All things come to an end.

From the lives of ants to birds to whales to planets to stars to universes. From seasons to moon cycles to childhoods to relationships to business partnerships to civilizations.

And - at the same time:

Consciousness is eternal, and all endings are - if viewed from a wider perspective - simply a changing of form.

Into and out of embodiment, into and out of relationship, into and out of waking, into and out of seasons of growth.

If eternity is not to become stagnant, crystallized, boring, it must be this way: an ever-weaving, ever-shifting tapestry; a multi-dimensional song woven from rhythms at every scale from microseconds to millions of years.

And as I weave myself in - my own experience and perception - there is a sequence that unfolds within my awareness, my own internal storyline, as each cycle unfolds and completes. I wonder if this might be true for everyone.

Infinite

I. I arrived in these mountains in the time of the first flowers, the first leaves. Orchids, trilliums, bloodroots, may apples. New warblers arriving each day to join the chorus. Peeping frogs, warmer nights, germinating seeds, a thousand fragrances. In this time of awakening, winter feels almost theoretical. It is better to immerse, to feel each small moment expand to reveal more moments, to see - through the eyes of a child or a newly hatched egg - an infinite branching unfolding.

II. My father most recently arrived on Earth to a farm family in eastern South Dakota, on July 31, 1937. As is true of most children, his memories of experiences in spirit, of previous lives on Earth, were hidden and so he explored the creeks and valleys with new eyes. And - as is true of most children - any possibility of aging, of death, seemed so far away as to remain theoretical, a possibility beyond an infinity of life experiences.

III. Our lives wove us together as housemates, as friends, and a spark began to kindle. I asked, awkwardly, do you think we would make a good couple? And we kissed, and snuggled, and rode bikes holding hands, and made love inside a hollow redwood tree. As we entwined our bodies and the threads of our lives, there was no thought - at least in my mind - that there could or would ever be an end.

Indefinite

I. From Beltane until early July, life in these mountains is a continuous unfolding. Wave after wave of flowers. Fledglings taking wing for the first time. Basswood blossoms. Thunderstorms swelling creeks and waterfalls. Wild berries. Garden vegetables. An awareness begins to creep in that winter may one day arrive, that the flowing tide may one day begin to ebb, and yet each day brings new growth, new wonders. It can feel, in this time, as though summer might yet last forever.

II. Drawn by a love of spirit, of service, my father entered seminary school as a young man and became a Catholic priest, though he was never truly happy within the confines of biblical theology. Allowing his inner light to shine through, he became a songwriter, youth mentor, wilderness guide, and curious spiritual seeker exploring a more direct, more present connection with the Unseen Mystery. Each new chapter was a new beginning, even as the first signs of aging - of slowing down - appeared in his body.

III. We built a life together, decided to marry, and hosted a wondrous celebration of our love atop our sacred mountain. We chose each other, easily, each day. We bought a home, renovated it, turned the bare lawn into a veritable farm, and spent our summer weekends harvesting and preserving the bounty and wandering among alpine wildflowers. As the rains came and the nights turned cold, we warmed the wood-fired hot tub, crafted meads, snuggled in front of the stove, read stories to each other. And, at the same time, I began to realize when spending time alone that we were each shifting, gradually. That our partnership might not last forever, even as there was no end in sight.

Definite

I. There comes a time when the subtle shortening of days no longer escapes notice. When, one by one, the birds leave the morning chorus, set their young ones free, and begin to prepare for the long journey south. When the leaves of trilliums and orchids begin to senesce, last year’s fallen leaves dissolve, and the forest floor begins to feel empty. When the great flush of insects gives way to a great flush of spiders, harvesting the bounty in their own cycle. When the subtly cooler nights fill with the song of katydids and crickets. Summer is still in full swing, and yet we can no longer pretend that it will last forever. Change is afoot, the tide is turning. On this day, the 21st of August, you are here points to this place, in northern temperate climes.

II. My arrival marked one of the last new beginnings in my father’s life, and much of my childhood was instead a time of continuing. Planting the gardens each year, maintaining the homestead and trails, keeping a regular rhythm that felt like a place of safety to me, as a young one finding my way. His body was healthy enough through his later years to hike, to split firewood, to play daily basketball, and yet there were new pains, new wrinkles, signs of slowing. He was not in any way anticipating or looking toward death, and yet he also felt a growing clarity that he was moving in that direction. Releasing, reflecting, letting go.

III. I’m not sure when I first said, to a dear friend, I don’t think we will be together indefinitely. There are no clear boundaries or milestones when infinite becomes indefinite, when indefinite becomes definite, and so we can only look back and notice a gradual shift. If we are still in love, if we have interwoven our lives and homes and families, then it can be hard to accept this shift, even to admit it within ourselves. For me, this was a part of a much larger inner shift, a spiritual rebirthing of sorts, and I found myself no longer comfortable in familiar relational roles. In the language of sovereign relating, we were each in a place of asking the other to change who they are in order to feel fully met and seen and understood.

Finite

I. At some point in September the first cold front sweeps down from the northwest. Or - on the west coast - the first Pacific storm rolls in with an all-day cold rain. And all who are present and alive - plants, birds, insects, bears, even the least-attuned humans - know what this means. The warm days to follow are precious, numbered, yielding ultimately to frost, harvest, falling leaves, and the long nights of winter, when all is held in seed and bud and egg and slumber. The warblers and vireos of summer take their cue to fly south to the tropics, and all who will be staying gather food and fuel and prepare to snuggle in to burrows, dens, and cozy homes of all types.

II. For better or worse, the transition from definite to finite has become something of a rite of passage in modern medicine: the diagnosis. Whereas in earlier years the approaching end was usually shrouded in mystery until our last embodied days, those of us who choose to submit to MRIs and CAT scans and blood tests will - more often than not - eventually be presented with words like terminal and incurable and remaining life expectancy. So it was with my father, in October of 2014.

Even though we all know that our lives must end, time flows and feels differently once someday becomes someday soon. And I don’t think it is helpful that we are encouraged and in many ways expected to fight, to spend our last years in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals, in an escalating series of treatments that diminish the quality of our remaining days and only serve to delay what is inevitable. We fear death, individually and collectively, trusting and yet still not fully knowing what is on the other side.

III. Finite-ness is a trickier concept when the end is a matter of choice. Just as a terminal prognosis can create a deeper sense of presence and meaning in our days, so too can a decision to leave a partnership and co-created home restore a sense of depth, of preciousness, of desire to make things work, to hold each other a little bit tighter. And - here too - there is fear in play. Fear of being alone. Fear of hurting the one we love most. Fear of judgment from God or friends or family.

And so it is harder for me to choose one moment when our partnership became finite, there being oscillations back to definite and even indefinite in between. But beneath our struggles to accept separation there was a shifting of resonance. I discovered others - and one in particular - with whom I felt a mirroring, a parallel weaving of our threads, a deep sense of relaxation, of being met in the depths of my experience without having to explain, to translate. And I knew that - whether or not any of these new resonances were destined to become partnerships - I could not ultimately maintain partnership without that resonance.

Fin

I. Frost arrives silently, without fanfare, often on the heels of a brilliant fall day. One morning the world is a wonderland of sparkling crystals, and - inside of living cells - biochemistry is frozen in time. Expanding ice ruptures cell walls, and - as the day warms - tender plants wilt and die. Leaves stop producing chlorophyll, revealing their hidden, more-stable underlying pigments and setting branches ablaze with color before they flutter to the ground on autumn winds. And then - one day in November - the last leaves have fallen, the last fruits have been picked, the last migrating birds have departed, and the long winter’s rest begins.

II. There is something that hospice workers call active dying, and it is in many ways the counterpoint to the long and painful labors of birthing. Some deaths, like some births, are sudden and unexpected, but the more common way is a gradual shutting down of the body’s systems. Fewer, slower breaths. Weaker, erratic heartbeats. Mind slipping out of consciousness. We who fear death do not speak often of this liminal time, and we are not always present in our loved ones’ last moments, and perhaps this is OK. Perhaps it is easier for their souls to finally let go when we are not holding on.

Ten years or one hundred and twenty-three moons ago, my father entered his active dying process on this day, the 21st of August, 2016. On the 22nd I walked the railroad tracks west of town, not knowing what else to do aside from maintaining a bedside vigil, and on the 23rd he took his last breath at nine in the morning, with Jean and myself present as witness.

III. Twenty-one moons ago, on December 11th, 2024, my partnership of fourteen years came to an end. I cannot say it ended well, softly, gracefully. I can say that it was the hardest thing I have ever done to stay present with my best friend, one for whom I still felt a deep love, one whose body naturally entwined with mine, one with whom I had built a homestead and life together, one who was feeling betrayed by my shifting resonance and who was pleading me to stay. To stay present with her and at the same time hold a boundary: it is time, I feel, to let go.

After

I. Once the last leaf has fallen and the last persimmons and quince have been picked, there is a feast. This has been true in nearly all human cultures, and even though it has been stolen, commercialized, and commodified in ours, it survives as Thanksgiving. A celebration of life for the season of growth that has just ended. My father always ensured that we saved the largest potato, the largest squash, and a good helping of all of our garden veggies, and we made a tradition of making a meal entirely from what we had grown and collected. I have done my best to continue that tradition, and to offer gratitude each year, a closing ceremony before the season of rest and then the first stirrings of rebirth beginning on the winter solstice.

II. After my father’s body had become ashes, after the human bureaucracy had issued the requisite forms to say that yes, indeed, the being known as Edward Francis Stone was now deceased, we gathered. I sang his songs, his anthem of time and changes.

And we shared stories. The story of his life. Stories and poems he had written. Our experiences of him, our enduring love, the ways he had brought us together, led us into our own journeys, our own awakenings. The various ways that his soul had visited us, on his way out. And we shed tears, nourished our bodies, spread his ashes at his favorite overlook, where we had maintained a time capsule of writings from special occasions throughout the years.

III. There are many steps to disentangling shared lives. So many decisions to be made. Who will take the bed, the silverware, the cars? How will we sell our house and equitably divide the proceeds? We did all of this well and smoothly, I feel, and it was strange to observe that the bureaucracy seemed to expect that we would be angry, fighting, hiring lawyers. And once all of that was complete, we were also able to reconnect emotionally, to hold each other in love, to agree to stay in touch as we each wove new paths forward, with new human connections, in new places.

And still, there is something missing for me. Even though most partnerships come to an end, even though many people have released religious dogma around marriage and divorce, there remains a collective subtext that separation is somehow shameful, taboo, a failure. That it is best kept quiet or spoken about in hushed tones.

And I would like to propose changing that. I would like to suggest that the more harmonious world we seek will not be a world of perpetual till-death-do-us-part relationships but rather a world where we can acknowledge and even celebrate endings in their time. Where the same families that gathered for a wedding might gather again for a bittersweet celebration of relationship, where stories of times past are shared and there is perhaps a ceremony of unbinding. Where the former couple can set each other free, with love, surrounded by loving witnesses, while honoring all of the ways they have supported each other on their journeys, all of the ways they have entwined hearts and souls and bodies in their time together.

Rebirth

I. We know that spring will come again. The choice is whether we choose to stand outside the cycles, to observe, or whether to immerse. Whether, when the wild orchids emerge and open their sweet-scented wondrous forms in spring, we again feel the infinite potential of the new season, or whether we hold back, knowing that all will again fade to winter in time.

May I always choose to immerse, to feel the infinity of springtime, to release - entirely - the memory of winter, even as I know that the cycles will continue.

II. I have - thanks to my mother’s interdimensional capacities - had several very interesting conversations with my father since that day ten years past when he left his body. And so I know that he is working with a group of souls helping to guide humans on Earth into new forms of community. And I know also that he is looking forward to returning, to being embodied among the skinks and lilacs and basswood blossoms once more.

Most of us say that we would like to remember who we truly are, remember our past lives, remember our spirit selves. But with that remembering comes a choice. Will we still choose to be all here, to be all in, as we move through adolescence, as we make choices to weave our threads into the pattern on Earth, in bodies? Or will we hold back, give life less than our full attention, knowing that our time here is temporary, that we will return, in time, to spirit?

III. I am, I think, still in the winter phase of relationship. And I find myself in the place of holding the whole, writing this, and wondering if and when I will be ready to dive in again, to fall in love, to feel the excitement and infinite potential of new connection while still knowing, on some level, that this too shall pass.

But I don’t think there is a recipe for that. I have learned, over the past years, that life is more about allowing than trying. I know that I was all in for Appalachian springtime this year, and I trust that I will be all in when it is time for me to find love again, or for love to find me.

I will end with this beautiful simple song, that I have shared before, that was my anthem through a time of letting go of partnership. I wrote to its creator sharing my experience, and she shared that she wrote it in a time that she was letting go of grief she was carrying but that she has heard from so many people who have felt its resonance in times of letting go - of a child lost in a miscarriage, of a loved one who has died, of a relationship.

As much as we might want to cling to stability, to familiarity, the pattern will always weave us through endings into new beginnings.

Wherever you are at, in all of your cycles, all of your unfoldings, blessings on your journey.

~Markael

In recent months I have found myself exploring systems designed to facilitate human connection across boundaries of conflict, difference, isolation, old wounds. Nonviolent Communication. Authentic Relating. Conscious Intimacy Games.

I am, in many ways, resistant to all systems and institutions, all good ideas that have evolved into organizations with jargon and established practices and levels of certification. And yet, I am also curious to learn more, to discern where these practices are in resonance with my own deeper knowing and where they feel a bit dissonant or incomplete.

One year ago, I published Common Ground, an impassioned plea to see our shared humanity, our shared experience of embodied aliveness, across our societal and self-imposed divides.

This is, in many ways, a counterpoint to Common Ground. The yes, and.

In this divided world, most of us, most of the time would benefit from taking the lessons of Nonviolent Communication and Authentic Relating to heart, embodying openness and curiosity and a willingness to see the emotions and unmet needs that lie beneath our prickly personas and polarized perspectives. This is undoubtedly the case because - well - blame and prejudice and projecting our shadows and wishing people dead and actually firing bullets into other humans’ living bodies are somehow still part of our collective experience. It is also the case because far too many families and intentional communities and workplaces and groups of all types descend into cycles of escalating blame and conflict and misunderstanding until they dissolve or explode.

It is equally true, however, that some of us, some of the time would benefit from putting some emotional and physical distance between ourselves and those closest to us, and that the toolkits and embodied expressions of compassionate communication can get in the way, trap us in cycles of conflict and repair in which our ability to feel others’ pain, our desire to bear witness and offer comfort, restores a sense of closeness without assessing and addressing underlying differences.

A dear friend once told me that we can make relationship work with anyone, if we commit to open communication. And perhaps that is true. But just because we can doesn’t necessarily mean we should.

I think most of us can agree that the goal of living is not immortality or surviving as long as possible, but rather being present and fully alive in all of our moments.

Similarly, I would say that the goal of relationship, of human connection is not permanence, but rather sovereign, harmonious co-creation. Supporting and encouraging each other in our journeys of evolving and discovering who we truly are, at our deepest levels.

The framework of Authentic Relating includes three levels of conversation, three levels of working through conflict, moving from shallower to deeper:

1. Observational. This is what happened. This is what I perceived.

2. Personal. This is how I feel about it. This is the deeper need behind my feelings.

3. Relational. This is what I am noticing in what you are saying. This is what I am noticing in myself, as I am listening. This is what I am asking of you, to feel heard/seen/respected/acknowledged/etc.

What is simultaneously the gift and the trap of this framework is that, for most of us, as we shift into the relational level, our needs change. As we open ourselves to being in presence with this fellow being beside us, to feeling and understanding what they are feeling, our empathy is activated and we feel a need within ourselves to offer comfort, to offer compromise, to repair whatever rift has been created. And - often enough - this need becomes stronger than whatever original need created the conflict, and so we move into resolution.

The question then becomes: does the conflict come back?

Was it just a misunderstanding or a mistake or a reaction, or did we make a compromise at the relational level, the empathetic and compassionate level, that was internally out of alignment?

I’d like to propose one more level of conversation, if our relating is to be truly authentic - in service of our deepest selves - rather than simply attuned.

4. Sovereign. This is who I am, we can both agree. This is who you are, we can both agree. And this is what that means for our relationship, moving forward.

I will be the first one to say that sovereign relating is really, really hard to do well. Most of us, most of the time, choose between empathy and inner resonance in conflict conversations. In order to feel and express our own inner truth, we turn off our empathy. Or in service of empathy and desire for connection, we lose track of our inner truth.

Sovereign relating requires both parties to be able to hold both their innermost truth and their empathy for the other at the same time. It requires a relationship rooted in love and devotion - a true desire for the other to have what is best for them - rather than in fear and attachment.

In service of empathy and desire for connection, we lose track of our inner truth.

This is the trap of Authentic Relating, of Nonviolent Communication, that leads to repeating cycles of conflict and repair.

If we find ourselves in such a cycle, it’s worth asking:

Are our conflicts becoming more or less frequent over time?

Is anything really changing in our relationship, when we move through repair?

And if we find that conflicts are becoming more frequent, that the same or similar conflicts are repeating, then let us ask ourselves three more questions, in service of discerning whether this particular interpersonal interweaving is in resonance with our deeper self:

1. Is the other person asking me to change who I am in order to feel met, heard, seen, acknowledged? Am I asking the other person to change who they are? If, for example, I need my partner to share my fear when I am afraid, and feeling fear is not a part of their experience, then I am asking them to pretend or to shift at the core of their being. Or - vice versa - if I need my partner to trust in something greater, to buoy my own trust when it is flagging, and they naturally feel fear and doubt instead, then I am asking them to change who they are. There are many possible incompatibilities at this level, and we all evolve over time so that we naturally grow into and out of compatibility.

2. Are our threads in the pattern weaving in tandem, or are they diverging? Does staying in closeness, in relationship, require an inner compromise in terms of where we are each going? If we are business partners, do we have aligned goals and visions? If we have intertwined our lives, do our next steps align? Or do we find ourselves each drawn to different parts of the world, different ideas of what makes a home, a family, a community?

3. Do we feel mutual resonance? When we are not actively in conflict or in the process of empathetic resolution, do we relax into each other’s presence? Or is there a tension there, a sense that something is missing? Even if we were in resonance before, are we in resonance now, as the people we are each becoming, in this place and moment?

We owe it to each other to practice compassionate communication, to see our shared humanity and needs and emotions through our differences. But we also are not obligated to remain in relationships, in families, in partnerships that no longer support our own evolution, our own sovereign path. Yes, and.

If the answers to these questions tell us that change is due, that what is really needed is not to resolve conflict but to shift the structure of our relationship, then it is time for sovereign relating. Although we can also practice relating on this level when we are in harmony. We can practice holding both our own inner truth and our love for each other, our desire for connection, and build comfort in that when it is not difficult, when there are no endings in store, no big decisions to be made. We can ask each other, more often, not just how are you but who are you? What is in the center of your being, in this moment? What is your innermost becoming?

In order to feel and express our own inner truth, we turn off our empathy. Or in service of empathy and desire for connection, we lose track of our inner truth.

This is the dichotomy, the duality, that we can move beyond at the level of sovereign relating.

In order to feel and express our own inner truth, we turn off our empathy.

And this is the path that most of us choose, most of the time, when our need to align with our inner truth surpasses our need to remain in connection. We hurt those who we most love, so that they will let us go, so that we can let go of them. This is in some ways the path that I chose, nearly two years ago, when I ended my partnership of fourteen years.

Relating at any of the four levels takes two. We cannot relate on a sovereign level with someone who is unwilling or unable to meet us there, and sometimes distance must be created without consent, without understanding. Sometimes, perhaps, pain is unavoidable. But we can still do our best to hold our inner truth and our love for another at the same time. We can, if we are strong enough in ourselves, choose to create distance when we need it, without asking others to create that distance for us, through hurtful words or actions.

If I ever find myself teaching workshops on human relating, I think I will explore this level. To hold both self and other, authenticity and empathy, in balance. To acknowledge that while it is imperative to see each other as human, to hold curiosity and compassion for other’s inner lives, it is also not imperative to find resonance in every connection. To practice stepping apart, holding boundaries, acknowledging real differences while still holding each other in love.

I still have much to learn.

Wishing everyone a blessed Lughnasadh, which occurs at 7:43 am tomorrow, Eastern time. Perhaps the least celebrated of the eight turnings of the year, this is the time when days begin to grow noticeably shorter, when - despite lingering heat - it becomes clear that the peak of summer has passed. It is the time when nights are filled with a chorus of katydids and crickets, when morning dew sparkles on a thousand spiderwebs, when birds largely grow silent, release their territories, and prepare to leave for warmer climes.

This is the season of ripening - tomatoes, peppers, fruits, seeds. It is the time of the Perseid meteors - next week - and the time when the bright stars of the Summer Triangle - Vega, Deneb, and Altair - shine high overhead after dusk, above Capricorn and Aquarius to the south. It is the time when the first leaves begin to drop, just a few. When, some cool morning, we first catch a new scent on the breeze and say that it smells like fall.

This is the first post of what will be a series of three, exploring that which links us to each other, to our communities, to our places. Exploring the great weaving within which we dance into and out of connection and relationship.

As always, I make no claims to be a certified expert of any sort; this is simply a framework that has felt clear and meaningful to me in recent times. Let me know if it also resonates with you.

Over the past year and a half I have found myself unattached to other humans, outside of relationship. And over the same time I have experienced a shift in my relationship to place. A sort of sacred farewell - a releasing of ties - with Marys Peak and the Willamette Valley and soon after that a devotional courtship - a building and deepening of connection - with a small corner of southern Appalachia.

And I have also been wondering: what weaves us together, when we release attachments?

Attachment theory talks of insecure and secure attachments. And in exploring that, over time, I discovered that “secure attachment” - for me - simply meant that my fear was not being triggered, that I felt confident that my partner would not choose to step away.

Attachment - whether anxious or avoidant or secure - is still a sort of holding on, clinging tight. Words carry feelings within them for me, and attachment carries a sense of fear, scarcity, need. It is a word that feels apt for a nursing infant but not so much for a union of sovereign souls.

For a time, I felt that releasing attachment meant holding relationship lightly, but I have also realized that I am not one to hold things lightly. What I feel for this place, for the basswood tree that is dropping seeds on me as I write by the creek, is not something I could or would ever simply dance away from. Letting go, moving away, would be a sort of sacred process, a blend of grieving and finding new love, as I have already experienced twice in my life in my changes of place.

And yet, I would not say that I am attached. I don’t need this place, to be whole, to be complete. And still I love it. I wish to be present here through all of its seasons, all of its blooms, all of its birdsongs, all of its scents and colors and surging waters and subtle shifting energies that ebb and flow with the great cycles.

I would rather say I am devoted. That my soul and this land have - on the deepest level of the pattern - chosen to weave together in co-creation.

And when I witness couples, friends, communities that are weaving together in harmony, I am also witnessing devotion. Togetherness rooted in love.

Attachment is, on some level, rooted in fear. Devotion is rooted in love.

Sometimes, when I describe my daily morning wanders in all weather, I hear something like “wow that’s commitment” or “that takes discipline”.

What do these words actually mean?

Commitment is, perhaps, simply the shift from light to weighty. The decision, based in attachment or devotion or some combination, to weave our threads together in ways that require effort to disentangle. To call this place home. To sign a lease. To buy a house together. To take on an essential role in an organization or community. To start a family. Not forever, but for the foreseeable future.

And discipline is, then, a sacred honoring of our commitments. It is keeping our practices even when we feel tired, going on our walks even when it’s raining, being present for our partners and friends and children even when we are distraught or distracted. It is the masculine pole, the holding of the container. And - like commitment - it can be rooted in love or fear, devotion or attachment. We can hold a course out of love, honoring ourselves and our co-creators, or we can hold a course out of obligation, fearful of facing the judgment of ourselves or others should we fail.

I am devoted to our living Earth

I am devoted to this land on which I walk, to these mountains

I am devoted to this body that is my home, that is me in this incarnation

I am devoted to my soul purpose, to the unfolding mystery

I am committed to staying present, to noticing the bird songs and the spiders and the frogs and shifting stars and planets each day.

I am committed to moving through discomfort, through old wounds, through perceived limitations.

I am committed to sharing my gifts, to weaving my thread, to holding what is mine to hold.

I am committed to staying open, even when it is easier to contract, to close down.

And - when the time comes to again weave into partnership, into relational commitment

I wish to do so from a place of devotion

To be not bound together

But rather interwoven.

As we move through the peak of summer, the warmest-on-average days in this part of the world, I’d like to share an aligned project that I suspect many of my readers will connect with.

Microseasons

Wild Orchid

Downy Rattlesnake Plantain…

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a month ago · 41 likes · 23 comments · Ann Collins

Ann divides the year into 72 “microseasons” - each one five days long with its own unique happenings. This is not a rigid structure - timing can vary from year to year - but we have “the time of the basswood blossoms” or - in this moment - “the time of the rattlesnake plantain”. I admire these beauties daily on my morning wanders and I am grateful to Ann for writing them a poem, an expression of devotion.

It is easy to view the world in the framework of Avatar or Fern Gully. Those who would live in harmony at war with those who would extract, exploit, develop. Those who embrace industry and technology at war with those who embrace nature.

And my question to my fellow harmony-seekers is this: what happens if we win? What happens if the juggernaut of our industrial economy collapses?

Are we truly ready to let go of our thermostats, our excavators and tractors, our roads and cars and airplanes, our supermarkets, our wires and antennas and data centers?

Is there any real possibility of shifting into a world where primitive skills like hide tanning and basket weaving and spoon carving support us? Or do we, too, love our modern world, even as we perhaps feel a level of guilt and shame around it?

And moving one level deeper, let us ask ourselves: why is it that we have collectively adopted this modern, “domesticated” lifestyle? Why have we chosen to shift from a world of longbows and horses to a world of factories and airplanes?

Some might say we chose this because of corporate greed and good advertising, or because we became disconnected from our sense of belonging in nature, but I might propose a different answer. What if we have collectively chosen, co-created these shifts because we have been trying to create Heaven on Earth?

Almost every innovation, from bridges to railroads to cars to airplanes to electricity to computers to smartphones to anesthesia, has been a shift in the direction of immediacy or ease. Given the option, we choose to travel around the world in hours rather than weeks. Given the option, we choose to consult Wikipedia on our phones rather than making a trip to the nearest library or resident expert. Given the option, most of us choose to set the thermostat rather than splitting wood and starting a fire.

Imagine, for a moment, what it must be like for our souls when we are not embodied. Or perhaps you carry memories of this. Or perhaps you have conversed with friends and family beyond the veil. That which we desire, we create. Those who we wish to find, we find. There is no distance, no time, no effort or pain or process of creation, as there is in the material realm.

So perhaps we are, in our techno-futurist fantasies and our real-world advancements, simply trying to re-create what we remember, just as immigrants to a new land seek to restore what is familiar.

If this is true, then let us ask ourselves: what has gone so wrong? Why is it that we have allowed our technological dreams to disrupt the living systems of our home planet? Why is it that, when we have the totality of human knowledge and the possibility of instant communication with anyone at our fingertips, in our pockets, we end up doom-scrolling and playing silly games and feeling bored and depressed?

And then, if you will join me on this journey of questioning, let us step one level deeper and ask ourselves: who are we, anyway?

There are perhaps infinite answers to this question, but one has been sticking with me over the past days, and I am curious if you, too, feel a truth in it.

We are living, evolving storylines.

All eight billion of us, embodied. All of us in spirit. All of our animal and plant companions. Spirits of rivers and lakes and mountains. Souls of planets and stars and galaxies.

We may have emerged from the same Source, but we have diverged, evolved, become unique through lifetimes beyond counting, through chance and choice, experiences and encounters through the depths of time and space and continuing into our current incarnations, our families, our cultures, our ancestry, the genetics and epigenetics of our physical bodies.

And if this is true, then the goal is not oneness or sameness but harmony in diversity, an ever-shifting tapestry of co-creation.

When we first stepped into Earth bodies, human bodies, I imagine that many of us were frustrated that everything was process. So much labor to shear sheep, to spin thread, to weave clothing, so much effort in every aspect of our lives. And so we began to invent, to innovate, to mechanize. Until we reached a point when clothing can go from design to prototype in a day, to mass production in a month. Until the process disappeared, or was buried in sweatshops and supply chains. Until our lives became full of stuff and empty of meaning and we began to wonder whether process might be just as sacred as product, whether - in our quest for Heaven on Earth, we might have missed something rather important.

Matter. Mater. Mother.

The feminine half. The gestation. The birthing. The space between desire and result. The joy of sensory, sensual embodied presence. The who and the how that live between the why and the what. The ever-unfolding story.

A slave is a human being who has been reduced to function and financial value, whose story has been intentionally disregarded and erased.

A commodity is a co-creation of our living world that has been reduced to function and financial value, whose story has been intentionally disregarded and erased.

Until we choose to see each other and our co-creations as we are rather than for what we can do, we remain both enslaver and enslaved.

I have written a great deal about decommodification, but isn’t it better to name what we are creating rather than what we are destroying? Let us call it, instead re-story-ing. Restoring the story.

I should pause for a moment to clarify what I mean when I use the word story.

I most definitely don’t mean spin, the sort of manipulative and shallow storytelling designed to shift our behavior and beliefs, the ubiquitous structure of advertising and exposés that leads us to be skeptical of all stories, to wonder what their tellers want from us.

I also don’t mean the generic story, the story of the commodity that remains when all of the individual story-threads have been mixed, erased, forgotten. The story that is written in the textbooks, taught in the schools. The story that is true and yet carries no life within it.

In my younger years, my scientist years, I read and wrote a lot of text like this. I thought I was “smart” because I could remember and recite things. These days, ChatGPT brings the accumulated knowledge of every textbook ever written to our fingertips upon request, and yet it remains a dead story, a commodified story.

The story of which I speak is something that no AI model will ever be able to write, because it lives inside of us, in the spaces between us, in our relationships, in the sequence of experiences and embodied present moments that collectively give form to us, to our co-creations, to the living universe.

Here is an encouraging thought: stories cannot truly be erased, they can only be ignored.

And just as we have started to tell the stories of human slaves in the long process of healing, so too can we tell the stories of those which we call products and commodities, beginning the process of restoring the web, of healing the wounds of separation. Here are a few examples from my own life:

We have created an organism.

Like the 30 trillion cells in our bodies, we have become - in a sense - eight billion cells in the body of a global civilization, both nourished by the whole and contributing to it in our own ways. And the great undersea fiber optic cables are its nerves, and the powerlines and railroads and highways and seaways are its blood vessels.

And this organism we have created is beautiful.

Yes, it includes herbicides and clearcuts and open pit mines. Yes, its organizing principle is capitalism - the impetus to acquire wealth by producing what others want to buy, while perpetuating scarcity and poverty and oppression. And yes, in our pursuit of Heaven on Earth we have created everything everywhere all at once, a sort of boredom-inducing overload that fails to notice the stories, this one thing, right here, in this moment.

And, still, it holds us. Its form, its structure is built of us, of the sum total of human invention, of the living waters and metals and mountains and forests and animals of Earth. That which contains beauty cannot help but be beautiful.

We have created a mirror of the biosphere - a masculine structure based on will and novelty and competition and individual achievement - overlaid upon a feminine structure based on discernment and adaptation and collaboration and interconnection. And yet, our creation is also a child of Earth. It could not exist without her waters, her forests, her metals, her living systems.

We perceive these worlds as being at war, but what if they could merge? What if in addition to bringing Heaven to Earth - immediacy and ease - we could also bring Earth to Heaven - process and interdependence and cycling and recycling?

I think that the way we begin to merge these worlds is by seeing the stories, feeling them, embodying them. Opening our eyes and our senses and allowing ourselves to experience the wonder that is all around us, in nature and in our own creations, our own inventions.

There is no more important distinction to me, personally, than this one:

Do we inhabit a world where the goal is to become educated, to get a job, to accumulate wealth, to save for retirement, to compete, to succeed, to leave a legacy? (If so, please kill me now and take me to a better place...)

or

Do we inhabit a world where the goal is to be present in an infinite variety of embodied experiences, to be curious, to feel the stories that weave together to create each moment, to open all of our senses? (If so, may I please be incarnated a thousand times over, in different cultures, different bodies, different species, different planets, different galaxies…)

We are woven of story…

…and while it is possible to give them words, they are ultimately felt, embodied.

These stories are born of our full experienced reality in each moment - relationships, emotions, sights, sounds, smells, sensations, songs - and yet they become more than the sum of their parts. They take on - within me at least - a unique quality, almost like a color or a tone or a melody, that becomes a quilt square within the tapestry of my being.

We are living, evolving storylines.

And as we open our eyes and senses to the storylines that surround us: in each other (even when we disagree), in the natural world, in the web of highways and wires and pipes and cities that we have built, we embody those stories as well.

They become part of us.

And as they become part of us, our experience grows in richness, in meaning.

And it begins to matter less what we believe - about climate change, burning coal and gas, mining, spraying herbicides. It begins to matter less whether our minds have concluded that an action, an activity is right or wrong.

Instead, we begin to feel the web of nature, the web of commerce, as an extension of our bodies.

Where stories have been erased, where ecosystems have been destroyed, where humans have been oppressed, there is a pain, a hollowness, an emptiness. And so we begin to choose relational reverence, re-story-ing all that nourishes us, all that we dance with, all that we create. And just as we can feel the difference between empty calories - junk food - and true nourishment, so too can we feel the difference between stories of harmony, of interconnection and stories of extraction, of profit.

Landfills feel off to me. They feel like cysts, like growing masses in the body of Earth, waiting to be healed, to be drained, to re-enter the great cycles. Clearcuts feel like a skinned knee - too much removed all at once, taking time to heal. Toxic mining ponds feel like abscesses, like infections waiting to be cleansed.

What if, instead of bland language about megapixels and gigabytes and screen sizes, those little rectangles in our pockets came with a story like this:

And then, holding the gravity of that, and out of respect for the harmony of the whole, the story might continue:

We are in transition.

The for-profit, capitalist institutions that have built the modern world are on the verge of collapse, as their business model is not viable without growth, and the end of growth is now upon us.

The great organism that we have created is beginning to explore a new operating principle. One that seeks to maintain the immediacy and ease, the Heaven on Earth, but in a way that is relational rather than transactional, that seeks not to accumulate wealth but rather to maintain balance, to meet all needs, to close the loops, as in a forest, to ultimately put an end to the need for mines and landfills.

I feel, deeply, that seeing the stories, embodying the stories will help to bring us there.

And, as we open our eyes to the wonders around us, as we weave other stories with our own, so too do we shift, transform, re-imagine who we are, in a way that we will carry with us, beyond our Earth bodies, into our next adventures. Even as we create Heaven on Earth, we will also create Earth in Heaven.

We are living, evolving storylines.

I will close with a song I have shared here several times.

I have more than once told its creator, now a dear friend, that I feel it is among the best songs ever written.

It captures, in its poetic lyrics, the essence of curiosity, awakening to story, awakening to wonder.

I left you standing

When we opened the space for ceremony

Cleared the underbrush and saplings

And you grew tall in the newfound sun

Outpaced your shaded sisters

Set five buds

And opened the first

On my birthday

To be discovered

On my morning walk

My first gift

Gratefully received.

I placed you in the soil when I was 16

In a cage protected from voles

Transplanted you to Oregon

When my father passed

And in the year

When the slugs found you below ground

When you set no leaves

You somehow survived

When your younger kin did not

To be resurrected the following spring

To find yet a new home

With my dear friend

To someday find your way

Back to me once more.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two Lilies

Some folks connect to the natural world through the mind, through classifying, identifying, collecting information. Information about habits, habitats, food and medicinal value, ancestral uses.

These folks perhaps wish I would talk more, on my walks. They wish I knew all of the names of all of the trees, all of the ways each plant can become medicine or food or fiber or form. They tell me, well-meaningly, that my walks would be more valuable, more marketable if I billed them as educational.

I am always interested to learn more, and yet I feel a resistance to really leaning into this.

(And I find it strangely amusing - a synchronicity of divine proportions - that as I was approaching the nearest basswood just now to take the photo below, my access was blocked by someone giving a very, very informational talk about its qualities and uses.)

I well remember the hot summer days

In the time of fireflies and fireworks

When the woods became suddenly perfumed

When your blossoms burst open in their multitudes

When my uncle’s bees filled their boxes to bursting

With light, unique, wondrous tree-honey.

I have missed you

These past 17 years

Living west of your homelands

In forests of towering fir.

Here I have found you again

Old friend

And in these southern mountains

You are two weeks earlier

Blessing my solstice wandering

With your fragrance

Your boughs abuzz

With all who seek nectar.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Basswood

Some folks connect to the natural world spiritually. They regard the entheogenic plant medicines - those that help to release the mind and reveal the soul - as sacred. They offer ritual, ceremony, prayer, acknowledgement to plant spirits, animal spirits, spirits of place.

I do this, too. And yet I do not do only this. And I can find myself feeling lonely and strangely different amidst the cacao ceremonies, the prayers to the four winds, the ayahuasca dietas.

I heard you daily in valley woods

But I only once found your hidden nest

Thatched over and tucked among last year’s leaves.

I listened to your proud proclamations

Teacher-Teacher-Teacher-Teacher

Saying “this is my space”

And I watched you

From high in my sunset tree

Hovering high above at dusk

Singing a whole wild melody before diving down

As if purely in the joy of being alive.

Here you are again

A thousand miles distant

Singing your joy into the dusk

Alongside the Veeries and Wood Thrushes

And I am grateful

For your presence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ovenbird

I connect to the natural world relationally, through the body. Through the senses. Through the felt recognition that the same life force that animates my cells, that shapes the exquisitely complex forms of my eyes and muscles and neurons, also animates the intricate patterned symmetry of lily petals, the bursting buds of basswoods, and the annual flight of ovenbirds from tropics to nesting grounds.

And something that has become clear to me is that information is not relationship, and relationship does not require information. This is perhaps best explored by human analogy. If I introduce my friend Bill as a most excellent carpenter who is also a chef with a PhD in engineering, proudly bisexual, and married with two children, I have not actually helped anyone to know him - only to place him into categories and grant him respect or judgment based on their values. And by contrast, as I connected with my dear friend and fellow Substack writer Hannah over many months, we built an immense depth of mutual understanding, of relationship, without sharing any of this usual information. Instead we shared experience, presence, emotion, sensory perception.

And - similarly - spiritual reverence is also not relationship. I offer prayers to your soul is a very different statement than I see you, I feel you, I am curious about your experience. I have been surprised to notice that those who have a deep spiritual reverence for nature are often unaware of the lived experience of the beings who reside there. As one example, I have occasionally pointed out that highly-amplified nature-inspired dance music blasted into the woods is almost certainly impactful to the acoustically-sensitive birds and frogs and creatures who call those woods home. And the response has usually been one of surprise, as if that possibility has not occurred to them.

I am the person who I am at least in part because I did not spend my childhood at sleepovers and block parties and in the company of siblings and friends. I spent it, instead, sitting in blinds to watch the secretive sparrows, playing in creeks, learning the timings and habits of the prairie flowers, planting seeds and watching them grow, and climbing trees in all weather to watch sunrises and sunsets.

And - at this time in my life - I feel called to invite others into curiosity, presence, relationship with the whole living world. The world from which we, as embodied beings, are truly not separate. There does not seem to be too much of a roadmap for this, and so I find that the best I can do is to follow my intuition, my heart. And in this moment my deepest calling is to create trails, to weave passageways among and between wonders and beings of nature, and to invite others to join me there.

I am still discerning exactly how to create these containers, how to gently invite my fellow humans to step out of their minds, out of spiritual reverence, and into curious, wondering presence, into being-to-being relationship. But it felt right, on this Solstice and birthday, to mostly skip the ceremonies and educational plant walks and instead to invite one person to join me on the just-completed, six-hour Chain of Wonders path.

Have a blessed Solstice everyone!

~Markael

For twenty years before I was born, my father was a wilderness guide, youth mentor, minister, teacher, curriculum developer, community leader, songwriter, and musician. A man with a full social calendar who frequently set off on all-day drives to events and conferences.

I wish I had been able to know that man.

Ed Stone was a most excellent father - I have no regrets - but the man I knew had a much diminished sense of confidence, seldom traveled far from his valley home, kept a small circle of friends, and eternally struggled to bring his visions to fruition.

A few things shifted in his life between those stages - a surprise induction into fatherhood being one of them - but perhaps the most significant was that he left the priesthood and the Catholic Church. Or the church left him. Or both. I think it could reasonably be said that the separation was mutual.

His journey away from the church is a story for another time, but one with echoes in most of our lives: growing into our own deeper truth, finding ourselves out of alignment, letting go of that which feels secure in favor of that which feels most authentic. Part of that journey is learning to hold ourselves, to source our power and truth within, to discover - in the depths of our being - that we are loved and are love. That we are - as we are - always enough.

Exactly one year ago I published an essay and poem titled To Be Enough, following shortly after Love, Expanding. And Hannah King, who is usually on the same wavelength, recently shared Becoming Mountains, as her own expression of wholeness and enough-ness.

Let this be the counterpoint, the “yes, and” to discovering our own wholeness.

What we achieve, in breaking free from old patterns, in feeling an inalienable fullness within, is a sort of agency and sovereignty. An ability to consciously choose in resonance with our own deepest self, without being magnetically and unconsciously pulled into codependencies that compensate for our missing pieces.

Yes, and.

Yes, and, this is not the same as independence or radical self-reliance. It is easy to venture down that path, as my father did after leaving the church. It is especially tempting for those of us who are no longer willing to compromise to fit into boxes, or who are on some level afraid that stepping back into relationship or into community will also entail stepping out of integrity with ourselves. But that path, too, is ultimately limiting - a box of our own making, with a membership of one.

Yes, and, there is value in being held in community, in belonging, that does not reduce to a security blanket, an outsourcing of self in exchange for validation. Structure that we don’t have to create. Financial support. Seeing and being seen. Showing up for each other. Sharing foods and skills and ideas relationally instead of transactionally.

Within the Catholic Church, my father had guaranteed financial stability, respect and recognition among people he had just met, a steady supply of folks interested in his programs, and a clear sense of belonging. As long as he was willing to squeeze himself into the box. To accept their theology as truth.

Outside of the Catholic Church, my father did his best to replicate his previous work - to offer courses, publications, spiritual support to others on their journey - and almost nobody listened. More people offered skepticism than respect, subscriptions grew very slowly, events seldom brought more than ten people, and money dried up.

We are held within many kinds of social containers. Marriages, extended family, workplaces, institutions, cliques and circles of friends, churches. And - too often - we stay in containers that no longer align with us, or we even tolerate harm, because a flawed container feels better than no container. Or we discover, after having left, that we are free but no longer supported, in ways that we previously took for granted.

We are slowly, I feel, discovering that to hold and be held need not be coupled to romance, bloodlines, memberships, employment contracts, or any such thing. That it is possible to simply choose to open space, to invite others in. That it is possible to hold others in ways that do not force them into a box. That it is possible to be held in ways that do not constrain alignment and authenticity.

Circles of women, as Hannah is finding. Circles of men, as organized by my friend Jon. Cuddle clubs, as created by my new friend Ishka. Cohousing and intentional communities, as I am now exploring. Co-working spaces. The stronger we can build these, the more belonging and support can be waiting with open arms - asking nothing of us except that we show up as our whole selves - the easier it becomes to step out of containers that no longer suit us, the weaker the old patriarchal control structures become.

As we are held in smaller groups, so too are we held in human geographies, in the “vibe” of a place. And one of the reasons we move is to find a place that holds us, that aligns, more deeply. I moved recently first and foremost following an intuitive calling. But I also moved, it is fair to say, because I no longer felt held by the “vibe” of Corvallis.

Corvallis, Oregon held me well through my graduate research, through my transition to seed farming, through my launch of the Winnow Wizard business. Those were all deeply in alignment with community values, with the collective consciousness of the area. But then I started to shift out of my mind, out of analytical thinking, and into presence and intuition.

Corvallis is a mind place, a college and research town with one of the highest proportions of PhDs in the country. It is a place where credentials matter, where even the folks out mowing and weeding are expected to be licensed and insured, where every renovation gets permitted and inspected, where the yoga teachers and counselors cite their certifications and approved methods, where going back to school is the usual first step in shifting paths. It is a place where most people are a bit confused by my own path, my inner guidance, my absence of strategy.

Where I am living now, credentials seem far less important, and most folks at least out in the country don’t seem to bother with permits and codes and inspections, choosing instead to simply create what works best for them. This is a place where “I left my corporate job to follow my soul calling” is a surprisingly common story, where there seems to be much less focus on orderliness and more acceptance of organic chaos.

Another difference I have noticed is in the relationship to boundaries, landownership, neighborly relations. Out west, there is more of a sense that boundaries are very important, and rural neighbors are surprisingly seldom friends, each tending their own little empires. Here in southern Appalachia, most property boundaries are unmarked, and neighbors’ dogs that wander over are usually met with friendly curiosity.

This region also carries in its recent memory the social experiment that was Hurricane Helene - a time when the structures that hold us transactionally - grocery stores, utilities, roads - became inaccessible for nearly a month. And so neighbors learned to hold each other relationally, to ensure that everyone’s basic needs were met, to reclaim the responsibility of care and support that we too often outsource to the system. The impersonal, extractive economy of buying and selling that would reduce us all to producers and consumers of value, commodified and interchangeable.

I am still weaving in here, still a bit unsure of my place. And yet there are ways in which I already feel well held, that would not have come as easily in my previous home. Ways in which I am beginning to hold others, as well.

As we are held within groups and within wider human geographies, so too are we held within the wildness that surrounds us: rivers, trees, birds, seasons, ecosystems, weather, scents, sounds, flavors. And here too there is a “yes, and” at play.

Yes, we can deepen our connection to place over years, generations, even centuries. We can notice ever-smaller details, give names to each rock and glen and twisted tree, develop the wisdom that can only grow across cycles upon cycles: how a place responds to flood and drought, how the timing of blooms shifts subtly from year to year, how a place feels when layer upon layer of experience and memory has woven into its tapestry.

And, we are Earthlings. Wherever we are, on this planet, we are home. We can grow roots quickly in new places, fall in love with new creatures, feel the same current of aliveness that runs through mountains and plains, rainforests and deserts.

I felt deeply held in the Minnesota River Valley for my first 18 years, and in the hills and valleys of western Oregon for my most recent 18 years. But I also felt held in the deep woods of southeastern Minnesota, in the high prairies and cloud forests of Ecuador, and in the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming - places that I called home for much shorter spells. And I already feel held, very deeply, in my new home.

My father chose place over community. He chose to belong fully to his valley home for the final 38 years of his life. I am grateful for this, in a sense, because I could not imagine a better playground for a child like myself than the cliffs and rocks and creeks and woods and riverbanks that started right out our back door. But I also sometimes wonder what my childhood would have been like if he had chosen community. If we had moved somewhere with more like-minded people, where his gifts could have been appreciated.

I don’t believe there are any right answers here. Some of us will choose to be people of place for our whole lives, and others will choose to be nomads, feeling at home wherever our feet touch the ground. Some of us will gravitate toward mind and structure and order while others will embrace wildness and chaos. Some of us will find belonging in intentional communities while others will live among generations of extended family.

There may be no right answers, but there is weaving and crystallization, flow and rigidity. We can feel trapped by our circumstances, our fears, our habits, our patterns, or we can feel free to choose and create the belonging that feels most resonant, most aligned with our true nature.

And so my question to you, for your own musing, is this:

Do you feel free to hold and be held, as you would like to hold and be held?

And

If not, what is standing in the way? And how might that change?

(This post has a lot of photos and will probably not be complete in your email inbox. Please click through to read it in your browser or on the Substack app.)

Although it is usually celebrated on May 1, today is astronomical and astrological Beltane: half way between the spring equinox and the summer solstice. The inflection point in the wheel of the year when the upswing begins to transition into the fullness of summer, when the rapid lengthening of days becomes more subtle as we move toward the solstice still point.

I had something else in mind for this space, but it can wait for the 21st. Today I would like to bring you along on a path I have discerned and created at my new home. A loop that has become the start to nearly all of my mornings. I have a vision to ultimately create signs and meditative prompts along the way, but - lacking a sign budget at the moment - I’ll share some of those here.

I did have a forest path at one of my Corvallis homes, but this feels like the first time in my adult life that I have something like my walk in the valley at my childhood home - a long immersive wander through rocks and creeks and enchanted places.

The loop begins at the footbridges over Mineral Creek - vastly reshaped by the hurricane floods of 2024. It can then proceed either direction, but for today I will go counter-clockwise. It follows the main Mandala Springs road/path - or any of the smaller existing trails on the property - up to “Ceremonial Flats” where it branches off.

The path switchbacks past giant boulders and great trees, through an understory of trilliums and wild ginger and soon-to-bloom lilies, climbing to around 500 feet above the creek when it reaches what I call the north gate.

Physically, the north gate is a pair of mirrored vines, both with the same S-curve and both directly in the path. The larger one, in the background here and in the photo at the top, climbs a pair of twinned trees.

Energetically, it is a shift from rich Appalachian forest beauty to something that feels - well - different. A realm within a realm. A place where I could sit all day, listening to the birds and feeling my own roots grow. It feels a bit like stepping across the threshold into a cathedral, but a cathedral that has grown in place, shaped by Earth consciousness across deep time.

Beyond the gate I don’t feel like using power tools. And I feel inclined to speak in whispers. And I am even somewhat hesitant to make this path known at all. But I feel that it is time for others to find, and to begin to feel, these places. For us to stop hiking and to start visiting, wandering, belonging.

Shortly past the gate is a truly magical place. A spring at the base of an overhanging cliff, with wild orchids at the drip edge and massive trees growing at crossing angles below. Tucked into the overhanging cliff is a Phoebe nest, and it seems they have grown accustomed to my daily passage.

Somehow I found this place in my first half hour of wandering, on my first visit to Mandala Springs back in early February, even though I had no path or instruction, and I was simply following my intuition. It is probably safe to say that I live here because of this place. I might still have ended up here otherwise, but this is the yes that remained even as the housing options on offer felt more like no or maybe.

Out of respect for the Phoebes, I seldom linger here long, and nature has created a beautiful path - a series of gentle steps - up to the top of the cliffs, past some wild rock formations. Here is where I often first hear the song of the Cerulean Warbler - a bird that I have long loved from afar but never before encountered. Their presence here - along with Yellow-throated Vireos and Scarlet Tanagers and many others - marks this as mature, intact forest. A rare habitat, and another reason to keep this path small, to speak softly, to walk with reverence.

At the highest point of the path I have started to create a little altar space. As I was taking this photo yesterday morning two Ovenbirds zipped by - perhaps in a lively quarrel over nesting grounds - and today I found myself being investigated by a female Black-and-White Warbler, flitting in to perhaps six feet away to see who this two-legged wanderer might be.

From this point the path switchbacks down to another line of cliffs, passing a tree growing right out of the rock. There are many such embraces in these mountains, but this one seems especially loving - a sort of arboreal bear hug.

The top of the next cliff band is a great place to sit on the stone and gaze out - rather than up - at the warblers in the canopy, and most mornings I pause here for a long while, sipping my coffee and watching the sun rise above the ridge to the east.

The path then follows another natural series of steps and ledges down the cliff face and - like some of my favorite childhood trails - finds its way directly through the rock.

Emerging from the crack, the path contours gradually downward, below another band of smaller cliffs, and dips through a well where a tree fell in the hurricane, exposing the as-yet un-weathered, un-mossed, un-lichened swirls and patterns of stone, the crystals of garnet and quartz and mica.

From here the path contours across a steep valley, hopping rocks above a spring below. This is one of the few places where I actually crafted a path, doing my best to discern rather than impose a pattern.

At the edge of this valley is the south gate. The place where the energy of the land again shifts, where the forest begins to feel “normal” again. Where I often pick up the pace to head home, or - if I’m going the other direction - slow into a contemplative, non-goal-oriented cadence. The south gate is a large, old fallen log that I intentionally did not cut. A step into or out of the realm-within-a-realm.

Beyond the south gate, the path descends through a large opening created by the hurricane. Most of these blowdown zones are nearly impassable, but this one had a corridor, a natural route for a trail. I tend to discern paths based on where the ground is open, where I don’t need to cut fallen trees, where I can step on the fewest trilliums and orchids.

Below the fallen trees, the path descends steeply through evergreen laurel and rhododendron - a sort of hobbit-scale forest-within-a-forest of twisted trunks and seasonal blooms. Normally I would not create a path this steep, but again there was a clear route here between dense thickets and fallen trees, a sense of where the trail wanted to be. Soon, perhaps, I will begin planting stone steps.

Below the rhododendron the path emerges onto the existing Waterfall Trail, which follows Hawkbill Creek downstream to its confluence with Mineral Creek, and then back to the main path just above the footbridges.

If you are ever in this area, I invite you to walk this path with me.

And - wherever you are - I invite you to find, to create your own sacred paths. To notice the places that feel enchanted, to sense their boundaries and gates. To give yourself time, each day, to explore in presence.

Since my equinox writing I have traveled across the country with most of my belongings in a former Frito Lay fleet truck that - despite my misgivings and around 3000 lbs of excess weight - proved to be a trusty vehicle. And I have landed in a high valley south of Barnardsville, North Carolina, about 30 minutes from Asheville.

There are many topics that I considered writing about this month, that may return as future posts. The twelve-day odyssey: eight days on the road and three layovers with dear friends. My larger journey into the unknown, seeking community and place in which to be held in my next unfolding. And a particular chapel of nature, a sacred spot that I somehow discovered on my very first wander here back in February, that is now part of my daily walk. A place where orchids and trilliums sprout beneath an overhanging cliff with a spring underneath. A place where a Phoebe is nesting in a perfect sheltered nook. A place where - a few days ago - I finally met a Cerulean Warbler, the flying jewel that is the face of the Dendroica Project.

Perhaps the greatest shift in my life, however, is that for the first time in nearly 20 years I feel uncontained. Free to wander from my doorstep in nearly every direction, for as far as I could walk in a day, or - should I choose to head eastward - perhaps a week.

I wish for everyone to have this freedom. To be able to feel at home, to feel belonging, or at the very least not be trespassing, in a whole bioregion and broader human community.

The Swedes seem to have figured this out, with their Allemansrätten - “every man’s right” - that explicitly allows anyone to wander anywhere, even on private property, as long as they give a respectful berth to dwellings. I remember feeling a deep sense of relaxation in my wanderings, in my brief time in Sweden many years ago.

I am most grateful to have been uncontained as a child in the Minnesota River Valley. Although we only owned an acre and a half, we were mostly surrounded by public parkland, and all of the private lands within walking distance belonged to neighbors and friends. So my dad and I built a whole network of subtle trails. And some days we walked on them, and some days we charted new courses in between, discovering new boulders, new trees, new surprises each time.

Since then I have lived in greater and lesser degrees of containment, with my last home being perhaps the most hemmed-in I have ever been. I have been surprised to discover that rural areas are often worse than cities in this regard. Cities are designed to be “walkable”, with networks of sidewalks and paths that connect to parks and riparian corridors and offer an infinite selection of wanders from home, albeit with plenty of human company and limited wildness. Rural landowners - especially out west - tend to have limited tolerance for trespassers, and so often enough the only option after leaving home is to walk up and down the same road, dodging speeding vehicles. Or - sometimes - to trespass on private farmland or timberland or railroad tracks, with the underlying unease that we could get in trouble, that our presence is at best tolerated.

To be uncontained in a wild environment it is necessary to border public lands, or to live in a community of wander-welcoming landowners. And both of these seem more attainable in Appalachia than in other places I have lived.

To be firmly anchored, a tree must be able to grow roots in all directions, to be in intimate contact with soil and rock nearby and - through the wood wide web of mycelium - outward through the forest. And I feel that the same is true of me, perhaps of all of us on some level. It is not enough to be near a park, or to be able to drive a few minutes to a place to walk. I need to be able to wander, outward, from my home, building relationships with new trees and plants and creatures each day, experiencing the landscape in all of its cycles and seasons. I need to be able to find chapels of nature, to build a deep sense of place.

In my first two weeks here - and indeed even during my monthlong winter visit - I have been wandering more than anything else. Scouting new trails. Finding secret waterfalls on maps and making my way there. And remembering that this is something I need, daily, to feel fully grounded in myself. Something that I have been missing, in recent months and years.

I am most grateful for my daily wanders.

Are you able to wander, where you live? Do you aspire to be less contained?

Or is there something else that you need, to feel uncontained, rooted in place? Lines of sight? Access to water? Or?

Start digging in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and the soil will gradually change texture. Topsoil will fade into a deep clayey silt deposited by cataclysmic ice age floods, and below that you will find older and older sediments. In some parts of the valley these sedimentary stories extend for half a mile below ground, reaching back hundreds of thousands of years until finally there is solid bedrock: basalt or mudstone dating to tens of millions of years - a time long before humans but when life on Earth would have looked quite familiar: forests, grasslands, birds, insects, diversifying mammals.

Start digging in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, and after a thin layer of topsoil your shovel will hit rock. Gneiss, garnet schist, amphibolite, metagraywacke. Former seafloor sediments alchemized and recrystallized in the roots of ancient mountains. Ask these rocks their age - whether through clairvoyance or advanced geophysics - and their answer will boggle the mind. 1.1 billion years. Four times older than the first dinosaurs. Twice as old as the first plants and animals on land. These rocks were formed at a time when Earth would have appeared to be a barren planet of rock and river and ocean, when microscopic organisms in the oceans were just beginning to learn the art of multicellularity.

It is not that the missing years are compressed into a microscopic band, a few Jurassic atoms waiting to be noticed. Those hundreds of millions of years - most of the story of life on Earth - are simply absent: a discontinuity in time, a contact between present and prehistory. The soils and rocks on which the dinosaurs walked, in this region, were thousands of feet above our heads, lifted skyward by continental collision and then gradually washed to the sea. Bone and branch and mineral alike long since returned to the timeless cauldron of creation: salt in the ocean, grains of sand on beaches, carbon cycling through rock and atmosphere and living cells.

My father moved to my childhood home in the Minnesota River Valley in 1978. Nineteen seventy-eight is a year that does not exist in my embodied, experienced timeline, just as the year 2026 is not a part of his Earth story.

However certain we are that we are more than mortal beings - whether through belief or trust or inner knowing or experiences of stepping out of our bodies and between dimensions - the fact remains that our existence before our birth into this life and after our death lies across a boundary, a veil, a discontinuity. It is easy for me to imagine why embodiment might work this way. How many of us would choose to be all in, to be all here, to lean in to our senses and emotions and choices, if a thousand past-life memories were as vivid and present as our childhoods and first loves, if our time embodied felt more like a game-world or a dream-world than the entirety of our existence?

We experience a version of this, as well, when we up-root and re-root ourselves, when we step into and out of place-based timelines. Where I will soon be moving, the collective experience of Hurricane Helene in late 2024 is a defining event: a time when anyone living in the mountains felt that any moment might be their last, when boundaries between stream and earth and boulder and forest dissolved in unstoppable flows that destroyed houses and roads and bridges and power lines. A time when communities came together across differences and divides to share and survive and rebuild. In my timeline, I spent those same hours and days camped at the Conscious Growth Convergence, 2600 miles distant, dancing and singing late into the calm, clear night beneath Taurus and Jupiter. The videos of raging rivers that appeared on screens might as well have been transmissions from beyond the veil or from another planet, until I actually set foot on the scoured streambeds and empty foundations, until I began weaving myself into the story of place that holds this memory.

Sometimes the most profound shifts, the most profound discontinuities in our lives are not outwardly visible. In my own experience, the most defining moments have not been marked by birth or death or illness or trauma, and I am curious to know whether this is also true for others.

December 13 and December 19, 2023. Amidst relative outward calm, I entered a state of building tension, mental fog, emotion, deep longing. And, on each of these days, walking the same trail, I felt the tension resolve, felt a part of myself return, enter my body, integrate into my experience. First a feminine, playful, deeply sensing aspect. Then a masculine, monk-like, calmly present aspect. I emerged different, deeply changed, slowly rediscovering myself.

December 11, 2024. Although my partner and I had discussed separating before, on some level she was still my person, my family. An intense, painful spiritual and emotional process on this day culminated in the release of this attachment, in a state of calm and deeper self-awareness within which a choice to part ways became possible. Within which I no longer wanted or needed to be chosen by another in the same way.

January 29, 2026. This one was a bit more subtle and perhaps less confined to a single day, but after walking 50+ miles through the Blue Ridge Mountains and connecting to land and community, something in me began to shift from visiting to belonging. A solo hike through what felt like a deeply enchanted landscape on this day felt particularly like a turning point of this process, which would feel complete a few days later.

The first of these discontinuities was the most jarring, the most surprising to me, as I had no memory of shifting, rebirthing, becoming a new person like this - at least as an adult. Within friendships and relationships I was always the stable one, the steady hand. To surrender, trust, allow, explore my new self without judgment or questioning my sanity, was a challenge. And yet I felt calm, whole, settled inside.

Each of these shifts re-set my experience of time passing, in a way. Each marked a before and after in my memories with everything before seeming surprisingly distant, even if it had only been a few days or weeks or months.

To be like water is usually to flow, to surrender and discern and weave in a winding but continuous path from headwaters to ocean, from birth to death. But to be like water is also, sometimes, to leap over a rock ledge and tumble freely through the air to a new stream below. Or to shift, in an instant, from ice to liquid, from liquid to vapor: forms so different that we would not believe them to be the same substance if we could not witness their transformations.

Moving through discontinuities is a dance of depth, surrender, detachment.

Depth to know that there is still, on some level, continuity. That the billion-year-old metamorphic bedrock and the fifty-year-old tulip tree above it are both tissues of our living planet, different arrangements of the same original elements. That our souls move through the portals of birth and death and have done so many times. That even as our identities and worldviews and loves and attachments shift, we are still ourselves, still coherent, still whole. That snowflakes and the steam in our breath and raindrops and rivers are all water.

Surrender and detachment to be willing to let go. To let go of identities that are falling away. To let go of a need to control, and even to understand, with our minds. To let go of that which feels safe, secure, comfortable. To let go of those who are dying, or who are no longer in resonance with us as partners, as family, as friends.

It is possible to become attached to detachment. Having gone through the pain of letting go, having stepped into a deeper perspective, it can be tempting to stay there, saving ourselves from needing to let go again, in the future, by - as Garth Brooks would say - standing outside the fire.

I have felt some of this, in myself, over the past months and years, but in this moment I am feeling newfound excitement for moving back into immersion. For connecting with a new place and community. For opening to new love and friendship. For launching creative endeavors. Perhaps I have passed through this series of waterfalls, of discontinuities, and it is time to flow again, as a new river, the same and yet different.

This will be my last post from Oregon, as I leave in a little over a week. I am most grateful for the way that this valley has held and nurtured me for the last 17 1/2 years, and I look forward to many future visits. I will always, I think, feel a sense of belonging here, as I still feel in the Minnesota River Valley.

Happy Equinox everyone!

The last time I chose a new home, 18 years ago, I was following ideas. The first was an idea to study birds, to focus on conservation of my beloved Dendroica warblers, that led to Ithaca, NY, where my college roommate and best friend had landed. The second was an idea to produce hydrogen from photosynthesis, to create green living solar panels, that led to Corvallis, OR, where I knew no one.

Both of them inspired exploratory trips. In New York I found roadblocks, ambiguities, subtle signs of non-alignment. In Oregon I found new connections, synchronicities, doors opening, the land inviting me into relationship. And so I found my way to what would become my home through several chapters of life. The “photobiological hydrogen” project would ultimately prove to be more of a personal growth lesson than a silver bullet, and my path would unexpectedly veer into organic seed, equipment design and manufacturing, local food systems, and ecological spirituality, into and out of relationship, marriage, and homeownership.

I had assumed that I would stay indefinitely, until I spent the night on Marys Peak early last September, through a series incredible but gentle lightning storms, visited by harriers and owls, greeted by a suddenly clear dawn, in awe of it all, and I felt a clear message: the mountain is saying goodbye. This would be my last warm night on the peak, my local Chapel of Nature, and this show of light and cloud and wind and Sun and Moon and winged companions was her way of throwing a farewell party, which I received with tears and gratitude for the depth of connection that I felt there, over so many visits, so many nights, so many years.

This is how I receive guidance now, it seems. I feel a phrase, a weaving of the pattern, and then I feel truth tingles, as my friend Samara calls them. Tears come to my eyes, sometimes enough to roll down my cheeks, and I simply know, if I allow my mind to trust. There is alignment, attunement, resonance.

At the same time as I felt my roots lifting in Oregon, I felt a mysterious attraction to the southern Appalachians, the region around Asheville, North Carolina, that I first noticed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, as communities came together in new ways and across divides to survive and support each other and rebuild. As I pored over Google Earth and felt into this attraction, it narrowed to a rectangle with Asheville one corner and Spruce Pine, NC at the other. That was specifically the land that was calling me. South of I-40, west of I-26 simply felt less resonant, somehow.

As it would happen, shortly after my night on the mountain I spent eight days canoeing the Green River in Utah and made new friends who lived just outside my rectangle, who invited me to visit. And - after deciding to step away from my very-part-time work and finding my winter schedule open - I planned a road trip. Four weeks in the area, no plans, no agenda except to explore, discern, see what unfolds.

My mind had trouble with this, following an intuition rather than an idea. How would I explain it to friends, to family who asked? They would ask me if I had a partner, a job prospect, specific plans, and I would have to say: no, I just feel called there. And then I would find myself doubting: what if this guidance isn’t real? Why am I doing this? My mind would try to rationalize, point to connections and opportunities that matched my resume but that didn’t really feel resonant.

Once I arrived, my friends mostly disappeared. Not in a problematic way, just into their own plans and travels and processes and work and family matters. It quickly became clear that I wasn’t there to connect with them, or with activities and groups of people. I was there to explore, to connect with the land. And so began my exploring. Bailey Mountain, Laurel River, Big Bald, Big Butt (yes really), Little Butt (right next door), Big Ivy, Walker Creek, Staire Creek, Mineral Creek, Snowball Mountain, Big Fork Ridge, Craggy Pinnacle. I’m sure I walked over a hundred miles, meeting ancient rocks, feeling the winter pulse of tulip tree and oak and beech and hickory and sycamore, sensing the sacred places, the enspirited places, the zones mysteriously untouched by hurricane winds and floods.

A few days after my arrival, we visited friends-of-friends at a community inside my rectangle, that just happened to have a vacancy for precisely the remainder of my time there. Sun Song became my home for the next three weeks, and I was amazed to be welcomed into the family: to find myself reading to a two-year-old, playing nerf guns and trampoline basketball with nine-year-olds, drywalling the new community space, playing board games, charting a new trail to the ridge, sharing songs and intimate conversations. And from there I continued my exploring, except when the largest southeastern snowstorm in recent memory gave me an unexpected but welcome writing retreat, allowing me to compile some of my essays and poems into collections that could become books.

Two weeks after I landed in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a decision was becoming clear within me. I still wasn’t any closer to a clear sense of why I was there, but I knew:

I want to be here when the tulip trees bloom.

I want to be here when the spring ephemerals burst forth, when the great diversity of trees come into leaf.

I want to be here when the warblers arrive, when the whip-poor-wills call and the fireflies sparkle.

I want to know the smells of these mountains, the way they change with weather and seasons.

I want to find the secret glens, the sacred places, the rock gardens, the springs, the gnarled and twisted birches, the garnet-studded boulders formed in the roots of mountains of eons long past.

I want to follow all of the ridges to their high points, follow the creeks through their tumbles and branches to their sources.

I want to belong to this land, as I have come to belong to the Minnesota River Valley, to the mountains and valleys of my Oregon home.

And that had to be enough.

Thus began a search for a place to live. A search in which my mind tried mightily to get in the way, to crystallize possibilities into plans, to transform uncertainty into anxiety. A little ways into this search, I made a connection. A piece of land tucked into the end of a valley, bordered by endless wildness and old growth trees extending to the high mountains. Gneiss outcrops that reminded me of my river valley home. A community and event center founded on ecological spirituality and healing and nonviolent communication and music. The owners and stewards very much in resonance, fellow wanderers and meadmakers and visionaries of a new way of being. Truth tingles on both sides.

What happens when intuition and personal integrity contradict? What happens when the dwelling on offer amidst all this resonance is a tiny box on wheels with a head-bonking sleeping loft, a serious lack of privacy and personal space, and a price tag well in excess of the entire mortgage payment on my old duplex on a half-acre lot? Doubt. Indecision. I almost compromised with myself to say yes, then - when it became clear I needed to refuse the offer - I started to question the entire project. To make plans to drive back to Oregon. To wonder whether I was truly meant to move after all. To feel, beneath all of this, the original wound of separation, the loneliness, the hours and days that I cried as a newborn, pulled out of the wholeness of spirit into this experience of forgetting, of gradually rediscovering ourselves as embodied beings.

A well-timed sweat lodge ceremony and a surprising outpouring of love and recommendation from folks I had just met helped me to come back to myself, to trust in the process, to allow my mind to let go of the need for an answer, to feel empowered to state my own needs rather than simply accepting or rejecting what was offered to me. And so I found myself back in the same place, following trackless ridgelines, sharing mead and stories, and looking at a different possibility that I hadn’t seen before. A little circular dwelling with a delightful absence of straight lines and square corners, a wood stove, a front porch that steps out onto rounded bedrock, a tucked-away location, a long private driveway to house my trailer full of mead and books and tools and projects, and a price that doesn’t make me blink, that feels equitable. A place that fits elegantly into the landscape, as if it might have sprouted there. A place that I can say yes to, without hesitation.

After 23 years in Minnesota and 18 years in Oregon, I will be moving to North Carolina at the end of next month, landing at Mandala Springs, in the middle of my resonant rectangle, home to a chocolate factory, an event space, the tumbling freshet of Mineral Creek, drinkable springs that supplied much of the area after the storm, and a crew of creative, multi-talented, musical humans.

As for what I will do there, I will allow that to evolve, to open. I have the most excitement for publishing my writings, for crafting a “vocal resonance” workshop, and for immersing myself into a new part of Earth, growing new roots, meeting new people and building resonant community.

We shall see what this next year brings…

This is the monthly post, a couple of days early. I’ll be spending the next few days entirely off-grid at one of my favorite places in Oregon - one of many that I will miss and that I hope to return to visit in future years. Just as I still visit the Minnesota River Valley and walk the old trails to our special places, so too do I feel that western Oregon will always be one of my homes on Earth.

I was almost a geology major in college. The geo kids always seemed to have the most fun, and there was something magical about standing in roadcuts and hiking through river gorges, reading the stories of eons past.

As with most sciences, though, I wasn’t as interested in the practical applications (mostly resource extraction) or the intellectual gymnastics of climbing the academic ladder. I just wanted to understand, deeply, this world that I inhabit, so that I could combine that with my own, inner, felt experience. So that my sense of wonder and belonging might be enhanced.

In this time, as I am exploring the southern Appalachians amidst anomalous cold in midwinter, I am finding that the trees, the plants, the insects are largely quiet, asleep, awaiting the upswing of spring. And so it is easier to feel the underlying pulse of the mountains, written in earth and water and stone.

There is a very familiar feeling here, in the bedrock. A sense that each ridge, each cove, each unique spot has its own character. It is a feeling I remember well from childhood, when I would hike to Lookout Rock, Moon Rock, Powder Rock, Sunset Rock, Strawberry Rock, and Whip-poor-will Hill behind my home in the Minnesota River Valley.

Seventy-two percent of Earth’s land surface is covered by sedimentary rocks. Shale, sandstone, limestone, dolomite. Rocks laid down, layer by layer, over older rocks. In some places these layers extend for miles beneath our feet, and humans, like oversized mosquitoes, poke ever-deeper holes to suck the oil and gas that often hides within, a legacy of ancient life. Sedimentary landscapes are full of memory and story, each vertical inch often holding thousands of years of history, for those who have learned how to read it: fossils, floods, sea level shifts, climate change, distant eruptions and asteroid impacts, tectonic drift. They feel to me a bit like libraries: stable, rich, deep, ancient, but also a little bit stagnant, crystallized, heavy. The molten iron heart of our planet feels somewhat more insulated in these places, buried beneath a thicker skin, beneath millions of years of deposition.

Fifteen percent of Earth’s land surface is covered by igneous rocks. Basalt, granite, andesite, rhyolite, gabbro. Rocks that have hardened from liquid. The frozen blood of our living planet, either cooling slowly below ground or released from volcanoes and vents to flow as lava. Although they vary regionally in color, chemistry, and texture, igneous rocks are always locally uniform. One fragment of basalt or granite looks like any other. They are a blank slate, a canvas upon which new stories will be written, new strata will be laid down. Igneous rocks feel to me like a conduit to the core. Standing and living on them, I feel grounded, connected, light, joyful, unburdened. But they can also feel a bit indistinct, unrelatable, each hill and valley feeling like the next, the great flood basalts covering thousands of square miles in a single regional story.

The remaining twelve percent of Earth’s land area is covered by metamorphic rocks. These are rocks that have been “cooked”, under high heat and pressure deep within the Earth, until they dramatically transform. Like the wonder of infinitely unique snowflakes forming in clouds, this is a mystery of beauty and complexity created from simplicity, the underlying conscious and creative structure of matter given freedom of expression. Atoms move, rearrange, recrystallize. Layered sheets of mica grow, creating – when exposed – a sparkling landscape of tiny mirrors. Silicon, oxygen, and metal atoms migrate out of their original minerals, re-aligning into geometric garnets that stud the rock as deep red jewels. Garnet-mica schist is one common metamorphic rock. Another is gneiss, an endlessly variable assortment of black and pinkish layers, folded into waves and whorls – the rock of my childhood home. In a transformative environment, uniform gray limestone becomes endlessly-patterned white marble. Crumbly shale and mudstone becomes slate, then schist. Granite becomes gneiss. Dull sandstone becomes shining quartzite.

If sedimentary landscapes feel like libraries to be explored and igneous landscapes feel like a blank canvas and a bridge to the living heart of Earth, metamorphic landscapes feel alive. Rock outcroppings appear unexpectedly, wherever the forces of heat and pressure created harder stone. Layers fold at all angles. Weaker zones erode, creating overhanging cliffs. Each outcrop, each angled ridge, each valley has its own personality, its own surprises. Each feels like it deserves its own name, like it can be known, addressed, related to. Metamorphic landscapes feel rich, in a way, like cities full of rock-beings, each waiting to be discovered. Who knows what the next section of stream, the next curve, the next ridge might reveal?

Metamorphic rocks tend to be old, often measured in billions of years, because these metamorphoses take place miles deep, and then the rocks must be uplifted and all of the overlying rocks eroded away – processes that require hundreds of millions of years. Metamorphic rocks form the roots of old mountain ranges, exposed when the high alpine peaks have weathered away to forested slopes. The gneisses of my childhood are among the oldest rocks on Earth, uplifted 2.7 billion years ago in what may have been our planet’s first mountain-building orogeny as the core cooled, the crust thickened, and plates began to form and shift and collide. That is more than enough time for Himalayan-height peaks to erode to a flat plain, waiting for glacial floods to expose the buried bedrock. By comparison, these Appalachian gneisses are youthful, formed a mere billion years past and uplifted 300 million years ago, their topography still sharply incised, their atoms still shifting steadily seaward.

Fifteen years ago I spent a couple of weeks in Sweden, and the gneiss boulders there felt familiar, strangely homey, despite being half a world away. I am discovering a similar feeling here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the ancient metamorphic core of the southern Appalachians. Gneiss feels like home to me, I guess.

What do you feel, as you explore different rock landscapes?

What geology feels most joyful to you? Most resonant? Most comforting?

Winter’s grip still holds strong, at least across the eastern US, but the days are growing rapidly longer and the dark quarter of the year is now behind us. At 3:03pm eastern/12:03 pm pacific today, we cross the threshold in our orbit that is halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox. Happy Imbolc, however you choose to celebrate!

Everywhere I have lived has been shaped by water. And this shaping happens sometimes inch by inch over millennia and sometimes in great sudden leaps and bounds, when solid ground is submerged and swept away, when flows escape containment and chart new courses, when the land itself becomes liquid and breaks free.

When I was 11 years old, warm rains on a record snowpack swelled the Minnesota River beyond living memory. I watched with a mixture of excitement and anxiety as our garden disappeared, tier by tier, then our sheds, our basketball court, our woodpiles. As the piles collapsed my father and I “herded” firewood, in our canoe, pulling it from the water before it could float downstream. Our basement filled, our house became an island, we moved in with friends. And then the river crested, just a few inches below the floorboards, and the waters receded leaving only subtle signs of their presence: sandbars on dry land, debris lodged high in trees. This was a 100-year flood: an event expected to recur, on average, once per century.

In late September of 2024, the towering stormclouds of Hurricane Helene met the high ridgelines of southern Appalachia with calamitous effect, all of their moisture wrung out over a small region, with rain totals reaching thirty inches. Saturated soil lost its tenuous grip on the smooth, ancient metamorphic rock beneath. The sheer momentum of torrenting mountain streams proved too much for the roots of riparian trees and the cobbles and boulders of creekbeds, and all began to move as one: a mass of water, earth, stone, and wood sweeping away buildings, roads, bridges, reshaping landscapes, carving a swath of destruction through which once-shaded brooks now babble in bright sunlight, tumbling through the bones of the mountains amidst sparkling glints of mica and quartz. This was a 1000-year flood: an event expected to recur, on average, once per millennium.

Newly exposed cobble-filled riverbanks tell the tales of earlier cataclysms: this has happened many times before, in the 250 million years since the lands now called Africa and North America collided to raise a range of folded and broken summits that rivaled today’s Rockies. Barren high peaks fall rock by rock, ground by glaciers and streams into sand. Lower, forested mountains are protected by a skin of roots and soil, held in place until gravity and water require otherwise. This is how these mountains move, though we seldom live long enough to see it.

When we look back into the story of our living planet, we find larger and larger disruptive events, further and further apart: each destroying, re-shaping, re-creating land and life in its own way. Volcanic eruptions that covered entire states in rivers of lava. Meteorite impacts. Solar storms. Continental rifts and collisions. And floods.

The magical gneiss mini-mountains that rise behind my childhood home are nestled in a valley far too deep to have been carved by the Minnesota River - even with its occasional outbursts. And within those rocks are smooth tunnels, carved by swirling water, high on the cliffs.

This valley was formed 10,000 years ago when the trapped waters of retreating glaciers found an outlet to the south and carved a channel to the Gulf of Mexico, briefly carrying the flow of ten present-day Mississippi Rivers. We might call this a 10,000-year flood. A flood so large that it creates new ecosystems, uncovers and carves some of the oldest bedrock on Earth, long-buried beneath glacial gravels, leaving behind islands of stone and cedar, home to rare plants and endangered skinks and a few curious, immersed children.

For the last 17 years I have made my home in the Willamette Valley of western Oregon, a place with topsoil so deep that it feels bottomless, spread perfectly flat for miles, far beyond the floodplain of the modest river that flows through it. The volcanic soils that hold water through months of summer drought, that have nourished my lettuce and squash and tomatoes for many years, again tell the story of cataclysms of water, some of the largest floods yet revealed to those who read and understand the stories etched into Earth’s crust.

The soils of the Willamette Valley originated hundreds of miles to the east. Where those soils once were there is now only a thin, young veil of organic matter over rock: the channeled scablands, they are called. This flood appeared without warning, carrying ten times of volume of all the world’s rivers, wiping entire regions clear of soil and turning the present-day Willamette Valley into a temporary lake, a settling basin filled with feet of new silt and clay when the waters all made their way to the sea. It happened when a dam of ice - a lobe of a glacier a thousand feet high - suddenly gave way, releasing the vast lake that filled the valleys of western Montana. We might call this a 100,000-year flood. Perhaps a million-year flood. A flood whose legacy defines bioregions for millennia.

We are fluid beings in water bodies on a water planet, and yet we cannot survive submerged. To see our homes inundated, our fields and gardens flooded, is to feel a sort of drowning, even as we watch from higher ground. I have just arrived in the mountains of North Carolina, and grief still runs deep here. Grief for loss of homes and property, for some. Grief for change and loss, among all who love these streams and mountains. Beloved streamside trees, trails, shaded swimming holes, sacred spaces are simply not there anymore, their atoms and molecules dispersed across Tennessee and through Memphis and Baton Rouge to the distant ocean.

And yet, destruction is also creation, on every scale. Already life is taking hold among the tumbled boulders, and new swimming holes tempt a dip in winter sunshine. For some decades hikers will scramble amongst garnet-studded schist and layered gneiss, shining white quartz and mirrored black biotite, a billion-year story written in stone, temporarily revealed by the power of water. Until trees spring up and drop leaves, forming new soil. Until moss and lichen cover the rocks, life finding every opportunity, filling every niche.

Whatever water touches, it dissolves. Raindrops dissolve rock, millimeters per millennium, pounding surf grinds headlands into sand, and the largest floods dissolve entire landscapes overnight. Water in motion is always an agent of unbinding.

Physical unbinding but also, I feel, unbinding on other levels. In a time when so many of us have become crystallized in our worldviews, unable to see our shared humanity through our caricatures of each other, the stories emerging from Appalachia are of communities coming together, helping each other through, rebuilding roads and homes. Barriers of distrust, prejudices and projections softened by shared meals, reciprocity, gifts freely offered and gratefully received.

It is a mystery to me that I only felt a calling to this region after the great flood. I am one who seeks to sow seeds of a new way of being, moving beyond the illusion of separation, looking inward rather than outward for truth and understanding. And I am curious to see what might be taking shape here, in the aftermath of unbinding. Perhaps I will weave my own current into that story. That remains to be seen. For now, I am exploring, sensing, sharing, discerning, allowing my own roots to connect with land and community, feeling firsthand the legacy of water in this place.

Mars and Venus have disappeared from the sky, from our perspective. Mars has been sinking slowly into the sunset over the past months, while Venus has been more rapidly sinking into the dawn. This week they cross paths behind the Sun, in synchrony. In the months ahead, Venus will rise brilliantly into the sunset, and Mars will rise more slowly and subtly into pre-dawn skies.

Jupiter reaches “opposition” this week, high overhead in the constellation Gemini, directly opposite the Sun. Although it can be challenging to visualize, this means that Jupiter, too, is a part of this momentary alignment. If we were standing on Mars, we would see a sky temporarily depleted of planets, with Venus, Earth, and Jupiter all hidden in the glare of the Sun.

I am not going to tell you what this “means”, only that I find it interesting, profound, worthy of note.

I am intrigued by the intersection of astronomy and astrology, the way that the grand dance of gravity wells and electromagnetic fields shapes and patterns the living, conscious universe of which we are a part.

Scientists are beginning to explore correlations between these alignments and cycles of solar activity, proposing that orbital tidal forces create a “metronome” that guides rhythmic patterns of sunspots, flares, and solar storms.

When we look at the Sun at this time of year, we are also looking into Sagittarius (the constellation, not the sign), the archer or teapot that marks the center of our galaxy. Although this larger alignment is not as perfect, being a couple of weeks past the winter solstice when the Sun and the galactic center align, we also have the collective gravitational tides and magnetic fields of millions of stars and a four-million-solar-mass black hole pulling in roughly the same direction as our planetary neighbors.

Perhaps we may see increased solar activity in the weeks ahead, or tectonic activity, or shifts on more subtle levels. So many humans become attached to outcomes and predictions, seek to demystify the dance into rules and lines and definitions.

Let us be open to mystery. Let us see what this alignment brings. Let us pause to notice the great, slow, rhythmic, harmonic dance of creation.

There are three ways I could begin, three paths that I have followed in this Solstice time, exploring patterns within and without, finding resonances. Once upon a time I would have tried to link them logically or linearly, but there are no lines here, only meanderings, wanderings.

One

There is a pattern of language that I recognize instantly. It is the language of immersion, of experience. Language that does not describe or analyze. Language that dissolves the perception of separation. Language that is felt, received more than it is interpreted, comprehended. The poetry of Hannah King and Mary Oliver and Rainer Maria Rilke. The immersive essays of Kate Clearlight and Marija Petkovska and Bill Davison. Language of embodiment, of softening, of curiosity. Language that speaks to my soul.

I have often imagined this approach as feminine, in contrast to the familiar flight into abstraction and thought and separation that feels comparably masculine. And it is indeed true that more women write and speak in this way, that it is perhaps easier for those of us in male bodies to forget that we are embodied beings, without the monthly somatic cycles, the new life growing inside, the experience of birthing and nursing.

But more recently I have been releasing this distinction. And as I have been settling into an experience of deeper embodiment, I have been asking myself what masculinity looks like, feels like, beyond separation.

Two

I have not felt called to “mythopoetic masculinity”, to men’s gatherings, to the archetypes of Warrior, Magician, Lover, King. Perhaps I have some wounds left to heal in relationships with fellow men, but I also simply don’t feel a resonance. These archetypes feel too much like roles, identities, abstractions, ways of doing or ways of thinking more than ways of being.

So, if not that, then what? What archetypes would feel resonant to me?

Three

Last month I had a conversation with a tree. A very large, very old, yang-feeling fir tree high on a coastal ridgetop. And the question I asked was something along the lines of what it means to hold masculine energy in a forest. Not in a village or a wolf pack or some other social structure, but in the deeper fabric of reciprocity and co-creation that speaks in rivulets and raindrops and lichen and mycelium.

Whether the tree answered me or whether I simply peered deeply inside myself in his presence is an open question, but what I felt in that moment was the beginning of a framework of paired masculine and feminine archetypes that has gradually taken shape in the weeks since.

The River

She who flows. She who is like water. She who is flexible and yet indestructible.

She who surrenders to the current and in so doing comes to know herself.

That part of us which cannot in any way be defined but can always be felt, is always in motion.

The blood within our veins. The air in our lungs. Spring breezes. Storm winds. Molten rock deep beneath our feet. River of stars overhead.

All of the other archetypes have some vocation, some profession, some animal, some activity that aligns or resonates. The River does not. Changing, shifting, flowing, transforming is her nature, and yet in so doing she creates form, leaves tracks upon history, carves channels into rock.

The Builder

He who contains and channels the flows. The beaver. The carpenter. The mason. The engineer. The conductor.

He who holds space, who creates containers. Physical containers. Social containers. Energetic containers.

He who defines boundaries, creates structure. Walls of our homes. Our bones. Our skin.

There is a sometimes-subtle but important difference between containing the flows and controlling them. Sometimes we act like oversize beavers, making rivers deep enough for our boats, transforming flow into motion and energy, containing without controlling. And sometimes we seek to tame the rivers, to keep them confined in their channels, to make them flow when and where we want them. And in so doing we create disharmony, dominion, separation, a war mentality.

There are parallels in the way we build our homes, in the way we build our gatherings and communities. Are we seeking to contain, to create structure within which all can blossom and express and co-create, or are we seeking to control, to create conformity to a rigid plan or vision?

The Sprite

She who steps lightly. The mountain stream. The bubbling spring. The dancer. The kinglet flitting among branch tips.

She who laughs easily, who allows emotion to wash over and through, who shifts from grief to anger to joy in minutes.

She who is spontaneous, curious, impulsive, intuitive, quick.

She who lives entirely in this moment: expressive, creative, attuned, unpredictable.

The Monk

He who watches and waits. The mountain. The ancient oak. The soaring hawk.

He who feels deeply but slowly, who holds memories of deep time, who is content to watch the river flow past, to gaze at the stars, to take in the endless patterns of clouds overhead.

He who is calm, observant, meditative.

He who holds stability, strength, continuity, serenity.

The Wise One

She who holds the threads of the pattern. The ocean. The grandmother. The seed saver. The librarian. The healer.

She who learns through connection, who honors every part, who ensures that all voices are heard.

She who holds all that has been created in form, through cycles of death and rebirth.

She who can sense imbalance and restore harmony, can resolve paradox into wholeness.

The Weaver

He who weaves threads into new forms. The architect. The plant breeder. The bard. The designer.

He who merges intention and wisdom into invention and creation.

He who allows the pattern to evolve, expand, grow.

The Mirror

She who receives and reflects. The Moon. The still pond. The listener.

She who perceives on all levels, who sees herself in another and another in herself.

She who allows us to know ourselves more deeply.

She who allows us to see through the illusion of separation.

The Illuminator

He who shines from within. The Sun. The firefly. The guide. The visionary.

He who lights the path, who helps others to find their way, to discover their own inner light.

He who reveals what has been hidden.

He who shows what is possible.

Unlike conventional archetypes, these are in no way specific to men or women, and perhaps I am creating confusion by describing them as masculine and feminine, by choosing gendered pronouns. All of them live, to some degree, within all of us. And yet there are tendencies that I have observed. Plant breeders (Weavers) tend to be men, and heirloom seed savers (Wise Ones) tend to be women. Builders of all types - those who create structure - tend to be men, as do monks and contemplative hermits of all denominations. Listeners, counselors, and healers tend to be women. And women who are builders tend to carry a masculine energy about them, while men who are healers often have a feminine energy.

Within myself, I find that I am perhaps equally River and Builder. I can, at times, struggle to create structure to contain my flows, and my journey of the past few years has been more surrender than intention. But I also enjoy building shelter, holding space, and I feel like that is something I will be opening more moving forward. It is also something that I feel a resistance to, an area where I have some old wounds left to heal.

I am more Monk than Sprite. I spent many days of my childhood immersively watching. Watching birds. Watching trains. Watching clouds drift overhead. Quietly communing. I find that my emotions can be muted, slow, that I can tend toward detachment and standing apart. I find myself attracted to others who are more spritely, impulsive, spontaneous, emotional, in order to awaken that part of me.

I am more Weaver than Wise One. I aspire to create new things, and I don’t feel specifically called toward healing, preserving, maintaining. Though I respect and honor all Wise Ones in their work.

I am perhaps equally Mirror and Illuminator, shining or reflecting as is most needed in a particular moment.

And I feel I am all eight of these, to varying degrees, more than I am Warrior, King, Magician, or Lover.

Do these “alternate archetypes” resonate with you? Which ones do you identify with? Are there others that you would include?

For more Winter Solstice reading:

• Last year’s Paradigm Shift: a meditative poem for stepping out of separation.

• Hymns for an Ecological Spirituality (2021): five songs for singing at Solstice time.

May you have a blessed Solstice!

~Markael

When I wrote down the lyrics to my Labyrinth Canyon song, I tucked them between the pages of Hannah’s We Are Wanderers. And when I flipped it open to copy the words into our collection of river songs, I saw that I was also looking at Be Like Water, on page 42. And in that moment I felt like that poem needed to be a song too, so I wrote it alongside.

I’m not sure if it’s a song yet, but here is one possibility. It can also work as a round or a cascading echo.

I was somehow not surprised - because these parallels and not-coincidences happen too often - to learn that Hannah was working on a new book of poetry with that title. It appeared in print in what seemed like no time at all, and I picked up my copy last week.

Just a couple of weeks ago I found myself wading into a small river that was a little deeper than I expected, trying to keep my pants dry. And then these words washed over me as I realized that I was - literally - holding on, feet in the mud bank, clinging to the vines. And that was all it took to convince me to shed my clothes and join the flow.

Be Like Water is, first, a journey of letting go, of releasing the barriers within our minds and bodies that keep our flows not just contained - which is part of the dance - but controlled. Finding the courage to jump in, or finding ourselves at a breaking point where there simply is no other option.

It is, next, a journey of curiosity, of wondering who we truly are, of allowing the current to guide us, to tumble us, to show us our own reflection amidst the herons and reeds and sun-dappled shadows.

And it is, finally, a journey of finding, of discovering a sense of self that is not based on fragile identities or roles or even archetypes, but rather “water meeting water, moving through channels of stone”. An inner strength that comes from knowing, sensing, feeling innately that we are a part of it all, and all of it lives in us, flows through us.

As Hannah writes in her own book-release post:

I have spent hours amidst tangled willow and reeds, watching bird flight and sunsets, feeling the current wrap around my skin. I have seen water in its many forms and seasons and expressions as a reflection of myself. This mirror has softened me into an acceptance and understanding of my truer identity. Beyond the mind’s reasoning and analytical structuring, there is something much deeper and stronger and life-giving that we contain. To Be Like Water, is to become a channel, allowing life to move and pour through us. We are reservoirs of being, with an intricacy of tributaries. Maybe all our waterways, individually, connect to oceans collectively.

In some ways I wish that Hannah’s writing were not so rare. What would it be like if we lived in a world where we sat in rivers more than we sat in desks, where we stopped looking out there for truth and love and validation and instead allowed ourselves to be held, immersed, met by the living wisdom that surrounds us?

But, that is not the world we live in - yet.

And so I highly recommend slipping Be Like Water into your pocket for your next trip to the river, to read as your feet are tickled by the current. And giving copies to all of your friends who are trying to break free, who feel the subtle pull of something deeper. And while you’re at it, pick up a copy of We Are Wanderers as well.

To order these direct from the author, use the Venmo or Paypal QR codes below and send:

• $17 for each copy of Be Like Water

• $26 for each copy of We Are Wanderers

• $5 for shipping.

Leave a note with your payment including what you are purchasing and your name and shipping address, or email this info to hannahbeeking(at)gmail.com.

Supplies are dwindling and more books are on order, so shipping may not be immediate.

Tomorrow I turn 500.

Counting by the Moon.

I was born three days after the New Moon, under a slim waxing crescent, and when our celestial companion returns to that phase tomorrow I will have lived through 500 complete cycles. Five hundred crescents sinking into evening twilight. Five hundred halves - balance points of light and dark - shining high in the evening southern sky. Five hundred Full Moons rising at sunset.

I have always loved the slim evening crescents. Perhaps some part of my being remembers this from my emergence into Earth, feels a familiarity each time it returns.

I remember seeing the Moon with new eyes at this stage, two years ago on my 476th lunar birthday, shortly after an intense process of re-embodiment that left everything feeling a bit different. From this point onward I have always been intensely aware of where our Moon is at in her cycle, and I have made a tradition of watching Full Moon rises whenever I can, of finding the young crescent on her first or second day.

If we didn’t live by calendars, we wouldn’t know exactly when our birthday came around each year. It would be plus or minus a week or so - “in the time of the basswood blossoms” or “just before the spring equinox”. But if we watched the sky we would know exactly when our lunar birthday arrived each month. Something feels special about this natural clock. No abstractions. No months of arbitrary and variable length named for old gods and emperors. Just Earth’s perpetual dance partner keeping time in a billion-year swing. Just our own awareness and attunement.

To find your lunar birthday, simply look up the dates of the moon phases in the year you were born. (Change the year in the URL.) Then count from your birthday to the nearest phase. So, three days after the New Moon, or two days before the third quarter.

To find your lunar age, calculate your age in days, divide this number by 29.53, and round down. Unless today is your lunar birthday, in which case you might need to round up a little.

There are 29.53 days in a lunar cycle and 365.24 days in a year. Dividing these numbers means 12.37 lunar cycles in a year.

This is very, very close to 235:19. Every 19 years or 235 moon cycles, our lunar birthday and our calendar birthday align. (Leap years and orbital eccentricities can make it be off by a day or so sometimes.) This also means that if we find a year when the Full Moon is on our birthday, it will happen again in 19, 38, 57, and 76 years.

This is fairly close to 100:8. We reach our multiples-of-100 lunar birthdays when we’re 8 (100), 16 (200), 24 (300), 32 (400), 40 (500), etc.

This is also fairly close to 111:9. We reach our repeating-digit lunar birthdays just ahead of our 9th, 18th, 27th, 36th, 45th, etc. birthdays. My godmother who is about to turn 90 has just completed her 1,111th lunar cycle.

What is your lunar birthday? What phase of the Moon were you born under?

What is your lunar age? How many Full Moons have you lived through? How many of these have you honored with your gaze?

Does it feel meaningful to measure time in this way? To experiment with stepping outside of the calendars and clocks that govern our lives? To set aside the stories that go along with being “in our 30s” or “in our 60s”? To shift from abstraction into immersion?

The story of Genesis goes like this:

There was a will, an idea. And the Creator gave form to that idea. And it was finished. And He is watching from afar, looking on from on high.

How very masculine.

How incredibly unlike the way the universe actually works.

From the scale of DNA to mitochondria to cells to eyes and ears to bodies and trees to forests and rivers to mountains and oceans to planets to star systems to galaxies and beyond…

Across every timescale from milliseconds to millions of years…

Everything is continuously creating itself.

Wherever we look, we find beauty, complexity, creativity, emergence. In the structure of water molecules forming snowflakes and frost patterns, droplets refracting light in all its colors. In the way that our 30 trillion cells collaborate, the way our bodies create and constantly re-create themselves. In bursting buds and germinating seeds. In the jewel tones and migration paths of the Dendroica warblers. In oaks and palms and towering sequoias. In canyon walls. In fountains of lava. In rainforests and reefs. In the orbital dance of planets, the ever-shifting storms of Jupiter, the spiral arms of the Milky Way.

It is mildly interesting that a pretty creature called a Monarch Butterfly exists, flies about, can be classified and pinned in an insect collection.

It is utterly wondrous that this creature hatches from an egg into a tiny colorful caterpillar, splits her skin five times as she grows, hangs herself from a thread, splits open one last time to reveal a glassy chrysalis, dissolves her body entirely into goo, re-forms within days into wings and patterned scales and legs and far-seeing eyes, breaks free, expands, takes wing, and then knows – based on the time of year – whether to fly north or south. And if she flies south, she knows exactly how to find the mountain forest in Mexico where thousands of her brothers and sisters will gather to wait out the winter, where they have ideal conditions and strength in numbers. And then she knows when to fly north again, where to stop and where exactly to lay her eggs. And her children, when they emerge with their wings, know to keep flying north. And their children know to stay put, to lay eggs close to home in high summer. And then their children – her great-grandchildren – know that it is time to complete the cycle, know innately how to find the wintering grounds again.

It is actually impossible to encode this migration pattern in DNA. Sure, we can mess with their genes and find ways to break their navigation systems, but there is no mutation that could send them all to Asheville, North Carolina for the winter instead. Their routes are encoded in the living matrix – in something far deeper than thought or language, in something that cannot be located in matter or reduced to cause and effect, in the very essence of their being. And this is true of all life, in more ways than we realize.

Creation is not an event. It is a process. A process that is alive everywhere in every moment. Which means that the Creator, the life force, that which guides random molecular motions into living structures and ever-shifting beauty, is also alive everywhere in every moment. And this Creator is not acting on will, on an idea, but on discernment, balance, guiding all that exists – from butterflies to stars and planets - into and out of form through cycles of rebirth.

I have just told the opposite story of Genesis.

There is a living universe. And within that universe the Creator is always giving birth. And every being, every mountain, every river, every planet is Her child. And She lives within all of Her children, so that they too can give birth, so that they can know their story, know instinctively what they need to know to coexist in harmony.

What happens when the story of will, of creation-as-product, claims dominion over the story of wisdom, of creation-as-process?

Patriarchy. Witch-burning. Wars of expansion and ideology and religion. Empire. Extraction. Depletion. Pollution. Technology to fix the problems caused by other technology. Drugs to treat the side-effects of other drugs. Abstractions. Beliefs. Distorted stories about ourselves.

How strange do the stories of patriarchy seem, when we step outside of them?

A woman’s body contains everything needed to bring a new human into the world. Womb, umbilical cord, milk, egg that will be the seed, that will divide and diversify to form all 30 trillion cells. All that a man provides is a single pollen grain, a tiny capsule of genetic material. The magic of creation is hers. By what right could he possibly claim ownership – of her, of her womb, of her children?

Our children naturally find wonder in all that they see, until we put them in desks in sterile boxes, away from the winds and birds and falling leaves, and teach them that what really matters are the abstractions we have created: language, math, logic, religion, history. Until we teach them, through our own actions and values, that the butterflies and owls and thunderstorms are just nature, a passive and beautiful and sometimes disruptive backdrop within which we shape our lives.

The closer we get to this innate, wild, creative power, the less we are able to engage our minds and wills, the more we are asked to surrender and open.

Consider that our bodies give us some degree of choice as to when we step away to the bathroom, when we eat, when we sleep, when we drink water, even how long we hold our breath while swimming or singing a long phrase. Our bodies tell us their needs, and we interweave those needs with our schedules and desires. But our wills and schedules have no influence whatsoever over when a child is conceived, when the moment of birthing arrives.

The Dendroica Project has been my chronicle of opening to this living current, which has always been deeply woven within and through me but which was bound for many years within a structure of mind. It has also, unexpectedly, become a chronicle of my own rebirthing, my own surrendering. And it doesn’t feel accurate to say that I chose this unfolding, only that I allowed it, I stopped resisting.

I am discovering that nearly everything about working with this wisdom within all matter is the inverse of the dominant paradigm.

Nothing was, everything is.

Nothing is abstract, everything is personal and relational.

There is no role for experts, for classrooms and lectures and textbooks. Knowledge and understanding is felt, inside, in the moment.

There is no room for hierarchy, for methodologies and systems. The mind does not craft identity or plot a course so much as receive, reflect, discern.

Effort and determination do not open a path. In fact I have found that they usually create detours and roadblocks. Invitation and intention – desires set free without attachment – allow the pattern to weave in response.

Several times now I have sketched out a book that I could publish, only to feel the energy slip away as I attempted to fit a framework around these essays – seasonal or thematic. As process inched closer to product – something that I would try to sell, to market. I do feel that I would like to have my writing in print – if only because most of what I write is probably better received while sitting by a mountain stream than while staring at a screen – but I am letting go of the idea of crafting A Book, of the standard sort with introductions and bibliographies and too many words in one place. And I am letting go of the idea of being A Writer, of the sort who is often quoted and interviewed and asked for autographs, of the sort who begins to feel like writing is work because it pays the bills.

I feel like it is time for me to align my own outward path with my inner experience, not just in writing but in presence with others, in groups, in workshops, in music. I am beginning to have glimpses of what this might look like, how much more joyful it would feel than a life of meetings and emails and spreadsheets – even if those meetings and emails and spreadsheets are all in pursuit of noble goals. And – at the same time – I feel an intense and deep-rooted resistance to this. Not the sort of resistance that feels like intuition, like guidance, but the sort that feels like a protective shell born of centuries of survival within a paradigm of logic, mind, dominion, control. An invisibility cloak of sorts. A protection that I feel I am ready to release, that I have been gradually dissolving through various experiences over the past year.

I find myself inspired by eight days of song and story on the Green River, by the way that journey created a container within which all of us could open to a deeper experience. Within which we could comfortably shed our physical clothes and soften our inner barriers and step away from our habits of distraction. Within which we could relax into direct experience of river and rock and sun and herons and warblers and cottonwoods and six other human creatures. I don’t think I will become a river guide, but I would love to create or co-create experiences of opening, of awakening, of setting ourselves free from our self-imposed stories and rediscovering the living creative current that is always within and around us.

I feel that the time of awakening is upon us. Not because we must, not because there is a moral imperative to do so. But because the paradigm of imposed will, of creation-as-product, of extraction and abstraction is sputtering to an ignoble end in a cauldron of warring ideologies, discarded plastics, depleted soils, AI knock-offs, spam emails, junk food, empty promises, decaying infrastructure, wealth inequality, cubicles, and antidepressants.

And because She is calling to us. The feminine aspect of All. That which raises mountains, which brings the rain, which guides the monarchs and warblers on their migrations, which lives in our cells and bodies. That which has been silenced, suppressed, ignored for far too long.

I am listening.

Are you listening?

I was thinking I might find a photograph of a monarch butterfly for the top, but then I remembered this artwork, that I purchased from its maker this past May. I buy very little art – in part because I am blessed to have an incredible artist in my family – but this one just felt resonant.

Looking at it more closely, it is a woman inside a butterfly. A woman who contains stars and galaxies. A butterfly that contains oceans, whales, mountains, forests. I could not imagine a more perfect match, even if it had been commissioned. These sorts of alignments have been appearing with surprising frequency and offer a quiet reassurance in times of doubt that - yes, this is real.

This work is titled “Imaginal Morphosis” – named for the “imaginal cells” within caterpillars that hold the image and potential of the butterfly-to-be. To buy one of these for yourself or to check out Rena’s other works, visit her website.

Cyclically speaking, tomorrow is Samhain - halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. The end of harvest season, end of the downswing, beginning of the season of short days and long nights. The cycles of Moon and Sun are in phase at the moment - full at Samhain, new at equinox and solstice.

Traditionally, this is the time of year when the veils are thin, when it is easier to reach the spirit realm, the souls of ancestors. Perhaps I am attuned differently because I feel myself pulled not outward but inward, not upward but downward this time of year. This is the season when I have felt most deeply attuned to Earth, to life, to the wild feminine force of creation. It would seem strange to feel this more deeply at the time of falling leaves than at the time of bursting buds, but so it is. There is, now that I consider it, often a symmetric and perplexing feeling of disconnection around Beltane, the time of peak growth and blossoming, a time of action and outward focus. I can see this pattern in the archive of Dendroica writings - A Letter from Earth and The End of Separation were both born in this season.

Although the stormy weather may keep her hidden from view, today is the 500th full Moon since my birth. November’s “monthly post” will be an exploration of lunar birthdays and lunar timekeeping. I had thought that “Goddess Within” might wait for the winter solstice, but these sorts of co-creations take form quickly and do not like waiting :-).

Once upon a time I received awards for my mind. Spelling bees. Math team. Knowledge bowl. Honor rolls. Merit scholarships. Some human minds operate more like computers than others - crunching numbers, storing and recalling information - and it so happens that I ended up with one of those.

As the world has grappled with privilege and sought to balance the scales, I have found myself wondering exactly why we have created something called “merit”, that can supposedly be measured by test scores and grade point averages, and why it is still considered OK to assign greater or lesser worth to human beings on this basis.

Over the past few generations, these skills have become demonstrably less useful. Calculators can handle the math. Autocorrect will catch mistakes and teach spelling on the fly. Search engines offer access to all of the world’s histories, encyclopedias, and research journals in seconds. AI can now summarize, analyze, create images and videos based on our prompts and needs.

We are approaching another John Henry moment.

The Industrial Revolution was by and large a replacement of human muscles with machines, and humans who had built their livelihoods and identities as cobblers and blacksmiths and steel-drivers found themselves suddenly cast aside. Now it is human minds that are being replaced, and this time it is the analysts, the technical writers, the coders who are in trouble. Perhaps it is time to write some new ballads.

More broadly, the advancement of computing power and “artificial intelligence” is beginning to force a reckoning that I feel is long overdue. We have been taught that our analytical minds are the pinnacle of our evolution, the core of who we are, that our emotions and intuitions and experiences and dreams and revelations - even our physical bodies - are subservient to logic and reason. As we begin to use AI as a tool, replacing and exceeding our own analytical capacities, it becomes easier to see that the human analytical mind is also a tool. A tool that is meant to serve the whole of us, not declare itself in charge and hold tight to the steering wheel.

Consider: For the most important decisions in your life - partners, best friends, having children, where to live, career paths - did you decide rationally or did your mind rationalize a choice that was already clear on a deeper level, so that it could pretend to be in charge? And if you did decide rationally, based on a cost-benefit analysis or a balancing of others’ needs and expectations, was there some part of you that felt bereft, constrained, contained, controlled, resentful, yearning for freedom?

Consider: Whether you are an artist, an astronomer, a musician, a counselor, a farmer, a caregiver, a birdwatcher, a forester, a river guide - whatever you are most passionate about, can you explain why you feel that way? Probably you can describe what brings you joy, but can your mind reach the root, the why? And if you try to fully explain yourself as a product of genetics and circumstance, does that feel real or does it feel contrived, limiting?

For myself, I can confidently say that my mind has never brought me joy. It has brought me satisfaction and recognition, certainly. And also plenty of fear and anxiety. Because rational decisions can always be wrong. Some important data can be missing. And so we must be vigilant. And recognition must be earned. If we can win or excel, we can also lose or disappoint, and so we must constantly perform - academically, vocationally, socially, relationally.

If my mind has never brought me joy, then what has? Here is a short and very incomplete list.

Communing with warblers and kinglets

Long conversations of the heart

Nights around bonfires

Whip-poor-wills, owl hoots, wood thrush and ovenbird songs

Lilacs, winter daphne, basswood blossoms

Intimacy, affection, loving touch

Dancing to live music

Running naked in thunderstorms

Singing in harmony

Stargazing, sunsets, moonrises, ever-shifting clouds

Germinating seeds and ripening fruits

Homemade pies and homebrewed mead

Keeping bees and gathering honey

Feeling truly, deeply seen and loved

All of these are entirely outside the domain of artificial intelligence, and will remain so no matter how advanced the technology becomes.

AI will never be six months pregnant and wake up with a sudden craving for dill pickles.

AI will never feel like this is an excellent day for a trip to the beach.

AI will never remember that time in middle school when we rolled down hills in barrels full of leaves.

AI will never wake from dreaming and ponder the meanings and messages.

AI will never understand grief, loss, the bittersweetness of time and change.

AI will never experience a sudden burst of existential joy for no reason.

AI will never embrace the mystery without trying to find answers.

AI will never comprehend sensory, sensual, emotional embodiment.

For any project, task, job description, assignment, it is now a worthwhile question to ask:

Could AI do this?

The answer has practical implications, but it is also an important litmus test because we are not meant to be machines.

Why are we here? is of course a very big question that I cannot claim to answer definitively, but I also cannot believe that we are here to go to school, choose a career, raise a family, save money, retire, and die. We are not here to execute the script, to fit into boxes, to be respectable and respected and become a footnote in the history books. We are here, my inner knowing tells me, to immerse, to embody our whole selves, to grow, to feel, to heal, to give and receive, to form relationships, to be curious, to be creative, to be present and aware in each moment.

And if that is true, then it does not serve us to spend our lives hammering steel into rock, as many folks did in John Henry’s day. And it also does not serve us to spend our lives translating inputs into outputs, creating bland advertising copy, reading and writing legal briefs, or doing any of the other myriad activities that AI and machine minds are in the process of taking over.

If the answer to could AI do this? is yes, then one possibility is that we simply allow AI to do it. The other, more interesting possibility is that we shift the task, the role, the assignment to be outside the scope of AI. That we stop treating humans like machines and instead treat each other like embodied divine beings. How does that sound?

In medicine…

How many doctors and patients actually enjoy the 15-minute visits where all of the charts and labs distill down to a standard prescription or procedure - one that more often than not doesn’t restore health and leads to unwanted side effects? It’s certainly true that an AI doctor could handle that, but…

What if doctors stopped viewing bodies as mechanical meat-suits? What if doctors looked at the whole person, developed meaningful and lasting relationships? What if they understood that physical health and mental health and emotional health and spiritual health cannot be separated, that no two bodies are alike? What if they sought not to resolve symptoms but to restore balance? What if they relied on their intuition, their wisdom, their “gut feeling” at least as much as on standard guidance? What if they consulted in care teams rather than fragmenting into siloed specialties?

I have to believe that we would be a whole lot healthier, but also there would be no reason to worry about AI taking over.

In education…

What do children really gain from reading something and then summarizing it? From memorizing facts and figures to regurgitate on tests? From 13-17 years of sitting in desks and taking notes? From being continuously graded and assessed? Teachers can prohibit students from using AI, attempt to catch the cheaters, but what if they instead chose to give only assignments that AI could not complete?

What if all learning was personal, relational, or both? What if our literary assignments were not critical analyses but reflections? How did you feel while reading To Kill a Mockingbird? What situations came to mind from your own life, your own family history? How has reading this book changed the way you think or perceive? What if school days were filled not with tedious worksheets and multiple-choice tests but with extemporaneous speaking, collaborative problem-solving? What if children were invited to show up as their full selves not just in therapy sessions but in every moment?

Then there would be no way to use AI to cheat, but also our children would be more joyful, more confident, well on their way to embodying their own wholeness.

In art and music and writing…

Do we really want to live in a world where we are all creating “content”? Where we are competing for subscribers and views and likes? Where art is pretty pictures on walls and music is pleasant background sounds and books are riveting dialogue and a gripping plot? In this world, AI can creep in and create the “content”, replace the artists.

What if instead art was about process and relationship? Live music, poetry readings, showing up as ourselves. And - on the other side - getting to know the people whose art we admire, whose music we listen to, whose books we read. Subverting the paradigm of producer and consumer, and building instead a web of co-creation and inter-relationship. Then there would be no place for AI to creep in, except perhaps as a tool used playfully and intentionally.

If we can release our analytical minds from their position of dominance, their need to categorize and control and define and judge, then we will begin to realize that we are so much more than we thought we were. We are most definitely not machines. We are a union of spirit, body, and mind, not just as a cliche for marketing yoga classes, but…

Spirit - Spark of eternal consciousness, universal creativity, awareness, spontaneity, simultaneously unique and interconnected. Source of our deepest passions, loves, desires.

Body - Thirty trillion cells, sight, sound, scent, taste, touch, movement. Organic, nonlinear, sensual, messy, carrying within the seeds of new bodies, the wisdom of deep time. Creation of a living planet, interdependent, attuned to cycles and flows.

Mind - Curious, focusing, attuning, receiving, reflecting, understanding. Translating experience into language and language into experience. Pondering, wondering, wandering, dreaming. Telling stories, weaving threads of spirit and body into a tapestry of being.

We have moved very far into an experience of mind-dominance, with abstractions like nations, corporations, religions, and worldviews feeling more real to us than our own bodies, our own souls.

My sense is that we cannot go much farther in that direction, that the house of cards and contradictions is beginning to collapse, that we are beginning to awaken, to feel our inner resonance, to soften and relax our minds, to set ourselves free.

May it be. May we come to know who we truly are.

Today is the fourth anniversary of the Dendroica Project. I am surprised to see that there are now 86 posts. When I subscribe to a new Substack I often try to read through the archive but I realize that might be getting a bit intimidating here :-).

With that in mind, here is a short list of “recommended reading” posts, in chronological order. There are many more that could have been included, but these are the ones I look back on most often.

A Letter From Earth - Imagining how we might appear to a four-billion-year-old planetary consciousness who has weathered (and even created) far greater cataclysms than any of our present disruptions, whose guiding values appear to be life, creativity, beauty, and change. Stepping outside of the standard script of crisis, grief, and shame.

“I would like to invite you to be participants again, to see yourselves as part of Nature rather than separate or in conflict, as masters or destroyers. To fall in love with the beauty and diversity around you - chickadees as well as condors, possums as well as polar bears. To focus not only on that which might be lost, but also on that which is thriving. To accept your own bodies as mortal yet miraculous, a collaboration of billions of cells and a culmination of billions of years of evolution.”

April Showers - An epic poem (with science!) exploring the wonders of the hydrologic cycle, photosynthesis, pollination, and more.

“Photosynthesis
One reaction to drive them all
And in the sunlight bind them...”

On Immersion and Curiosity - Exploring the difference between simply being in nature, hunting for something, and being fully present and curious.

“Doctors and lawyers fly thousands of miles and hire guides to stand in rivers and cast for trout and regale their colleagues of their adventures. Only silly overgrown boys stand in rivers all day just for the sake of standing in rivers. So it seems that men who wish to stand in rivers will usually carry a fly rod, and hatcheries will raise fish and dump them unceremoniously in streams and alpine lakes so that they might occasionally bite on a bug-that-is-not-a-bug and find themselves hooked through the jaw and reeled in by a two-legger who will, more often than not, extract the hook and toss them back. Because it’s not really about the trout.”

On Control and Participation - Why is it that even conservationists focus so much on control, why their efforts often seem futile and heavy-handed? An invitation to shifting into a mindset of participation, to accepting that some changes cannot be reversed.

“We whose ancestors invaded this land, or arrived fleeing famine or persecution, or were captured and carried into servitude, must now become native here, must find a way of belonging. We are not going to be declared invasive and shot, nor is anyone going to send us packing. I think it is high time we understood that the same is true for the English sparrows, the starlings, the endless acres of blackberry brambles, the buckthorn, the reed-canary grass, the barred owls. All who are here will be woven into a new tapestry of place, new harmonies, new ecosystems, new speciations. That is the way this planet works.”

Denaturing Duality - Part one of a series focused on breaking down binaries, in this case humans and nature, artificial and natural.

“Quite a few people in my hometown, perhaps even a majority, would prefer that their food contain no artificial ingredients and their lettuce is certified organic while at the same time eschewing herbs and tinctures in favor of the latest unpronounceable synthesized, patented, purified pharmaceutical pills. … Why must we believe that that which nature has created is automatically better or worse than that which we humans have created? Nature can create both poisons and medicines - sometimes both at the same time - as can we. Nature is constantly exploring possibilities, as are our scientists, and both - in my view at least - are expressing a basic universal desire of all consciousness to create, to explore, to evolve.”

The End of Separation - Part two of breaking down binaries. An inspired, deeply felt exploration of yang and yin, masculine and feminine currents, and the rising of the divine feminine after millennia of patriarchy.

“The awakened, embodied feminine is unbreakable, untamable, and uncontrollable.
She will bow to no king, no god, no authority.
She does not need permission.
She is not afraid – of death, of loss, of pain, of anything.
Her awareness extends to include all of life, all of creation.
She does not seek truth. She knows what she needs to know.
Her love is infinite.
She is within all of us, waiting for us to relax our identities, release our minds, surrender, trust.
She is growing stronger. We cannot ignore her forever.”

Paradigm Shift - Written during a time of paradigm shift in my own life, a poetic journey through the miracles of everyday existence. An invitation into wonder and presence.

"Feel the rivers flowing inside you
The rhythm of your breath
The pulses of electricity
The cells dividing
The ten thousand processes
That convert lettuce and wheat and beans
Into blood and bone and muscle 
And energy and motion and thought

Feel the weight of your body
Feel the tug of Earth upon you
Feel the gentle pull of Moon, of Sun, of planets
Feel the tug of every star
Pulling across light years
Holding the galaxy in form
What is gravity
If not love
At a cosmic scale?"

Convergence - Part three of breaking down binaries, in three parts. A meditation on science and spirituality and the “electric fences of the mind” that folks on either side are afraid to cross.

“Yes, ecology and astronomy and geology and genetics and physics reveal wondrous truths about our physical reality, its history and evolution. And, consciousness underlies matter, and science cannot answer every question, and intuition and insight and communications with spirit are also valid ways of knowing.

Yes, religions are old patriarchal structures that maintain dependency and extract wealth and power. And, they still carry spiritual wisdom within them, and the connections to spirit that people feel within them are very real.

Yes, we can awaken to the reality that we are spiritual beings, aspects of universal consciousness. And, with that knowledge, we can choose to fully embody and immerse within our experience of Earth.”

Resonance - Written on my 40th birthday this past summer solstice, reflecting on the web of interconnection that has been forming on Substack and expanding into real-life connections and friendships. What is it that feels most resonant when I encounter it in another’s writing or sharing?

“I began to connect with others who were also writing from their own inner resonance. And I don’t think, as one such writer shared, that I simply have a “true gift for mirroring”. I think that - in reaching inward for what feels most true, for the words that wish to be spoken - we are tapping into something universal, a living field of potential and awareness and aliveness to which we all belong, that is extending an open invitation for us to relax into being, to get out of our heads and identities and convictions and stories, to listen - not to “experts” or priests or gurus or master beings or scientists or politicians, but to the wind, to the trees, to the birds, to the rain, to our bodies, to that voice within ourselves that says this is real.”

I’m back home after a month of floating the Green River in Utah with Samara Jade and a wonderful group of humans, exploring desert wonders and arches and slot canyons and hot springs, and joining the second Conscious Growth Convergence.

There are many things I could say, many photos I could share, but The Dendroica Project is not meant to be a journal or a collection of photo essays. Subtle ways in which my life and self-perception has shifted will trickle in here over time.

I’ll be back next week with a full post on the fourth anniversary of creating this space. For now I’d just like to share a song that came to me during solo canyon explorations, amidst the deep grottoes where ten thousand-year-old tears drip steadily through heat and drought, where the oasis jasmine holds tight through flash floods and perfumes the shady depths for one short week that just happened to coincide with my visit.

How many million years did it take to build these canyon walls?
How many million more did it take to wear them down?
How many lifetimes did it take to lose our wisdom?
May this be the lifetime when we find our way home

I trust in the river to carry me where I need to be
I trust in the river to show me what I need to know
I trust in the river to guide me on my journey
I trust in the river, surrender and let go

I am at home in this body
I am at home on this Earth
Wherever my feet touch the soil
That is the place of my birth

I am water
I am stone
I am air and fire
I am blood and bone

I have been singing a lot recently. Singing freely into ocean waves, improvising in the car, spending five days at Singing Alive last month. And I will be singing my way down the Green River starting next week. Perhaps whatever is next for me will use my singing voice.

As has been true in many areas of my life, I have also been exploring musically, discovering what feels most resonant to me, what no longer brings energy or excitement. This post is a chronicle of those explorations. If you would rather not read a bunch of words and would prefer to hear songs (including a very silly surprise at the end), feel free to skip ahead…

In relationship, in art, in writing, in music, I am discovering that resonance is very specific for me. I feel this but not that in my whole body, my whole being. Some time perhaps I will explore the not-quite-paradox between specificity and non-judgment, the way I can both embrace all music, all people, all creativity while also knowing exactly who I want to spend time with, what music I want to create and listen to, what art I want on my walls.

Here is what I am discovering about myself, musically.

I prefer grounded songs

What do I mean by that? I want my music to be rooted in experience, in nature, in story, in symbolism. Growing up, I was a country music fan, I think because the songs were about real life - or at least they used to be, before they transitioned to being about some sort of beer-and-chicken-fry-and-pickup-trucks caricature of real life.

In song circles, I sometimes find myself tiring of affirmation. We are one. All is love. Our hearts are open. I don’t disagree - I just find that I need a path into the oneness, into the love, a path that starts with something I can touch or feel or see. Without that path, the songs can feel religious, faith-based. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. I don’t want to be told, or even to tell myself. I want to feel it.

Kirtan singing is having a moment, and I find myself having a similar feeling there. Yes, the melodies and harmonies are beautiful, and it does create a relaxing and rejuvenating sound-space. But, chanting the names of Hindu gods is not something that I do, in everyday life. It is not grounded in my experience. It doesn’t connect, on a deeper level.

Here are some grounded lyrics…

I listened to the silence till it was no longer silence, till it was filled up with birdsong that has been there all along. (Samara Jade) This is probably the closest I have found to a song that is about an experience of oneness and interconnectedness but that finds its way there through various grounded, sensual, emotional, experiential pathways - which is perhaps why it has become such an anthem in my life.

Almost every day a bright leaf falls, to wither on the ground behind some walls. (Ed Stone) From my father’s powerful original song about death and mystery and letting go, that he sang for many funerals and that I sang for his.

Mourning dove calls me to remember, wherever I am, I am already home.

It is quite possible to write a song that is entirely grounded, that just tells a story. Those are called ballads, and I’m fairly indifferent to most of them.

The challenge, for me at least, is in discovering and writing songs that are bridges, that bring listeners and singers into something deeper, something profound through a story, through an experience, through a memory.

I want to participate

At the very least, I want to move, to dance. And yes sometimes I am content to simply receive, to allow my cells and my field to resonate within a sound bath. But I prefer to dissolve the boundaries between performer and audience whenever possible.

This is why I feel called to sing in circles more than in performing choirs. It is why I so love Max Ribner’s community singing project, holding space and bringing hundreds or thousands of strangers together in vocal unison and harmony.

I find myself growing frustrated, in song circles, when leaders spend a lot of time teaching songs, repeating all of the parts call-and-response over and over, until the group can sing them through a few times. I prefer instead when they simply launch in, allowing the group to pick it up organically, join in, create harmonies.

I want to co-create

I want to break down the barriers between the act of creation, of writing songs, and that which has been created. I want to sing songs that will only be this way once, in this moment, with these people.

People often speak of channeling songs, catching them from some higher realm or somewhere outside of ourselves, and while I understand - from my own writing - the way that phrases and melodies can just appear, take form, come through us more than from us, I also feel that conceptualizing it as channeling creates a false separation.

Channeling is overrated. Yes, we are more than our minds, our thoughts, our egos. But we are also more than a conduit or a channel for spirit to speak through. To say we are channeling is to maintain a sort of separation. I feel we are not so much channeling as opening, opening to our own essence which is interwoven with the fundamentally creative nature of the universe. Song is called into being, I feel, by the same underlying universal creativity that has given form to magnolia warblers and lichens and redwood trees, canyons and mountains and storm clouds, stars and planets and galaxies. And ultimately that creativity is not something that we channel, it is something that we are. Creators within creation.

I find myself wanting to explore a new way of singing together, one that is intentionally co-creative, that brings each person’s unique expression of universal creativity into this moment.

Vocal Resonance

Last year, at a choir house party, I had a unique experience. Someone led This Train is Bound for Glory, and we all sang along. And then someone added When the Saints Go Marching In on top of it, and someone else did Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, and few other songs with the same chord pattern joined the mix. And then folks started beatboxing, improvising, making up new words, all held within the container of chords and rhythm. It was one of the highlights of my year.

Creation is a tension between structure and flow. Too much structure, and flow becomes constrained. We are simply singing a song, re-creating that which has been created. Too little structure, and flow has no direction, and we are also limited. There is only so far we can go with an om or with vocal toning.

This is, I feel, universally true. It is within the structure of seasons and rainfall patterns and soil types and geology and microhabitats that the grand diversity of life evolves. Remove all structure - in a deep open ocean - and diversity is limited. Stabilize structure - in a cavern with uniform temperature and conditions - and the same patterns repeat, centuries of guano collecting in the unchanging dark. Provide the right balance of structure and change, cycles and patterns, ever-shifting opportunity, and creativity blossoms.

So…what is it that I would like to create, in singing together?

Structure without form.

An invitation for all present to open within themselves, to bring forth, to create something that can only be created in this moment, with this group.

Songs not as finished products, not as lines and melodies to be learned and repeated, but as containers to co-create within.

On my first morning waking up at Singing Alive, listening to the mourning doves greeting the dawn, I felt a connection all the way back to my youngest years listening to these beautiful creatures, and even though much had shifted in my life recently and I had just showed up at a gathering where I knew no one, I felt at home, at peace in that moment. A simple melody came to me, and a simple line. In the key of dove, which turns out to be approximately E minor.

There were more words, and there could be more words, but this is an experiment in vocal resonance. How much structure is enough, and how much is too much? When do we start focusing on learning and getting it right rather than allowing ourselves to feel, to flow?

I invite you, not just to listen, but to feel into the sound, the melody, the calls of the doves, the idea of home, your own inner knowing of what brings you a sense of belonging across time and change and distance, and then set yourself free.

On my last night at Singing Alive, I was wandering back and forth between two gathered groups. One was a man-with-guitar type, with folks singing along where they could fit in, and the other was a traditional song circle, with lots of time spent teaching and learning lines. Neither one felt quite right, and then eventually I walked up the hill and discovered a third one, newly formed, singing a song that pulled me in magnetically, and I made that circle my home until we all drifted off to sleep around 3 am.

There is something about the way these rhythms and harmonies fit together that is magical, more than the sum of their parts, making me wish for them to keep going, and going. Sadly, I arrived too late to learn it, or to become part of the “in-group” that would periodically take up singing it the following day, so of course I had to learn it on my own. Songs, like dove calls, can accumulate memories, and this is the one that will always remind me of Singing Alive and August of 2025. Thanks to Samara Jade (again) for bringing this song into being.

I did my best with just my voice, and of course I had to add a few extra harmonies…

And now for something completely different :-).

I do have a silly side, though it has been fairly quiet in recent times through my more profound shifts.

This song was born from singing in the car while car-shopping, and a certain frustration with the available options. And also with the way the car market has gone bigger and heavier and more tank-like rather than small and light and efficient, with a preponderance of what my acronym-pronouncing father called “suvs” (rhymes with doves or loves).

All that aside, I do actually really like my new car…

For the first time in Dendroica Project history, there won’t be a post this month on the 21st, the fall equinox. I’ll be somewhere in a canyon in Utah, far from the interwebs. Originally I was planning to schedule this post to go up then, but I decided to post it now. So…have a blessed equinox everyone, and I’ll be back here some time in October.