Time is Not Linear

Standing at the edge of the ocean, I am soothed by the infinite repetition of waves roaring and colliding against the sand. In an hour, the foam fingers of the swells will be high enough to reach the legs of my beach chair. In a few hours more, they will recede again, leaving a line of shells and seaweed along the shore. This cycle will begin again in a few hours, thanks to the gravitational pull of the moon.

The tide reminds me that time is not linear. Our society operates on linear time. We perceive time as having a beginning and an end. We are born at point A and we exist until we die at point B. The years tick by in chronological order, one after the other on a straight path into the future. Our own years accumulate in the same way, each year adding another number to our age, always proceeding forward to our final destination.

When we perceive time as linear, we expect progress to be constant and so pressure is applied on us to advance. Starting over is considered moving backwards in linear time. To start over is to “lose time.” Even rest, relaxation or resignation can be thought of as “lost time” because they are the antithesis of linear time, which requires a constant forward motion. Waiting for something to happen is considered “wasting time” because we consider time without action to be a waste.

Share

Nature Lives in Cyclical Time

In nature, time is cyclical. A multitude of cycles layered together, causing spirals of time. There is the cycle of a day from sunset to sunset, of a month from new moon to new moon, of seasons from springtime to springtime and of lifetimes from birth to death to rebirth.

Each season of the solar cycle, trees lose their leaves, grow new ones, until those brown, and release again. Each lunar cycle affects the direction the sap flows in the tree and the amount of growth it receives in a week. When a tree falls, it becomes a nurse log that creates the perfect environment for new life to grow. When one cycle ends, another begins

Consider how our body’s cells are constantly replicating and replacing themselves. Some parts of the body are renewed more frequently than others, but over time all the cells in our body are different than the ones we were born with. This cycle occurs within a multitude of cycles like the solar years and life cycle of our body. Age is not linear, but cyclical or more specifically a spiral.

Subscribe now

Time is a Wheel

In many Indian traditions, time is understood as cyclical, through kālachakra, the “wheel of time,” in which creation and dissolution continually turn and return. As a wheel, there is no single beginning or final end, only ongoing turning. The various cycles, such as cosmic, earthly and inner seasons, overlay with one another, the pattern repeats, but the details and conditions shift, so the wheel of time holds both recurrence and change, just as natural cycles spiral back around but never in the same way. “In essence, the Kalachakra view maps the macrocosm and microcosm onto one another…The movements of stars and the movements of our breath mirror each other in a profound correspondence. Thus, the cosmos and the individual are nondual and mutually pervasive, intimately interconnected and influencing each other,” writes Luis Gallardo in his essay, Turning the Wheel of Time. Just as the cycles of the moons affect the cycles of the ocean. Just as the circadian rhythms of the sun affect the cycles of sleep in our bodies. Everything is interconnected, turning simultaneously inward and outward, in cyclical time.

Share

Healing Happens in Cycles

Consider the healing process. When we function in linear time then anytime we have a setback in our healing process, we feel defeated because we should be progressively getting better, otherwise we are failing to heal. Also, we feel like at this moment we should be in optimal health instead of understanding the cyclical nature of our body, which is not an upward climb to constant improvement, but an ever-evolving state of being.

“If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember it to find it again and let it teach us,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her essay, Ancient Green. In cyclical time, when our healing is delayed, we are given another opportunity to get better, to reevaluate what worked and what didn’t work with more wisdom, instead of feeling shame or disappointment. Our expectations are more realistic. We understand that our standards for health must shift with the shifts in our body and environment, such as hormones, sunlight hours and climate. This example can be applied to creativity, work, relationships, and many aspects of your life.

Subscribe now

In cyclical time, we are able to repeat old patterns graciously, understanding that though the pattern may repeat, we are never the same twice. Though I may have made the same mistake twice, I did it differently this time. I did not fail to learn, I am still learning.

Cycles Embrace Uncertainty

Water molecules of the ocean evaporate into vapor and rise to the sky where they accumulate into clouds and rain down to return to the ocean. Each moment on this cyclical path the water transforms, and while the pattern is well-trodden, repeated in multitudes, each time the cycle is performed, the ways in which the pattern plays out changes. The cloud is unique and the ocean has shifted. As the saying goes, you never stand in the same river twice. The beauty of cyclical time is that not only are we moving in spirals, but the spiral is also always changing. The results are always uncertain and mysterious.

This is counter to chronological linear time in which there is no room for mystery, the movement is always forward and the results are always progress. Linear time is unnatural and a social construct. If we consider time as cyclical instead, then each moment is an opportunity to start again and with a fresh new perspective.

Share

Time is on Your Side

By applying cyclical time, we can release what no longer serves us when we have evolved out of it without feeling like we are inconsistent, flaky, or unreliable. Cyclical time allows us to start fresh whenever “the time” feels right to do so. You can never “lose time.” Cycles are happening every moment, every day, every year. Allow yourself to be guided by the natural energy cycles within you of movement and rest, solitude and socialization, creative outbursts and fallow times. By recognizing and acknowledging these cycles, we can flow more easily, slowly, and naturally, like the ebb and rise of the tide, the trough and crest of the wave, the turning face of the moon

Are You Ready to Discover Your Cyclical Rhythm?

If this topic resonates with you and you want to learn more about how to embrace cyclical time in your daily, monthly, seasonal, yearly, and lifetime spirals, I’ve included a list of 9 ways to practice cyclical time. These practices can help you slow down and find more ease with your own natural rhythms. This list is a compendium of life experience, nature‑based trainings, and research, and is available to paid subscribers only.

How to Discover and Practice Cyclical Time:

Here are nine simple ways to discover and practice your own cyclical time so you can slow down, listen to your body, and reconnect with the natural rhythms supporting your life. Start by choosing one or two practices that feel most alive for you right now. Let them move in cycles too, releasing any practice that no longer fits and beginning a new one when the season of your life changes.

Read more

Santa Claus Versus Fairies

Before my daughter started high school, in the years before the 2020 pandemic, we used to travel a lot, about three months out of the year. Often, we spent holidays abroad. We figured out how to make Xmas and Chanukkah work in multiple lands. In some places, like Quenca, Equador, Christmas was built into the culture, a multi-day parade of people from villages across the country right outside the door of our little apartment. In other places like, Bali, Indonesia, there wasn’t so much going on. There were no Christmas lights decorating houses, no parades, and no Santa Claus with children lined up to sit on his knee. That might have been what made precocious ten-year-old Flora suspicious.

A couple days before Christmas, after I purchased local artisan toys to wrap in paper and assign to Santa, as was customary for our overseas holidays, Flora turned to me and asked if Santa existed.

“Tell me the truth,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes, “the absolute truth.”

This was a moment of reckoning. Do I continue to lie to this very intelligent child, knowing she will find out soon enough? Do I continue to justify my lie with half-truths about the “spirit of Santa in all of us” some such bullshit? Or do I give her what she is asking for and tell her the truth?

“No,” I confessed solemnly, “Santa is not real.”
“What?!” she exclaimed. “Why did you tell me? You should have lied.”
In that moment my heart broke. Seriously, that may have been one of the worse heartbreaks of my adult life. I could see that something broke in her too, her belief in magic. I stomped on her childhood imagination, her dreams of magical lands and mythical creatures. I was the worst mother ever.

“This means the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist either,” she concluded sadly without needing me to agree.

Oh no, I destroyed her innocence. I should have known better. Of course she didn’t want the truth. She was ten after all, and too smart to still believe in Santa Claus unless she was in conscientious denial. She wanted to believe. She wanted me to lie to her.

And that’s when I blurted out with all sincerity, “But fairies really do exist!”

She looked reasonably suspicious.

“I swear it!”

And I meant it. I have always believed and continue to believe in fairies. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. They’re everywhere. Not like Tinkerbell humanoids with translucent wings, but like glitter, puffs, flits and sparks (and sometimes translucent wings). You’ve probably seen them too, whether you knew it or not.

I’m not alone in my belief.

Read more

Peace Through Outdoor Mindfulness

This is a sit spot practice. The more you do it, the more you will come to enjoy the feeling of doing nothing and the resonance you feel with the environment around you.

In time, you will notice that the beings around you are also noticing you. Feel how this changes your perspective. In time, you may begin to realize that you and the grass and trees and the bushes and the mountains are communing together with each other sharing that space. And then perhaps two ravens cross flight overhead and you feel for a moment the spectacular awe of something greater than yourself that connects you to everything.

Dogs bark. A siren screams. You get up and return home somehow changed. You feel just a little bit different. Something has shifted. The world looks different to you now and you look forward to your return.

This may sound like a simple exercise but consider how much effort it takes for modern people to put aside time in their lives to sit down and do nothing. Consider how we fidget and grumble. Consider how our minds wonder, and we think of all the other things we have to do. And yet, slowing down to do nothing may be the most worthwhile activity of your day. As the wise sage Winnie the Pooh said, “Don’t underestimate the value of doing nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

Share

What is a Sit Spot?

A sit spot is a place in a natural setting (forest, park, backyard, etc.) that you go to and sit with no other intention but to be present and observe your surroundings. It is meditative and allows you to connect deeply with your environment. As a practice, frequently visit this spot, at different times of day and throughout the seasons, to observe the subtle changes that take place in this relatively small and immediate space.

I have a sit spot in my front yard where I go to often, but I also have a sometimes sit spot. Sometimes when I have time to spare, I walk to the guardian pine and lay down my blanket and rest.

I chose my spot for the shade of a pinon with her wide canopy of branches. This tree is at the start of a path where the hill begins to rise, and the juniper and pinon begin to populate the sagebrush fields. Higher up the forest becomes denser, but here trees are sporadic and so this tree seems to me a guardian tree, a guardian of the forest beyond, the protected public lands where it is illegal to cut down trees, though humans do it anyway from time to time. I visit her occasionally and she grants me not just shade but clarity of mind. Sometimes new ideas, but usually a clearing out of the clutter to give space to growing ideas.

Sometimes if I’m having a bad day, this tree will lift some of the burden of carrying heavy emotions. On a good day, this tree will gift me small balls of resin on the floor beneath that I can burn later for the grounding scent of pine. I give the tree water from my jug, then myself.

Subscribe now

Reconnecting with the Other-Than-Human World

The distant Sangre de Cristos are framed in the pine boughs. I sit away from the trunk to avoid where the black ants gather. I notice after a while when there is a shift in the bird sounds. I don’t presume to know what the birds are saying, but I notice when the alarm ceases and a new chirp proceeds.

Pauline Oliveros writes in her book, Deep Listening, “When you enter an environment where there are birds, insects or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received. Your presence may be the difference between life and death for the creatures of the environment.” If you are always passing through, climbing your way to the scenic lookout, you may not realize that birds sound differently when we enter their territory; their songs heighten with alarm.

The general agreement is that it takes about 20 minutes for the creatures in your vicinity, like the birds, to determine that you are not a predator and lose interest in you. It is at this point, when the other-than-human world returns to business as usual, that some of the most exciting watching might occur. So, a minimum of 30 minutes is usually recommended for a sit spot practice.

The more often you visit your sit spot, the more you build your practice. Similar to meditation, sit spots bring a sense of peace. They also enhance your relationship to the other-than-human world and your ability to more easily connect in an embodied way with your surroundings wherever you go. You can visit your sit spot daily or weekly.

If you would like, you can spend time reflecting at the end of your sit spot practice, journaling about your observations or nature sketching.

Share

The Gift of Simplicity and Gratitude

Finding quiet moments in nature doing nothing but observing the world around you is the greatest lesson in contentment. In this way, we can appreciate the little things, have gratitude for simplicity and feel the bliss of being fully present with our world.

From my sit spot, I watch a dozen planes pass overhead. Their engines roar as they pass above me, and they leave tight contrails in the haze, filled with kinetic energy. But once the plane is long gone, the trails unravel and fade. They loosen and disperse into the clouded sky.

The sit spot teaches me how to do nothing. How to blend in, how to loosen and disperse into my ecosystem, even how to tolerate the buzzing flies and the raucous winds. I feel a sense of returning to myself, to my true nature. I am covered in dirt. My braid has come undone. I have an ant bite on my neck. It has only been 30 minutes.

Bonus for paid subscribers only: In appreciation of your loyalty to Our Uncertain Future, I am offering a downloadable audio meditation called Sensory Presence Meditation, perfect for listening to while in your sit spot. In this guided meditation, you will move through a grounding, sense-based practice that helps you arrive fully in the present moment. Through breath, body awareness, and subtle shifts of attention, you can tune into your inner guidance and your relationship with the world around you. Enjoy!

Read more

This month we are on an epic trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in celebration of my momentous 50th birthday. While we are even further off the grid than usual, I thought I’d share with you this post from last summer, so you can better understand why the GC is so meaningful to me. See you on the flipside!

Before the Map Was an App

The first time I spontaneously got naked in Nature, I was nineteen years old. My best friends and I were taking a road trip across the country between my freshman and sophomore years of college. We were choosing places to visit based on where we had places to crash.

This is 1994. There is no Internet or cell phones or GPS. I ordered a trip route off of Triple A, a desk sized wire-bound booklet of maps with your requested journey highlighted for you across multiple pages, depending how long the trip. Our journey started in New York and took us to West Virginia, Memphis, Oklahoma, and rapidly across the Texas panhandle where cops notoriously pulled people over for weed, which was all illegal back then. We went to New Mexico because our close friend was going to the now defunct College of Santa Fe on Saint Michael’s. From there we headed west toward California where we had a friend in La Jolla.

Searching for Something Sacred in the Desert

Natural Born Killers was a popular movie at the time and romanticized the idea of taking peyote in the desert with shamans. This is before Ayahuasca journeys were a popular tourist adventure. I was reading Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Way as we traversed Arizona.

Share

We didn’t have peyote, but we had plenty of cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms which we micro-dosed (before that was a word) at the Petrified Forest National Park. Climbing over the ropes intended to keep tourists out we took to the desert like tarantulas roaming in search of something we could not describe, shoving our pockets with petrified wood. Later, we petrified ourselves when we saw warnings of bubonic plague, naively believing we surely contracted it on our sojourns.

But it was the Grand Canyon that truly blew my mind.

My Grand Canyon Moment

Driving around the bend, the view opened to the gaping wide-open heart of Mama Earth calling out to me as if from beyond time and space, reaching its multi-layered melodious colored canyon walls into my deepest crevaces. I began to cry. We hadn’t even gotten out of the car yet.

My first sight of the goddess’s own goblet, a glorious canyon larger than my little New York suburbanite brain ever could have conceived of had me bleeding tears of clay. I jumped from the car to the ledge and the immensity of it all overwhelmed me. My friends pulled out their cameras (yes, real cameras with film) and I pulled off my clothes.

My white tee shirt flew off my shoulders exposing my unbound breasts to whomever might have been in view. I didn’t know or care. On the south rim, tourists are common but perhaps less then than now and perhaps more dispersed. We did not have social media and the idea of “if you don’t post it, it didn’t happen” did not exist then. We did not do things in order to be “seen” or get external validation via likes and clicks from strangers. These concepts didn’t exist yet and so our frame of mind was different. I might argue freer. Freed up from the slavery of the constant pursuit for validated visibility, proof of life.

Subscribe now

The Wild Feminine

I was never the “naked type,” so I’m not sure what came over me to be so publicly displayed. No, wait, I do know. The Grand Canyon came over me. I felt like baring my entire being and succumbing to her raging wild spirit. My friends stopped me short of removing my bell bottoms. I raised my arms to the sky as if to say, take me now, I want in.

We laughed about it, of course, for years. It was a joke. Johanna took her clothes off at the Grand Canyon. I didn’t think too much of it then.

But now I know. Now I know more fully than I ever have what caused me to expose myself in that way. Nature. The wild feminine spirit. I had been so separated from that for so long, living a life of city clubs and academia and shopping malls and fast food. Something about the deep canyon wider than the eye can see that lit a deep fire in my heart.

Share

Born for the Desert

Today, I live at the edge of another deep canyon in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument Park, not as monumental as the Grand Canyon but a monument none the less. Living here is a full circle for me from that first time I visited the southwest and we took a side trip to Taos to walk across the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, carving our names in the rail. I don’t know why I was born in New York when I was born for the desert. Red rock canyons hearken my soul back to a time primordial when I slept beside the fire deep within the fertile riverbeds fortified by lava rock walls. I never get tired of the rock formations of the southwest.

My Return to the Grand Canyon

I have been back to the Grand Canyon twice since 1994. Again, to the south rim and once to the north rim and every time I am blown away by the beauty.

Last time we were there in 2018, I beckoned my husband and daughter out in a rainstorm to the rim of the canyon where the sky lit like fire. They fussed a bit at crazy mom for making them stand in the cold wet wind. But then, as if the desert goddess herself wished to gift me for my dutiful worship, a rainbow appeared over the canyon in deep violent hues and I cried, again, at her magnificence.

Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? Share your memories! I’d love to hear from others who are equally obsessed with her.

Leave a comment

Get Your Free Nature Journal Now

I worry about the planet. I worry about all the once protected public lands that will now be opened to coal and oil corporations for exploitation, so we can drill and frack and mine pointlessly for the dregs of energy we require to keep this too fast burning society blazing.

I worry that the repercussions will be disastrous for the Earth, the trees, the animals, the plants and irreparable. We cannot replace animals that are extinct due to habitat loss from the lack of environmental protection. Old Growth trees take hundreds of years to grow back, generations of humans that would need to protect them from being clear cut.

I worry about the forests being bulldozed and the loss of carbon that keeps our air clean and regulates our climate’s heat. I worry about seas rising, mountains burning, land gone barren.

What can I do? I know worrying is pointless. I know my state representatives already agree with me. I write these essays all day long, but I’m mostly preaching to the choir. I volunteer for my local conservation organization, but this is only a small piece of the larger picture. What can I do?

Share

My Turning Point

We recently purchased a quarter acre of land in our neighborhood. It turned out that someone else wanted it. Since we already had plans for it, we offered to trade for another parcel and began a sort of negotiation back and forth that remains unresolved. I was telling my friend Amanda about it.

Amanda has been a student of mine in Nature Intuition and EcoWriting courses for years now. In both classes, we practice modern animism and spiritual ecology. We learn how to tap into our intuition and connect physically and spiritually with the natural world to learn to listen to nature beings all around us. Of course, we all have a preternatural ability to do this; I provide a method to remind us how to return to our animistic way of being with the natural world just as our ancient ancestors did.

But sometimes, I get caught up in my worries. Sometimes, winter is long and I’m inside my house, inside my head and forget stuff.

So, when Amanda said to me, “Ask the land,” I thought, “Duh.” I was so grateful to her for reminding me that we are deeply connected with the Earth.

Our Savior Complex

I am not the protector of the planet, the savoir in the movie who shows up and fixes everything. I don’t fly in with my cape and destroy all the ignorant Captains of Industry, single-handedly revitalizing the Earth. None of us are. Humans are not.

We are in a relationship with the land. Just as on a committee for an organization with a shared mission, we would ask everyone represented for feedback. We must invite the land to the table. The Earth must be part of the conversation. What does the land say?

Subscribe now

Modern Animism

So, I did as she asked. I didn’t have to go to the land to tune into it. Through my practice, I knew how to be in conversation from wherever I was, to tune in and listen. Listening is the most important part after asking after all.

I was surprised by what I learned.

The land was okay with not belonging to me. Since the other person’s intention was to not develop the land, the land was happy to remain as it was, untouched. My intention was to put an off-grid yurt on the land to offer to artists and writers for use. But my sense was that the land preferred to remain untouched. I wondered if another plot might be better after all.

Even if things don’t work out that way, I can ask the land again; how can I consider you? How can I make the smallest impact? What can I give you in return? Again and again, ask the land. This is how we are in relationship. This is earth reciprocity.

Reduce Eco-anxiety Through Nature Connection

It's time to ask the land what the land wants. It’s time to stop thinking we are the saviors of the Earth and instead be in conference with the planet and its needs.

When I do this, I feel that the Earth is tired. Something has shifted recently when I wasn’t looking. The Earth feels drained. I started grounding into stone and air instead of Earth to give it a break.

The Earth needs us to give back now and stop taking. It’s time we asked Earth what it wants and give it what it needs. We can’t stop the oil rigs, but we can nurture and feel the Earth as a counterbalance to the strain being put on it.

Share

Healing Earth Practices

This can be as big as regenerative farming, sustainable housing, or conservation work, but that’s not what I’m referring to.

I mean, it’s time to sing and drum and dance to Earth. Create Altars to the Earth. It’s time to write the Earth poems and recite them aloud with friends.

It’s time to pray for the Earth in community. It’s time to send healing energy into the land. It’s time to kiss trees and walk barefoot and grow flowers, all with the intention in your heart of hearts to nurture, love and give back to the Earth.

As I do this work, I notice the worry subsided just a little bit. My worry transforms. She’s right here with us. Together we are on fire. Together we are healing. We are in communion. She hears our prayers of gratitude.

Leave a comment

Key Takeaways:

• Shift from control to collaboration: Prioritize listening to the land’s needs, recognizing Earth as an active partner in ecological stewardship.

• Modern animism as a tool: Reconnect with your intuition to communicate with nature, using practices like meditation and eco-writing.

• Reject savior narratives: Move beyond heroism toward collective reciprocity with the land, acknowledging humans as one small part of the larger web.

• Healing through ritual: Counterbalance exploitation with creative acts and physical connection to nourish the Earth.

• Transform worry into connection: Replace anxiety with grounded nature connections, trusting that small, intentional acts of care ripple into systemic healing.

Symbolism of Trees

The medieval Kabbalists, or Jewish mystics, infused Tu BiShvat with a spiritual significance. They believed that since fruits held in them the spark of divine creation (the seeds to grow a tree), and that humans held in them the spark of the divine, then to eat certain fruits was a way of releasing these divine sparks into the world.

Trees hold significant meaning across many cultures. Buddha reached enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, and it is therefore symbolic of enlightenment. In the bible, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represents wisdom or awakening, and the Tree of Life represents immortality. Celts believed that trees were their ancestors and the gatekeepers to the Celtic Otherworld, so they were held as sacred. The baobab is revered in Africa and Madagascar as a sacred and mystical tree, in part because they provide fruit even in harsh climates and because their branches look like roots reaching to the sky. In ancient Egypt, many deities were associated with trees. In Norse mythology, the Yggdrasil or the World Tree, is an ash tree that encompasses all the worlds, including the world of humans and the world of the gods in its branches and roots.

Subscribe now

Nature Therapy

Connecting with trees comes easily to me. I’m a tree hugger, what can I say? We get a bad rep, but I think that’s because people just don’t get it. Scientifically, trees emanate phytoncides to protect themselves from parasites and these natural tree chemicals have been proven to have a positive effect on humans as well, downregulating our nervous system and preventing disease. It makes sense since we evolved with the trees until modern times. But I also follow the old belief that trees “balance your chakras,” and I stand by that. Give me a two-minute tree hug and I will feel ten times better.

Share

My Dryad Soul

I never knew an aspen grove until I came to the Mountain West. I never knew the tall white spine, the silvery crackle of bark, the leaves like paper chimes celebrating. I was 19 years old when I first traveled to the Rocky Mountains. I was astonished by the craggy peaks, cloud grazing heights and towering forests. But before I made the journey west, I decided to get a tattoo. My first tattoo.

Even at that age, I understood the significance of my quest. My best friend Michele and I were traversing the continental U.S. as young adults alone in the greater world for the first time without supervision. We were leaving home, just as mythologist Joseph Campbell’s hero must do. We were adventuring to see America, to see the Smoky Mountains, the red mesas of Utah, the wide-open spaces of the western deserts, the Pacific Coast Highway. We were called.

We were young, so young, and as much as we thought we were experienced, we had so much ahead of us to be known. Perhaps subconsciously, we understood we were crossing this threshold into adulthood with this one road trip, unplanned, unfettered, and free. A tattoo was a commemoration of who we were and who we would become. Michele’s brother recently opened a tattoo parlor, so we went to him, naively perhaps because he was inexperienced and specialized in skulls, but optimistically.

I designed my own tattoo. I had been drawing a lot in pen and ink at the time. My design was a tree. A woman tree to be specific. That was the first image I wanted etched on my body for the rest of my life. At 19, the rest of your life doesn’t mean much, but now, I’m glad I got that tattoo. Granted, her brother did a terrible job. The line work was uneven. The face in the tree was a squashed together blob. And the three coverups I’ve gotten in the last 30 years to try to improve it, didn’t help much. But I never regretted it. Because it’s not the art, but the meaning I cared about. I knew that I had a dryad’s soul, that I connected to the divine feminine, to nature spirits and the more-than-human world in a deep way I could not express in words, only with permanent ink.

Trees encompass so much. They are portals, healers, wise ancestors, and immortality-gifting gods. Imagine what you can discover, spending time with a tree.

Share

How to connect with a tree:

• Allow yourself to be drawn to a tree for any reason; it’s location, appearance, or a vibe you get. Don’t overthink it.

• Set the intention to form a connection to the tree.

• Sit under it for a while (20-30 minutes) even better if you’re touching. Trees make great leaning posts. Or lay down under the tree and stare at its crown.

• Breathe with your tree. When you inhale oxygen, the tree is exhaling oxygen. When you exhale carbon dioxide, the tree in inhaling the same carbon dioxide.

• Hug that tree! Wrap your arms around it (Watch for ants, sap and protrusions).

• Talk to your tree. It might answer you.

• Be sure to thank the tree when you are done.

• In the spirit of reciprocity, offer the tree a gift such as a song, a strand of your hair or a beautiful stone.

Leave a comment

You may also like…

I am excited to introdude a guest writer and our long-time friend, Gary Feuerman. Eric, Gary and I used to perform in many a writing event around town together, as well as an online ekphrasis-style flash fiction blog back in the day called Postmodern Petroglyphs. We even contributed to a Pecha Kucha Night together in 2012. Gary joined the Winter Writing Challenge I offered last month and shared his writing in the Facebook group. This piece about his relationship with a “brother tree” during his brother’s cancer treatment struck me, not just because the themes of animism and nature connection are prefectly aligned with Earth Sensory Perception, but because of the beauty, vulnerability and energy of the writing.

Gary says about himself, “Entrepreneur and business lawyer who came to Taos, NM in 2003 to leave those things behind and live a contemplative writing life while wandering the high desert and Sangre de Cristos (preferably with a long beard and a shawl). 21+ years later, I'm finally getting back to where I began, but now with two young daughters, a life partner who conjures sublime chocolate from cacao beans, and a variety of peaks, valleys, and deserts (literal and figurative) to write about.”

Subscribe now

#7 Evergreen by Gary Feuerman

I’ve always had relationships with trees. When I was little, I hugged the trunks of the oaks that towered in my backyard making an amphitheater of sky over the little, pink-tiled basketball court my dad made for me. I cried for the oak near the property line that fell out of its concrete mooring in a summer windstorm and came within 3 feet of demolishing part of our kitchen. It was a gnarly furrowed tree that had been split by lightning years before and bled a tarry sap. The gardeners cut up the fallen giant into firewood for people with fireplaces (not us). I always noticed the trees in parks standing in all weather in all seasons, dressed in leaves or shorn naked under the clouds of winter. This is my favorite tree season when the branches are fully revealed. If you look close, notice that they all curve up toward the sun and dance in the smallest of breezes. I used to take time and watch the sway and jiggle. I’d lie down on the grass or dirt and look up disorienting myself into a world of vertical beings and sky. More recently, in Taos, I discovered a Pinon tree, an evergreen, on the trail to Devisadero Peak. It became my brother, literally. It had an opening in the branches like outstretched arms waiting to take me in. I would walk into its shelter and lean into it. There was a sharp knob that I knew was for pressing my third eye. I’d hug my brother and press my forehead into the knob. Instantly, I’d make up prayers and spin energy circles through my belly, up through my throat to my face and out the top of my crown. When my brother was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, I’d hike barefoot to my brother tree and pray with him. I’d conjure the whole forest and could see with my eyes closed and my forehead pressed against the knob the web of life in golden nodes throughout this forest and all forests. I could hear my brother tree groan in the wind and feel its flexibility in my arms. It made clicking sounds and the needles licked my ears. My brother was alive and awake in every way. I felt that together we could lift my blood brother’s cancer and send it throughout the forest network to be changed into other energy. I knew this. I went to him every day. I sent my energy in rings clockwise then counterclockwise. I saw my brother’s face in my dark inner film studio projected against the light behind the curtain. Me and brother tree groaned together confident we could cure Stephen. I believed this with everything I had. Magic. And for a couple of months in the summer of ’21, the disease waned. Stephen was hopeful. I kept walking barefoot to brother tree. As the seasons began turning and my feet got colder, Stephen’s cancer roared back and filled him with fluids. The chemo didn’t work. The alternative meds didn’t work. Stephen lost more weight and the feeling in his hands and feet. He became gaunt. He walked with a cane. His goatee got long and I thought he looked like my vision of Santiago from The Old Man and the Sea. I still conjured the forest and spun the energy. I cried to my brother and walked barefoot in the cold. Some days, I talked to him as I hiked and he was funny. High on methadone. The conversation jumped from track to track. In December, I walked barefoot in the snow and came to my brother to say goodbye to Stephen. It was a windy, cold day and brother tree, a short, squat one among squatty trees, groaned louder and higher pitched than usual. I spun the energy still, knowing it was more for myself than for Stephen. After he died, I came back to the tree through the winter, still hiking barefoot in the ice and mud. I conjured the forest, the golden nodes, and I spun the energy and listened to my brother.

Share

Leave a comment

Free Writing Prompts

Join our free 8-day Winter Writing Challenge December 2nd-9th. More info below.

Though it is technically still autumn, signs of winter have already begun in temperate areas of the northern hemi. The first coat of glaring white snow, the first bitter freeze, the first sight of white capping the mountains were all initial signs of winter’s arrival. I have always had a bittersweet relationship with the winter season. I can neither claim to hate it nor love it. When days darken, I get excited for the many projects I’ve been wanting to do that I can finally complete without the pull of sunshine to tempt me outside into my garden. The longer nights outside mean longer nights indoors with family around a cozy fire or a good movie. I get excited for mountain climbs on snowshoes through the stillness of a winter forest. I’m also happy to not have to be bothered by flies and tarantula wasps. I can walk through the sage with headphones on without being vigilant for rattlesnakes who are all in hibernation.

But admittedly, a couple of months into the season of dark and cold and I can feel my muscles grow tense around frigid bones. The time I spend outside in the low southern sun stops being enough to replenish my vitamin D and serotonin stores. I find myself daringly dashing through the edge of evening light to get safely home before I can no longer see the path before me. I’m sick of hat hair and boots and ashes and headlights. My family and I usually venture somewhere warm for a week or two over winter break to defrost before impatiently facing the sometimes painstakingly long months of the new year.

Yet when I grow impatient for spring, I remind myself that winter’s greatest gifts are below the surface. Winter is prime time for tapping into our psyche and intuitive gifts. As with plants who go dormant during the cold winter months, this period of rest is important for our wellbeing.

Share

When a deciduous tree goes into dormancy, it stops growing new foliage and leaves brown and fall away. The remnants of their summer growth—a litter of leaves, needles, bark, greenery, seeds, bones, decay and more—disintegrate at the floor of their trunks. Soon, a thick layer of dense white snow covers and saturates the detritus to further assimilate into the dark earth. This accumulation of debris from past seasons enriches the roots with compost. Though we cannot see it with our animal eyes, the past is still with us in the depths of the land; millennia of summers amass beneath the soil. When the natural world dies back and returns to the dirt, we say goodbye to what was, in exchange for what is.

Subscribe now

So much is happening beneath the surface during the winter months. Though trees appear to enter a state of complete inactivity in the wintertime, roots continue to grow and thrive. All around barren trees stop their reaching upward to resume an inward spiral, drawing down into the earth, below the topsoil. Underground the roots are searching for water and nutrients, continuing to grow and stockpile in preparation for spring when they will need to replenish their leaves and buds. Snowpack helps to insulate the soil, so the roots can continue their delicate and slow work throughout the coldest months.

Like the composting topsoil and the roots of a tree, humans are also called to go underground during this time of the year. The brisk cold of winter is merciless on bare skin like a sharp warning to seek shelter, return to the cave for hibernation, gather the last gnarled rosehip from the riverbed and go inside. In the imaginal realm, the cave is where we retreat to the heart of our being. It is the deep subconscious where we can open our eyes to the darkness and see our true light. In our modern culture, we perceive the cave as foreboding and avoid it as best we can, seeking out spaces that are large, well lit, and with open floor plans. But we are missing out on the mystery and self-understanding of the cave. Some caves contain crystals that took millions of years to grow. The cave resides underground, in the past, yet during dormancy, we can let go of what came before, to hibernate and dream of what will come next.

In winter, we can replicate the natural world and allow ourselves to go dormant above ground. Slow our growing. Release what we no longer need. Simplify our lives. Rest. A state of inactivity can become fertilizer for the new year. It gives us time to restore and reconsider our goals and priorities.

Meanwhile, we can continue to grow underground. Out of the limelight, out of other’s view, below the conscious realm of logic and thought loops, we can continue to establish our roots. Turning inward, we can connect with our intuition, the voice inside of us that is always loving and kind and provides answers that tend to arrive with a sense of relief and deep understanding. In the cave of our heart, the answers are quiet and come with patience and rest. We cannot rush it. We can return to the light only when the time is right. So when spring approaches, we are ready to bloom.

How to Winterize for Wintuition:

1. Take naps solely for the purpose of dreaming. Collect your dreams in a journal and see what message they may be repeating that you need to hear.

2. Have one whole day with nothing scheduled and no plan. See what happens. Look for signs and synchronicities.

3. Try going to bed as soon as the sun goes down. You can read or draw or journal or color or anything bed appropriate that you wish to do before you fall asleep (without a screen!). Enjoy the extra time beneath the covers.

4. Create a contest with your spouse/children/roommate to see who can stay in bed the longest on a Saturday morning. The loser must bring the winner coffee or tea in bed.

5. Light a fire (candle, bonfire or fireplace) and turn off all the lights. Perhaps play music or stories. Stare into the light.

6. Walk in the falling snow. Listen to the silence. Notice what you hear. Bonus points if you go out at night.

   Share

Join our Winter Writing Challenge!

Register now

Read more

Halloween is a popular American family holiday consisting of costumes and candy, but its origins are deeply rooted in Celtic paganism. Halloween began to be celebrated in America in the 19th century with the influx of Irish immigrants who brought over their old traditions based on the cross-quarter holiday between equinox and solstice called Samhain (which translates to “summer’s end”.) Because the belief was that at this time of the year magic was more potent, young women sought fortune tellers and seers to divine insights into their future husbands. This is how the holiday became associated with witches and the supernatural.

I have been practicing witchcraft since college, but I rarely tell people that I’m a witch. For the most part, this is because I assume people will misunderstand. Last year I told my uncle I was a witch; I don’t remember the context. His response was, “So, does that mean you practice the dark arts?” That’s pretty much the response I expect from most people.

Witches are perceived as Satan worshipping heathens. Witch is a dirty word. Witch is a term used against women considered nasty, difficult, uppity, disobedient, rude. Witches are portrayed as evil antagonists in movies and stories. But none of these myths are true. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Modern witchcraft is a diverse religion that includes more sects than Christianity. Like any other religion or spirituality, witchcraft seeks connection with divinity. Witches are primarily nature lovers, healers and peacemakers. They believe everything that they do will return to them three-fold like magical karma, so they are cautious with their actions.

That said, where did these negative ideas about witches being evil come from?

HISTORY OF THE WITCH

The earliest written record of a witch is in the Bible, the book of Samuel, considered to be written sometime between 931 B.C. and 721 B.C., in which King Saul sought the Witch of Endor to summon the dead prophet Samuel’s spirit to aid in the defeat of the Philistine army.

The word “witch” comes from the Old English word wicca or wise one. Historically witches were people who practiced witchcraft. Many were healers, midwives, herbalists and other types of wise-women. With the complete adoption of Christianity in Europe in the Early Middle Ages, witches still practiced the old religions in some form or another. Since they were misunderstood, Christians perceived them as violent and evil and believed that they were working with the devil. This is because Christians believed that everything in the spirit world was evil and demonic. Natural forces, omens, ancestors, spirit guides, dryads, nymphs, fairies, and all the other spiritual beings of the pagan world were considered necessarily evil. And since witches communed with these beings, they were doing the devil’s work, the embodiment of evil.

Share

In medieval times not being “Christian enough” or fitting into society’s box could be reason enough to put you on trial as a witch, which was secondhand for demon worshipper. Here in the United States, we know of the notorious Salem Witch Trials, but worse witch trials occurred all over the world beginning in the early 15th century and continuing through the 17th century, including The Würzburg Witch Trials, the Basque Witch Trials and the Pendle Witch Trials. The number of people executed for witchcraft is estimated at somewhere between 40,000 to 50,000 and a disproportionate amount were women. Being called a witch, though most of these people were not witches at all, meant torture, imprisonment, and execution.

Some historians speculate that the witch hunts were incited by the enclosure of the commons. Following the Great Famine and the Black Death, surviving landowners began constructing fences around once commonly shared land and resources that families had cultivated and grazed animals on for generations and depended on for survival. Privatizing common land resources as well as an increase in taxation and food scarcity, displaced mostly elder women and widows, who were rightfully angry and vocally protested the change. These women were some of the first to be put on trial for witchcraft.

Additionally, women who were practicing herbalism, midwifery and other healing arts were percieved as a threat to the newly trained male university physicians. These universities were run by the medieval church and starting to professionalize medicine, setting back women’s health care by hundreds of years. “The real issue was control: male upper-class healing under the auspices of the Church was acceptable, female healing as part of a peasant subculture was not,” writes Barbara Ehrenreich in Witches, Midwives, & Nurses. However, most women still prefered the folk medicines of witches as they were far more successful. Ehrenreich says, “The witch was an empiricist: she relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring.” The witch hunts and subsequent trials served to wipe out the competition.

WITCH WOUND

To this day women are killed as witches for far less. Since 2010, many men and women suspected of using witchcraft have been beaten and killed in Papua New Guinea, including a young mother who was burned alive. Similar episodes continue to occur in Africa, South America, the Middle East and in immigrant communities in Europe and the United States.

This historical warning to behave and conform is deeply ingrained in us and often it keeps us repressed, just as it was meant to. In her insightful book, Heal the Witch Wound, Celeste Larsen writes, “The messaging of these displays of violence was clear and direct: Seeking power while existing in a female body is dangerous. Defying societal norms around gender and sexuality is dangerous. Speaking out against injustice is dangerous. Questioning the authority of those in power is dangerous. Offending the wrong person is dangerous. Trusting in your friends and neighbors is dangerous. Believing in pagan superstitions is dangerous. Being different is dangerous—so keep to yourself, keep quiet, keep your head down, and keep out of the way.”

There is even a term for it “witch wound.” The witch wound is a shared, intergenerational, spiritual wound that was established in the Burning Times and continues today. Many of us still carry the witch wound, stored trauma held in our DNA or carried in our collective consciousness. There is a fear of being burned, persecuted, or judged if we speak our truth, act in ways that go against the popular mindset, or practice healing arts, especially those associated with women. This fear may run deep and manifest in ways such as playing small or holding back from doing the work we are called to do. The witch wound is your psyche's way of trying to keep you safe.

My witch wound manifests in multiple ways, such as not telling people I am a witch due to a fear of being misunderstood, for one. I still look over my shoulder before hugging a tree. I also censor myself from talking about goddesses, spirit guides, omens and other such witchy things around strangers I’ve yet to vet. This might be common sense or paranoia. At best, people will believe I am weird and delusional, which I’m okay with. At worst, they will think that I am colluding with satanic forces and should be kept away from their children. True story, a Young Life bible instructor once told my high school students not to trust me because I am not Christian. Perhaps I will not be burned, but I might be ostracized or even lose my job.

Subscribe now

WITCHES IN MEDIA

Witches have been portrayed throughout world literature, particularly in fairy tales, as the evil villain. Witches eat children and poison princesses. Witches were the worst thing we could conjure to scare our children and keep them safe. This was based on the times in which fairy tales dominated. During the Renaissance or Elizabethan Era, on the tail of the Burning Times, people feared sorcery and curses with all manner of suspicion and because they didn’t know any better, they associated these things with witches.

This misconception continues today. When I looked up the meaning of the word witch in the modern dictionary it said: “a woman thought to have magic powers, especially evil ones, popularly depicted as wearing a black cloak and pointed hat and flying on a broomstick.”

Even in today’s media, most interpretations of witches are incorrect. Witches do not command an army of flying monkeys. Witches are not psycho killers, and they do not worship the devil, nor do they need to look like sexy goth chicks or old hags. Every time a new movie or television show comes out about witches, I am sorely disappointed to discover that once again, they missed the mark. With a few exceptions, the witch character is usually evil and dark. The old medieval stereotypes continue to play out in modern narratives.

MODERN WITCHCRAFT

Being a witch to me means that my spirituality is nature-based. Witches are animists with a deep respect for the natural world—plants, animals, rocks and the elements. Witches believe that the divine is in everything, here on Earth and within us, a part of all creation, not a punishing, demanding man on a throne in the sky looking down on us.

In fact, witches honor the divine feminine and the Goddess. Most major religions are patriarchal, and it may feel normal to refer to a monotheistic God or the Lord as a man, our Father that art in heaven. Witches are devoted to the Goddess as the mother of all creation, as well as multiple goddesses and gods. Witchcraft is very much in the body and sensuality based. There is not a hierarchy of spirituality above the body as you find in many religions. Sexuality is not perceived as profane but as mystic.

Witches also practice magic, yet another idea easily misunderstood by most people. I don’t pull rabbits out of my hat. I don’t wave a wand and say abracadabra, although I do sometimes wield a wand to cast a circle. And abracadabra is appropriately magical as it comes from the Hebrew and Aramaic and translates to “I create as I speak,” which is magic at its essence. The author Starhawk and one of the cofounders of Reclaiming Witchcraft defines magic as "the art of changing consciousness at will.” Magic happens by setting intentions and shifting thought patterns using animistic and pagan rituals in alignment with the natural world. Or as Alix E. Harrow writes in her fun novel Once and Future Witches, “That’s all magic is, really: the space between what you have and what you need.”

Share

Witches are completely magical but also totally mundane. Witches walk amongst us, and you may not even realize it. We don’t fly or float or melt when you throw water at us, at least not in this realm. For witches, there is more to existence than this three-dimensional reality. “The traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness with which human existence is entwined,” writes David Abram in his book The Spell of the Sensuous. Dreams, trance, myths and symbols divinely inspired hold just as much if not more value as the reality of matter that we uniformly agree upon existing.

Witchcraft suits me and my values and life philosophy just as others feel more suited to Christianity or Buddhism. Witchcraft does not clash with any other spiritual practices; I can still fast for Yom Kippur and chant mantras on my malas. However, witchcraft is still not as socially acceptable as other religions. It’s still equated with dark arts or Satanism in many places (which, by the way, The Satanic Temple is pretty cool, look it up if you don’t know.) Witches are still portrayed as evil in films and books.

These days, it’s important to destroy taboos, dismantle our programming and reconsider our reality. That’s the only way we can move forward with love and abundance to outweigh the fear and scarcity models that proliferate our media. It’s important now more than ever to take back the word witch as a term of empowerment not degradation. We need our witch kin to help our planet heal and embrace a new path toward liberation for all. So mote it be.

Subscribe now

Read Part One here.

Read Part Two here.

Even weeks after my elder dog Codee’s passing, my body remained achy and sorrowful, sensitive and tight. If I was honest, I wasn’t ready to lay her to rest completely. I wanted her to be at peace, but my heart still held onto her.

Going outside in the morning to journal, I still felt her presence there with me, a welcoming breeze. Purple asters sprouted in my yard for the first time. A family of quail waddled past. I was pleasantly surprised by a tabby cat peeking around the corner at me. I wanted her to come over for a visit. The loneliness persisted. A part of me couldn’t be comforted by human love or wild nature but required the comfort of subtle communication, simple loving and the ever-present knowing that only a pet can provide.

Grief continuously visited me in waves of body pain. This was the rollercoaster of grief. My shoulders, neck or stomach would send up an alarm and I would do my best to listen, let the tears go, let myself indulge in messy sorrow. I was learning to be in the deep emotion and not let it settle and calcify in the pit of my stomach. I kept remembering again and again that I lost my best friend.

Maybe it sounds dramatic to some to call a dog a best friend. Your dog can’t discuss your problems with you and give you advice, but your dog is an excellent listener and is always available for a hug. She can’t go to the spa with you or out to dinner, but she’s always eager to climb a mountain with you, to trapse through the woods and across rivers. When Codee was younger, she always stopped and turned around on walks to make sure I was still following close behind. She always watched out for me, every day for years by my side. In some ways, a dog is a better friend than a human.

I met a woman who said that it took her two and a half years to mourn her cat. I thanked her for giving me permission to continue to mourn for as long as I needed. In Caravan of No Despair, Mirabai Starr writes, "Everyone grieves differently, and science collapses in the face of the mysteries of the heart. There is no map for the landscape of loss, no established itinerary, no cosmic checklist, where each item ticked off gets you closer to success. You cannot succeed in mourning your loved ones. You cannot fail."

I still wasn’t ready to let Codee go. I was still trying to hold onto her love, to have her love near to me. I went on a walk. I saw Codee in front of me. Codee behind me. I kept crying, leaking onto the earth. My dreams remained haunted with pain, hurt and death. My therapist wisely suggested that if I couldn’t let her go completely then before I go to bed at night, I could imagine giving Codee permission to run free and return to me in the morning.

Share

When I imagined her, she was always in her younger body, the one that sprinted and leapt over rocks and could go farther and longer than me. The agile body that loved to shove her whole head in the snow and come up for air covered with snowflakes before rolling around in the snow pile, wiggling her spine over the ice. The body that loved to snuggle her nose into my neck. The body with sharp ears that could still hear the gentlest click of my tongue and quickly return to my side.

Then one day, unexpectedly, I did it. I let her go. I was amidst the most ordinary task, hanging broom hooks. I was standing in the mud room with Eric. I was holding up a hook array for brooms, which I had purchased weeks before but didn’t get around to hanging. Eric had a free moment to help. The day after Codee died, the mesh fell off the top corner of the screen door frame and peeled back each day collapsing more. As I stood there looking at the falling screen, my stomach churned. The sickness of grief took hold again. A wave of nausea swept over me. I felt myself hanging onto Codee. She was always just out of sight. Her spirit hanging close. I was tired. I had been holding on for my life, not hers.

Out of nowhere, so unexpectedly that I surprised myself, I said internally, intuitively, “Okay, you can go now.” A gentle breeze swirled around outside the door. “Yes,” I said, “It’s okay, you can go now.”

The wind picked up and spun, growing in intensity. Eric lifted his head at the sound as he turned the last screw. “Uh oh,” he said, “That was a big one.” He hoped nothing in our building project would get displaced by the giant gust.

But I knew it was Codee, set free from my tether, my deep desire to keep her with me. The wind is a courier for spirits and spirt communication and she was eager to run off. I don’t blame her. Finally free from her old painful bones, she wanted to fly.

Eric looked at the screen door. “I guess I should fix that too,” he said. I nodded. Her spirit would no longer be scratching at the door to be let out.

After hanging the broom and mop on the new hooks, I found a can of gold spray paint on the floor. I took the large smooth rock that I had chosen for Codee’s gravestone outside and began to coat it in metallic gold coats. I was overcome with a sense of aloneness then, different that the loneliness I had previously felt. Now I felt instead like Codee was missing from my side, like Codee was no longer at my side. Maybe that sounds like the same thing, but it isn’t. Loneliness felt like she was just beyond reach. Aloneness felt like she was nowhere within reach.

Waiting for the paint to dry, I walked along the south trail, resolutely alone. I would have to make my own way now. No one would lead me back when I lost sight of the trail as I often did. No one would tread the way, searching for snakes, sniffing for coyotes. No one would bark to let me know if a predator was nearby. I would have to be more alert now. I walked up and down the trail overgrown with rabbit brush, retracing my steps, embedding my path deeper. I have to make my own way now.

P.S. I hope that in some way, sharing my grief was helpful to you. Though this essay is complete, my grief is not. I still cry every day. I want to thank the many of you that have reached out to me with kind condolences. I really appreciate your love and support. Thank you for caring. Let’s continue to care for each other.

When our 16-year-old dog Codee April died, I initially told no one. Part of me was keeping it close and the other part of me didn’t think anyone would understand. Instead, I did what you do when your dog dies, I went back to work. Unfortunately, this was a big mistake.

The next day, I taught a couple yoga classes at the spa in the morning. I was late. I showed up exhausted and distracted. I felt nauseous, my stomach tight and riling. But yoga is healing for me and so I was able to breathe through. I was also grateful that no one signed up for a third class. After, I stayed to soak in the mineral springs because my instinct was to be with water. In the pools, my grief floated and spread through my blood, my veins, rivulets to my heart, the mother ocean of my body. My saltwater tears joined the healing waters of the mineral springs, streaming to the watershed to join the ocean from whence they came, journeying into the larger pool of existence.

Grief feels like spilling. Lao Tzu says, "Our bodies are water walking on the earth" because we are primarily composed of water. We are walking vessels of water, but we are broken and leaking, dripping and spilling in each footstep upon the Earth and each step is infused with all the grief we’ve ever experienced, and our ancestors have experienced, and the Earth has experienced.

I wasn’t soaking long before the spa attendees came around with their signs. Lightning close, please leave the pools. I didn’t mind. I was done. As I walked through the drizzle and drove home through the storm, it occurred to me that the Sky must be grieving too. Windshield wipers swished back and forth, keeping time with my tears. I let them fall and pool in my lap. I imagined carrying them around, sprinkling them on sunflowers and apple trees. I wanted to match the Sky’s thunderous grief. No tear unshed, no tear wasted. Only a storm of such magnitude, thundering and crashing, would be enough to grieve Codee. Let it out, Mother. Let it out.

Because of course, this grief isn’t just about my dog.

Each time we grieve anew, we are grieving for every loss that came before. Grief is an intense longing. It is a longing for something you once had that you no longer have and miss dearly, wishing you could have it again or wishing it was like it used to be. Something we once held precious has been torn from our bodies and it leaves a void, like a place carved out of our ribs where if we pressed gently, we could feel the indentation of missing still present.

Each new loss conjures an accumulation of grief that we have held in our bodies, all the missing pieces once dormant reanimate and vibrate with pain again. In Anne Lamott's book, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith, she writes, “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up.”

When I returned home from work, I had that terrible moment when I remembered that Codee wasn’t there like she had been every day for the last fourteen and a half years to greet me when I pulled into the driveway or opened the front door. Even in the last couple of years when she could barely jump, she still made a motion like a puppy leaping in front of the car with excitement to see me. I had to slam on my brakes because I no longer trusted her agility to sweep her out of harm’s way. Even when she couldn’t hear anymore and I had already been home for a few minutes before she finally noticed, she perked up her ears and stared at me wide-eyed and I went to her so she wouldn’t have to make the effort to stand. For the first time, there was no Codee there to greet me and it hit so hard. I missed her so much. I began to cry again and an unusual northern wind that hadn’t been there before passed over me. I felt her presence. I felt her telling me she was still there with me; she was still greeting me.

I was very lonely without her, and the weight of grief was crippling. I wanted to do nothing. I just wanted to sleep and wait for time to pass, but I had to go back to work again the next day.

This time, I was putting on my tour guide hat, a summer job I picked up mostly for fun and experience. I only had two women on my tour that day, and they were very kind. I was doing my best to keep it together, but I was leaking around my seams. We had a new tour van that day that I had never driven. I rode over a traffic cone, and it got stuck in the wheel well, an embarrassing way to start the tour. Otherwise, I thought everything had gone okay until my boss emailed me a week later to tell me that she received several complaints about how rude and erratic I was acting (not from the guests, but from other people I work with). I was shocked. I literally had no idea. I thought I had been relatively calm.

On the phone, I warned her I was emotional due to life circumstances, but she still rebuked me for being tearful, unprofessional, and raising my voice. It was terrible. Awful. I finally came out and told her. “My dog died.” She was the first person I told, and it burst out of me like word vomit. She immediately paused and said, “I am so sorry. That is the worst thing to happen to someone. I am truly sorry for your loss.” I took a deep breath and apologized for my behavior.

I immediately made an appointment with my chiropractor for Network Spinal Analysis. She helped me to see that I was trying so hard to keep everything under control that I wasn’t allowing myself to fully grieve. My emotions were unconsciously coming out in inappropriate ways. I needed to let myself be messy, to fall apart, to be real, to be a basket case. I needed to lean into the Elizabeth Gilbert quote, “Embrace the glorious mess that you are.” I asked my body to go with it, not resist it, to move into it more than ever, be in it, dance into it, feel it, don’t hold back, don’t guard myself in order to be perceived as something that makes others more comfortable, the mask of normalcy, of rational, of together and focused. Masks are exhausting.

I realized that I needed to start telling people what I was going through.

Share

In her book, Grief is Love, Marisa Renee Lee writes, “Your grief is yours alone, but you don't have to manage every aspect of grief alone. You cannot do that. Give a voice to what you're feeling. Find the people who value you, and even if it makes you feel weird or uncomfortable, tell them some portion of your truth… Grief is nothing to be ashamed of. Grief is love.” At an ancestral trauma retreat in August, I had discovered that shame is something I inherited. The inclination to keep my difficult emotions to myself as a means of protection, to withstand vulnerability and to shelter others from my pain, has been passed down to me from generation to generation. The shame of vulnerability manifests in dishonesty, isolation and in some ways, withheld love. Because expressions of grief and vulnerability are also expressions of love. "We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known,” social researcher Dr. Brené Brown writes in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection.

I went home and posted on Facebook  to my friends, family and community that Codee had passed away two weeks ago. I texted my parents and let them know. I started telling everyone I knew. When someone asked me how I was doing, I told them my dog died, even though it made me tear up in public. The most beautiful and surprising outcome was to discover that everyone understood. Everyone knew how horrible this experience was for me. Almost, everyone had lost a pet at some point and no one thought it was silly that I was grieving so hard for a dog. There was nothing to feel weird about, uncomfortable or ashamed of.

In The Smell of Rain on Dust, Martin Prechtel says, “Grief expressed out loud, whether in or out of character, unchoreographed and honest, for someone we have lost, or a country or home we have lost, is in itself the greatest praise we could ever give them. Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

Grief is often ignored in our society. Perhaps because it makes people uncomfortable, reminding them of their own grief, reopening their own wounds. Because of this people in grief often feel abnormal and alone. The catch is that if we spoke about grief more openly, then others could do the same. Allowing ourselves to be more present and accepting grief means that we could praise what is lost as much as we praise what remains.

I had allowed myself to open my heart and share what I was going through even though it felt scary, but there was one more thing I still needed to do. I needed to let Codee go.

Read Part Three here.

JOIN US TONIGHT September 30th 6-7:30pm Mountain Time FOR FREE FOR OUR MONTHLY NEW MOON RITUAL. Click on photo below to register for Zoom link.

.

Persephone is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. You may recall the Greek myth from 6^th grade Social Studies class. One day while the innocent maiden is out picking narcissus in an ethereal field of wildflowers with her besties, Hades, god of the Underworld, spots her luscious physique and falls instantly and madly in love. So entranced is he that he skyrockets out of hell on a chariot of black stallions to kidnap her and take her back to his kingdom slyly leaving no trace of his crime. Very romantic.

When Persephone doesn’t return before dark for dinner, Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, freaks out, as any mother would. She searches endlessly, calling out for her only child, probably having a panic attack. She begs her baby daddy, Zeus, for assistance and he is absolutely no help at all, preferring to cover Hades’ ass than help a goddess. That’s when Hekate, goddess of the witches and wilderness, steps in to help a sister out and they figure out what had happened. Demeter is pissed off. She doesn’t want her daughter hanging out with “those kinds of people,” AKA dead, and certainly doesn’t want her to marry a creep like Hades. She wants revenge.

Share

Since Zeus is useless, she does exactly what is in her power to do and takes an indefinite leave of absence from her duties. Basically, all the fields and plants die off, animals starve to death and famine spreads across the world. Now Zeus is forced to do something. He agrees to return Persephone to her mother, but if and only if, they can prove that she does not want to stay in the Underworld. This is where it gets tricky because Persephone partakes in the seeds of the juicy pomegranate, which casts a spell on all those who eat it and causes them to enjoy the Underworld, even miss it when they’re away. Hence, Persephone now wants to stay in the Underworld, by choice. Zeus’s compromise is that Persephone will spend half the year with her husband, Hades, and reign supreme as Queen of the Underworld, and half the year with her mom, frolicking in the sunshine and flowers above ground.

Seasons of Loss and Return

All of this is to explain why for half the year we have spring and summer, filled with anticipation and the joy of Persephone’s return to Demeter, and the other half of the year we have autumn and winter, filled with pain and loneliness while Persephone is not with Demeter.

Share

This tale certainly speaks to a mother’s great love for her daughter, an infinite and boundless love. It also speaks to the love of a man for his wife, passionate and relentless. But what does it say about the woman in between these two? She is surely the protagonist of this story, and yet she has no agency. Everything is done to her, and she is simply a victim of circumstance. Or so “they” want you to believe.

“In mythology, naivete and the fall into the abyss are the initiatory stages of individuation; they are the signs that a person has set off on the tortuous path of becoming herself.”

 – Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The Wisdom of Persephone

Persephone gets a bad rap. She isn’t some poor idiot who can’t think for herself or make her own decisions; she is smart AF. First of all, I think she is totally hot for the tall, enchanting Hades; he is a powerful king who worships her after all. I’m also fairly certain that she eats the pomegranate on purpose; she wants to see the Underworld with new eyes, to understand the realm of spirits and the afterlife. And who wouldn’t want to be a queen and have sovereignty of their own domain?

Oftentimes, this myth is equated with this time of year, Autumn, because this is when we turn toward the dark. We are leaving the sunny active days of summer behind and transitioning into a time of more stillness and solitude. Persephone understands transition more than anyone. She lives between two worlds, always crossing two realms of being, the light and fullness of above and the dark and mystery of below. Just as during this time of year, we are transitioning between the light and darkness. Persephone can be a model for us on how to do it gracefully.

Subscribe now

Death Energy and Renewal

Autumn holds a lot of death energy. Everything is dying back, and we are leaning into the fallow time of winter when there are no bees or fruits or flowers to gaze upon. People are uncomfortable with death because we associate it with grief and fear. And while this is true, death is a necessary part of the cycle of life. Things die, so they can decay in order to create new life. This is seen in the forests, as well as the psyche. We must let go of the old, to make room for the new. And as impossible as it is to release our loved ones into the mysteries of the afterlife, our planet couldn’t sustain immortality, and we would never change or evolve as humans if we thought we had forever to get our act together.

Becoming the Queen

Though much of Persephone’s tale ends with the outcome of her future decided for her by her parents, Persephone lives on as a great queen. She brings with her the knowledge of both worlds, above and below, life and death, and everything in between. She’s seen it all and uses this to seed compassion and diplomacy in her dominion.

Everyone struggles with change. We want everything to stay happy and easy and perfect, so that we never have to deal with difficulty or discomfort. But, that is the naivety of the maiden, not the wisdom of a queen. As Persephone demonstrates, change is as necessary as death for us to learn and grow. That is the only way we will achieve independence and self-knowledge. True happiness and ease do not come with everything staying perfect and the same, but instead with accepting life as it is—tumultuous, enigmatic, irrational and multiplicitous.

Subscribe now

The Descent and Return

I imagine Persephone as she journeys into the underworld each year in the shadow of the autumn equinox. She takes her time. She is in no rush. She says her tearful farewells before calling upon the land to open. On the edge of the canyon, she looks down into the depths of remembering—the past, the ancestors, the spirits and the unseen. She is preparing for the descent. Deep breaths of fresh air and nurturing sunshine on her skin. One last look at the clouds. And then she steps over the edge. As she falls, her flower crown slips away, her white gossamer garb loosens from her form and for a moment, she is completely naked and vulnerable and falling through the dark. Until she hears the call of her love and feels the shaking of death in her bones. She arrives in her kingdom dressed in the powerful stature of an empress, undeniably herself again. Her eyes adjust to the dark. Her husband, the king, kisses her pomegranate lips and she smiles coyly filled with secrets from above that she knows she will savor and dole out to him in tiny teasing bites.

Share

Lessons from Persephone

·       Death is necessary

·       Change is necessary

·       Trust the mystery

·       Eat the pomegranate: acceptance eases life’s inevitable transitions

·       You must go through the dark to get to the light

·       Willingness to face the darkness, makes you a more authentic badass

·       Find your balance: sometimes you want to be out in the sun with friends and sometimes it’s nice to hunker down in the dark in isolation

Read more

Read more

Animism and Nature Connection in Daily Life

We are born animists, all of us. As children, we embody an innate knowing that our universe is alive. We inherently create relationships with the nature beings and inanimate objects around us. This is our default mode.

I was born animist. I was blabbing with the Earth while shaping mud pies and climbing boulders. As a child I always talked to trees, pets and bugs. I also deeply believed that my stuffed animals would come alive at night and protect me from my nightmares. I lined them up around my bed in a particular order to ensure they were prepared to ward off any monsters.

Even the most introverted and “indoorsy” children befriend dolls, toys, stuffies, houseplants, and invisible friends. Children that venture afar have multiple companions with the crooked trees and boulders with faces. We all talked to bugs, fairies and pets like old friends. On the chance a child encounters a deer or a bunny, they welcome them as if they are expected.

Reviving Childhood Wonder: Returning to Animist Roots

As a child, I loved to lounge in the sunroom, named for all the windows, south facing and encircling around the wooden red door. Trees shaded the windows in the summer and kept the bright room cool. On days when no one was around, quiet afternoons with my siblings out for the day and my parents working in the yard, when the air was completely still, I spoke with house flies. I loved to create relationships with flies. Only the patient and lazy focus of a child can communicate with the harried nature of a fly. Only a child could hold herself close enough to listen beyond the frenetic buzzing.

I would wait as the fly circled my head. I never felt the need to swat at it. I waited patiently until it inevitably landed on a shoulder, a hand or an arm, optimal landing spots for long chats. I engaged that day’s fly in conversation. Small talk, friend to friend, “How are you today?” I had no agenda in mind the way we adults always have an agenda. The fly was my friend in that moment, my nearest acquaintance, my fellow of the sunroom realm. Our meetings were intimate. I named my fly something silly like Fred or Frances of Fuzzy the Fly. I felt the gentle ticklish touch of her rubbing legs against my skin. I pondered her desire to leap from me again and again before returning to continue our chat. These were not deep conversations between child and fly, they were appropriately simple, kind and encouraging chit chat with my companion for a few moments while I whiled away the afternoon, doing nothing and caring for the nothing I did. Just being. I never questioned if the fly felt the same way about me or understood what I was saying. There was no question about our relationship; we were in synch, in tune. I knew this fully in my little bones and cared nothing for a world that disagreed.

I miss that feeling, that talking to the housefly feeling. These days, I swipe them away instantly with a fervor; they are a nuisance, a pest, disgusting flies, poop-eating flies. These days, I’ve lost my sense of what it means to be still enough to befriend a fly. When did it disappear? Where did it go? Will I ever find it again. as an old woman perhaps, on my deathbed, welcoming flies in my final days to take what they need from my decaying flesh?

Share

Do you recall a time when you talked to flies or beetles or flowers or clouds? You might not recall it any longer, or maybe you do. If you are lucky, you still remember the way you felt the world animated. You were always in relationship, not just to humans, but to everything you chose to be in relationship with. Your world was large and abundant with life.

Animism Versus Scientific Fact

However, unless you were fortunate enough to grow up with animist parents who homeschooled you, this was eventually trained out of us. Once we were institutionalized into schools, we were told that our world is not only inanimate, but that humans are the center of the world. Perhaps even before you were sent to school, the adults around you made it clear that you were overly imaginative and tried to rid you of your fantasy world lest you embarrass them or yourself amongst peers. Do you remember the moment you stopped greeting butterflies?

It is not the fault of the adults, of course, for they were once animist children too who were also forced to conform to a world lacking imagination. Our modern world with its Newtonian way of validating our existence, is a world based on objective truth. Scientific fact is considered the one true reality and reigns above experience. It does not matter if you saw a tree spirit or heard the voice of a rock unless you can prove it. If you are the only one who hears it, then it only exists in your mind and is not “real.” But, animism requires subjective truth, a truth based on personal perspective, regardless of whether it can be scientifically proven to be right or wrong.

Intersubjectivity: Living Relationships with the More-Than-Human World

Animism is about intersubjectivity; reality is the lived experience shared between subjects. Every being on Earth has its own truth and all beings and truths are deserving of respect. This means that the human and spiritual world, the world beyond dualism, beyond monotheism, are in mutual and helpful relationships. The language of the spirit. Animas means soul, consciousness and breath, physical and spiritual. Everything is part of the animism network—humans, nature, spirits and the divine.

There is more to the world than the five sense of taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. There is the heart sense and intuition and dream worlds and art and music and ritual and so much more than a flat three-dimensional existence. It is time we remember our true inheritance.

Subscribe now

Childhood Dreams

The orange mesh hammock between two shade trees
Dim in the shadows strong dark bark, moist and verdant, 
birds singing. I am six.                          Maybe. 
I am swinging, one leg over the side. A lazy day
only a child can have, the sway of late summer carefree. 

I am not hiding, per se, but I am hidden. The clouds
Conceal me. The branches obscure me. The greenery
Masks me. The birds quiet my breathing. I can stay here
As long as I please. Only my dog cares to visit. 
She is mangy and hot. She likes the bed of the black
Earth on her belly and so I sing her a song, one that comes
To me from far away, a time of fairies. Fireflies flit.

Dragonflies stop to perch on my bare toes. The evening
Has arrived in whispers growing louder. Soon I will be called to dinner
If they remember me at all. They will summon me out of hiding.
I will crawl like ladybug examining each blade of grass,
Taking my time, a long haul across the driveway through
The tunnel of lilac bushes along the brick patio with grasses
Growing between its blocks, to the paved pathway, up

The wooden stairs. My dog will have departed by then, 
Sought the cool cavern of her cave beneath the porch 
With no desire either to go indoors. My cat mews 
At the threshold, beckoning me a little longer into night
Before I open the creaking screen door awakened 
From a dream by the loud din of others.

You may also enjoy:

Read more

The first time I spontaneously got naked in Nature, I was nineteen years old. My best friends and I were taking a road trip across the country between my freshman and sophomore years of college. We were choosing places to visit based on where we had places to crash.

This is 1994. There is no Internet or cell phones or GPS. I ordered a trip route off of Triple A, a desk sized wire-bound booklet of maps with your requested journey highlighted for you across multiple pages, depending how long the trip. Our journey started in New York and took us to West Virginia, Memphis, Oklahoma, and rapidly across the Texas panhandle where cops notoriously pulled people over for weed, which was all illegal back then. We went to New Mexico because our close friend was going to the now defunct College of Santa Fe on Saint Michael’s. From there we headed west toward California where we had a friend in La Jolla.

Searching for Something Sacred in the Desert

Natural Born Killers was a popular movie at the time and romanticized the idea of taking peyote in the desert with shamans. This is before Ayahuasca journeys were a popular tourist adventure. I was reading Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui Way as we traversed Arizona.

Share

We didn’t have peyote, but we had plenty of cannabis and psychedelic mushrooms which we micro-dosed (before that was a word) at the Petrified Forest National Park. Climbing over the ropes intended to keep tourists out we took to the desert like tarantulas roaming in search of something we could not describe, shoving our pockets with petrified wood. Later, we petrified ourselves when we saw warnings of bubonic plague, naively believing we surely contracted it on our sojourns.

But it was the Grand Canyon that truly blew my mind.

My Grand Canyon Moment

Driving around the bend, the view opened to the gaping wide-open heart of Mama Earth calling out to me as if from beyond time and space, reaching its multi-layered melodious colored canyon walls into my deepest crevaces. I began to cry. We hadn’t even gotten out of the car yet.

My first sight of the goddess’s own goblet, a glorious canyon larger than my little New York suburbanite brain ever could have conceived of had me bleeding tears of clay. I jumped from the car to the ledge and the immensity of it all overwhelmed me. My friends pulled out their cameras (yes, real cameras with film) and I pulled off my clothes.

My white tee shirt flew off my shoulders exposing my unbound breasts to whomever might have been in view. I didn’t know or care. On the south rim, tourists are common but perhaps less then than now and perhaps more dispersed. We did not have social media and the idea of “if you don’t post it, it didn’t happen” did not exist then. We did not do things in order to be “seen” or get external validation via likes and clicks from strangers. These concepts didn’t exist yet and so our frame of mind was different. I might argue freer. Freed up from the slavery of the constant pursuit for validated visibility, proof of life.

Subscribe now

The Wild Feminine

I was never the “naked type,” so I’m not sure what came over me to be so publicly displayed. No, wait, I do know. The Grand Canyon came over me. I felt like baring my entire being and succumbing to her raging wild spirit. My friends stopped me short of removing my bell bottoms. I raised my arms to the sky as if to say, take me now, I want in.

We laughed about it, of course, for years. It was a joke. Johanna took her clothes off at the Grand Canyon. I didn’t think too much of it then.

But now I know. Now I know more fully than I ever have what caused me to expose myself in that way. Nature. The wild feminine spirit. I had been so separated from that for so long, living a life of city clubs and academia and shopping malls and fast food. Something about the deep canyon wider than the eye can see that lit a deep fire in my heart.

Share

Born for the Desert

Today, I live at the edge of another deep canyon in the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument Park, not as monumental as the Grand Canyon but a monument none the less. Living here is a full circle for me from that first time I visited the southwest and we took a side trip to Taos to walk across the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, carving our names in the rail. I don’t know why I was born in New York when I was born for the desert. Red rock canyons hearken my soul back to a time primordial when I slept beside the fire deep within the fertile riverbeds fortified by lava rock walls. I never get tired of the rock formations of the southwest.

My Return to the Grand Canyon

I have been back twice since then. Again, to the south rim and once to the north rim and every time I am blown away by the beauty.

Last time we were there in 2018, I beckoned my husband and daughter out in a rainstorm to the rim of the canyon where the sky lit like fire. They fussed a bit at crazy mom for making them stand in the cold wet wind. But then, as if the desert goddess herself wished to gift me for my dutiful worship, a rainbow appeared over the canyon in deep violent hues and I cried, again, at her magnificence.

Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? Share your memories! I’d love to hear from others who are equally obsessed with her.

Leave a comment

I am a third-generation American. I often wonder if there is something about the immigrant mindset that makes it difficult to feel like you truly belong anywhere. When your ancestral roots are left far behind on another continent, you are always a visitor wherever you land. This is true for my Jewish ancestors especially, having been in diaspora for 2,000 years.

The word diaspora was created in the late 17th century in reference to the Jewish people. From the Greek word diaspeirein, meaning ‘disperse’, and dia ‘across’ + speirein ‘scatter’. We are in a state of diaspora. We are dispersed, scattered across the world. In this way there is always a sense that you do not belong, and this was certainly true for my Jewish ancestors who were perpetually persecuted, disenfranchised, raped, pillaged, displaced and ultimately victims of genocide (another word created for Jewish people). Moving around, though not ideal and often forced, was a means of safety.

This ancestral trauma may have echoed in my bones as I traveled from place to place always looking for home. But I was more privileged than my ancestors. I did not need to move around for safety. Instead, I moved due to restlessness, always searching, seeking, a place where I felt like I belonged.

I never thought I’d find one until I found Taos.

I have lived in Taos for almost 20 years. Eric and I got married here, pregnant here and raised our daughter here. We have lived in six houses in Taos County, owned two of them, but we have stayed in the proximity of this community this whole time. Rationally, our decision stemmed from wanting our daughter to have one place that she belonged to, that she could call home. We wanted a “hometown” for her where she could always return and find her people. Unlike where Eric and I grew up in the suburbs of big cities, we wanted her to have a small-town life where people had known her since she was a baby and she had a kinship with them. We might be a little family, but we have a large community.

I always thought that was the reason we stayed. But now I know it’s more than that.

One day while standing on the edge of the Rio Grande Gorge on one of my walks, I had the sense that I was always meant to arrive in this place, that my whole life led up to this moment on the precipice of a 650-foot drop to a river. I knew then that I did not belong to this town or this community or this country, I belonged to this land. And not just this little corner of land, but all the land. The whole Earth was my home, welcoming me always into her embrace.

In my youth, finding a home meant that everything would be perfectly aligned as if there would be a welcome sign with my name on it. Now, I understand that no place is perfect. There will always be things about Taos that I don’t like, but it is where I chose to stay and put my roots down, at least for now. Everywhere I go, I am home. I am a citizen of the world. An earthling on her starship. An integral being in a giant web of life.

I sit on the precipice, a boulder outcrop on the trail up to the ridge. Splayed out before me is the wide view of a town I’ve lived in for the last twenty years, raising my kid, participating in various jobs and businesses, friend groups and community groups. From above, it is merely a valley speckled with homes, stores, and offices, glittering in the late day sunshine. Somehow this is a conglomeration of my adult life. And it is gorgeous. Mountains wrinkle and roll in green ribs interspersed with river drainages emptying into the encircled watershed. Beyond all of this, past the sage-strewn mesa and the great gash of gorge in the prehistoric geological rift is the cerro that signifies my home, a three-peaked hill in the desert.

On the precipice, I am well aware that my life is ready to shift dramatically. Perimenopause continues full speed ahead with increased progesterone intake in steady intervals. My hair is shimmering in grey streaks behind my ears, my back aches daily, tightening and squeezing even as I increase yoga, weightlifting and chiropractic. I used hiking poles to climb this hill, something I never would have done a few years ago because it made me feel old and now, I love them for multiple reasons.

I still feel young. But I cannot help but see that there is an end in sight and more pertinently a deterioration, a slowing down, a change. I will not be able to shovel foundations, teach three yoga classes in a row, or hike up mountains forever. I am not implying that all of this will happen soon (although you never know), only that the inevitability of it is now apparent in a way it never was in my youth. Time is going faster, and it feels like it is running out. This unexpected change in point of view has led me to put more money into retirement funds than into travel, and to consider my possibilites in bite-sized pieces instead of long-term commitments. The sense that it is too late frays at the fringe of my future.

I find myself at midlife craving more. More simplicity, more streamlined, more purpose, more fulfillment, more accomplishment, but also less. Less ambition, less success, less fame and fortune.

Nature is a mirror. When I look out at this scenic view that I have witnessed perhaps hundreds of times in twenty years, it still brings me joy. I still feel blessed to be here, to be embraced by these mountains. I need no one to validate what home means to me as my younger self would have, constantly questioning where she belonged. Here I am, at home, at home in the world with my marriage, my house, my daughter, my body, my mountains, my rivers, my friends, my trees.

I have no idea what the future holds, only that there is one and it’s on the way down this hillside and it will be a new view, but just as beautiful as it was on the way up.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now