/and and not need a resolution. Yes to it all. Yes, yes, it all exists. And in that yes, I am better able to bear the unknown, better able to trust Life, and to trust the self in me that said Yes to this journey to begin with. I am able to trust the impulse that brought me to this threshold. And while stepping into the unknown will certainly require a shedding of something that no longer serves, the deep truth that is promised is that the unknown is also full of gold and gifts and elixirs and fresh new Life.

Both/And

If I Don't Let Go, I'll Never Really Know

I woke up this morning with those words swirling.

If I don’t let go, I’ll never really know. If I don’t let go, I’ll never really know.

This season has been a deep invitation to release and surrender. There is a gentle pull on my shoulders enticing me to lean back, encouraging me to draw away from the safety of things known, beckoning me to free fall into the groundless welcoming mysterious void. I know it is Her calling me. The Goddess. The Earth. Life Herself, soundlessly rumbling through my bones. This is not the high and far call of the heavenly divine. This is not a pulling up and away, the call of the aesthete to ascend out of the mud and muck and grief of this time. This is Life, as She is, coursing through me. Rolling through my own instinctual, flesh-and-blood, animal body.

This is not a call from above to transcend. This is call from below to go within.

I resist. This is that clinging that the Buddhists are always on about. This is the fear, the holding on, the grasping and gasping I can’t do without. This is the thinking that there is an external thing, some big authority out there, that will tell me how and where to go. This is the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of death, and the longing for a directive, a policy, a plan, a big Right and Wrong in the sky, telling me what to do to make sure I’ll never die. No letting go, no little deaths, no big deaths, just the clinging frenzied panic of a lie. The lie that there is nothing that will ever die, if I just try, if I’m good enough, if I hold on hard and shut my eyes.

But behind my tight shut eyes, I see a glimmer of my future if I believe the lies. If I don’t surrender, if I don’t trust life, I will still die, a shadow shell split apart, with this unsung song in my unsung heart.

If I Don’t Let Go, I’ll Never Really Know.

Trusting the Grace of Seasons

The over-culture is loud and fast. The predominant frequency is more, now, again, hurry, fast. I can’t hear it anymore without feeling a tremendous grief deep in my bones. It is a frenzied race that requires earning a living, earning our place. We must prove our worthiness to simply exist. If we are not productive, we are not going to last. It requires that we pay to play, and on top of all of that, the game is rigged at the end of the day. The game is full of rushing and suffering and fear and turning a blind eye and never slowing long enough to shed a tear. There is never enough time, never enough space, to let ourselves become overwhelmed by the enormity of the Grace of Life, the natural, slow, pace. It’s not easy, impossible maybe, to opt out of this frenetic energy. We all feel it. We all know. There aren’t easy solutions. It’s hard to go slow.

My mind has rolled all of this around for years, and my body has held the fear and I’ve run from it without an answer until I retreat back in. I go back into the over-culture and try again. And again I run and roll and strive and fail. I don’t fit in.

Lately, though, there is a new frequency I can hear. She is calling my high heart. She is beckoning gently. She is pulling me slowly down to rest on her soft green ground. Life Herself, Nature, Mother Earth, our planetary consciousness, holding a steady call, a gentle and persistent invitation to settle and rest and let myself fall.

Walk with me, she whispers. Watch the sky. Feel the wind against your skin, hear the rain and cry. Then stand up with the sun and run and run and collapse in a bed of grass. Notice how slow I want to go, and how everything will pass. It becomes precious when you notice how everything will pass. There is a Grace in the Seasons, a reason for the ebb and flow. There is a natural course, a rising inhale and then a falling, letting go. This will pass. Everything will pass. How do you want your life to go?

Slow down, she says, and listen. Tune in to the Grace of the Seasons. Trust me, I know.