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I have been wanting to tell you about this winter, about the process of wrestling my body and heart out of a marriage I thought would last until I was ready to leave this life. I have wanted to make sure no one imagines me as anything other than human. Vulnerable. Messy. Lost.

It is one of our most impossible human gestures to lean in – to trust, to love, without conditions, without knowing the outcome. This is especially impossible when there is already a story of fear rooted in our minds. One of the oldest, most primal instincts in us is to grasp. And yet nearly everything that matters comes out of these incredible, sometimes impossible, human gestures that require surrender.

Yesterday as I drove in slow motion through the Dayworld on a road where the speed limit is only 30 mph, I passed a hulking hunkering dark brown vulture,   perched on a fallen tree trunk just over the still body of one who would now become supper for hundreds of others. In the way these things happen, and no doubt because of where I am in this particular moment, I slipped between the worlds and saw my own body, or more precisely, the body of the one of me who had been married to the Earthquake Man, lying prone beneath the barbed talons and perfectly bare beak of this glorious terrifying death eater.

I am in the midst of a great dying. A dying to the way I thought, was taught, I would be held by this world. The way I imagined my children would be held in this world. And in this place there is so little that goes unquestioned. In this place, so much needs to be remembered. In this place, making love is the most critical practice. Several weeks ago, one night, in the wake of my oldest son finding his way back into a deeper more intimate and dangerous relationship with heroin, this practice looked like being held, loved, cracked open, witnessed and pushed to the far end of ecstasy by a man whose purpose was to assist me to do, exactly and only, that.

What has you come alive. What has  *YOU* come alive? If you do not know this, stop everything to listen. Let your ears rummage through the chatter, for the voice that is saying the things which terrify you the most. “What am I listening to Christiane?” you ask. You’re listening to your soul. The voice that is telling you the things which terrify your ego the most is your soul.

One early weekday morning when I was 7 my mother called my sister and me to the back door of our family home. With a particular euphoria I have only ever seen in her, she said “Shhh....just listen....” I leaned in, and in that space I heard, in the distance of the thick New England woods, a hollow rhythmic high-pitched staccato hammering. I had no idea what I was listening to but its effect on me was profound.

The elkhound and I are out at the time of the morning when the grass stalks are still frost covered, but their tips have already thawed. They are dripping and drooping with the weight of dew. We are sopping from our ankles down. The sun is already warm and insistent in its springtime relationship with this earth. Like a new courtship. Remembering something Martin Prechtel said, “don’t go home the same way twice,” we turn right in the field where usually we turn left, and come upon a stand of old trees with which we have not yet acquainted ourselves.

We are not taught how to have broken hearts. And this is a human catastrophe. The heart needs to be broken open just as much it needs to feel full and expanding. It needs to feel the unmistakable sensation of halting, breath-sucking awe and the necessary momentary place of certain-death doubt, just as much as it needs to feel joyous delight and ecstasy. It needs to be given the opportunity to choose to open, to choose to say Yes. The muscle of the heart, the miraculous organ itself, does this every second of every day of our lives though its insistence to beat and pump remains a mystery to us.

Two weeks ago, I was out with the elkhound at sunset, while my relapsed son was sleeping on the elk-hide bed in my office. There was medicine there, even if I couldn’t remember mine on that particular night. He slept, stirred by fits of rage that didn’t wake him up but caused him to throw things around the room. In his sleep, he was held by the very thing that held me but which I could not feel in that moment.

Tonight I am prostrate to the Beautiful Death. For two years I have been apprenticing to Her, in the form of a sculpture of a Catrina of Frida Kahlo. The Earthquake Man and I found her while exploring along the borders of Arizona and Mexico, in an artists’ colony where She was rather innocuously resting. Waiting. She stood about 5’ tall, her dream totems of the black irreverent monkey and the brazen red parrot, resting on her glorious boney shoulders. She was covered with a fine layer of dust.