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We must let these times call us up and out into versions of ourselves that have not yet been seen on Earth. We must be savvy and cunning. We must make ourselves inhospitable to the strategic assaults to our spirit and our courage, while making ourselves eminently findable by the deep Dream of The World. We must allow ourselves to be made in just such a way that we become brave and ingenious collaborators with the Dream in ways we could not have imagined. We must learn to serve in these times, not from a place of desperation or saving but from a place of love, deep imagination and fertile rage. 

Coda, noun: the concluding passage of a piece or movement, typically forming an addition to the basic structure. 

As I laid with Coda this morning, before anyone else was awake, I found myself whispering to him You have done what you came here to do. We are so well. We are on our way. And it is time to be on yours. We will never, never, forget you.

There is a balance that we are a part of, that we could also call indebtedness. We are beholden to each other and everything else for the continuation of this wild dance and our place within it…Listening for the relationships, supporting the balance that comes from increasing the erotic interdependence happening in that small ecosystem is. And if that means I feel anxious every morning that the rain will not come to offer its restorative oxygenated droplets, I’ll thank my parents and grandparents for this unfortunate endowment – the belief that at the foundation of the good life are certainty and predictability. 

Over the span of my thirty years as a clinical social worker, private practice therapist and now mentor, I’ve spent hundreds of hours sitting with mothers as they speak of the horrific moment when, as many of them have coined her, scary mommy comes roaring into life. Though we might joke about wanting to kill our children, because what else can we do in a situation that is so thoroughly inhumane as the one in which we attempt to sufficiently parent our children, there is absolutely nothing humorous about what has become of the conditions within which we are expected to raise our children. Even the most wealthy among us cannot buy her way out of the desertification and commodification that has become motherhood.

There have been moments, like yesterday morning’s unfolding, where I find myself in terrain of such intimacy I feel I cannot take any more. As I read through the memoir project I found myself in the midst of a conversation – you could say – with Belonging. Or perhaps it was a conversation with The Mystery about belonging. It got raucous. Confusing. Deep. More voices chimed in as the morning’s rain poured from the sky and the landscape appeared and disappeared behind shrouds of mist processing like specters across the impossibly green fields.

Whether I never teach another class or mentor another human or sit on another board or write another book, I feel an urgency to learn how to listen, and even more, how to hear, the unfolding story of this world. Whether this is a pivotal, ecologically catastrophic moment or simply another (now global) empire collapsing (like the hundreds that have occurred before), or both, to me, this moment needs to be witnessed. It doesn’t need to be fixed. It doesn’t need to be saved. It needs to be heard….

And for two weeks she hobbled around, alone and no doubt in pain, while her body and her spirit did the extraordinary work of healing. Why she bothered to heal, I cannot tell you. She was crumpled, forlorned...and yet utterly unvanquished.

After years of reciting prayers that meant absolutely nothing to me, prayers meant to indoctrinate me into a sense of meaning and order that is ultimately demeaning and demoralizing, the prayer that came out was to the bees, to the horses, to the fields, to the water and to my own body. After that came my love for them all, and more…for the lake that these fields poured themselves into and for the fish who swam in that lake. For the raspberries digesting in my belly. Then, one by one, I began ceremonially removing the stingers of the bees (in some heartbreaking cases, with the dead bees still attached), who had sacrificed themselves to protect their hive. Under the branches of a tiny Balsam tree just sprouting on the bank of the stream, I made a small altar, arranging the bees and stingers in the shape of a heart.

I can imagine a time, back before monotheistic religion, before the orthodoxy that led to the violent subordination and sequestration of women, when my foremothers spoke on behalf of Life….

This wild weaving – of midwifing the dying as we tend to what is birthing – is not a thing we do alone. We do not come to our senses in isolation. We come to our senses in intimate connection with each other. We find ourselves with each other. We make ourselves inhospitable to the self-consciousness and the sense-less-ness as we thaw and re-root in each other’s company.