You are the spiritual stabilizers the world needs right now! Your internal struggles are a microcosm of the broader cultural crisis we are facing. So, your personal healing is our collective medicine. Isn’t that good news?

This world is moving at a speed our human hearts can’t follow. Technology is changing daily. The news arrives before you’ve absorbed yesterday’s grief. Algorithms divide us into separate realities, while institutions and spiritual traditions that once offered continuity are weakening and no longer addressing the spiritual longing so many of us feel.

We are hyperconnected and profoundly lonely.

You may feel this whether you are in your fifties, sixties, seventies, or beyond. Perhaps the identity you built through your work, your family and your responsibilities no longer fits. Your body is changing. Your future feels shorter and the world feels so much ore uncertain and unfamiliar.

What if this is all preparation for you to serve in a new way?

For much of your life, you may have measured your worth through doing. Now life may be inviting you from a life organized around doing into one rooted in being.

In a culture obsessed with productivity and speed, learning to be is a radical act. Listening before responding, remaining when there is no solution, and tolerating uncertainty without reaching for someone to blame is what being looks like.

Your value is no longer only what you’ve accomplished. It is the quality of presence that you bring into the rooms of your life.

We’re living through historical amnesia. The news cycle makes every crisis seem unprecedented. We’re flooded with information but starved for perspective. Your lived experience really does matter now.

A life review is more than private therapy for resolving regret. It gathers your emotional and historical knowledge for the collective good. You have lived through loss, upheaval, social change, and unexpected beginnings. You have lost people you believed you could not live without, and continued living.

Your life does not prove that everything will be fine. It proves that fear is not the whole story. Experience becomes wisdom only when you’re willing to examine it. Otherwise, it can harden into nostalgia, grievance, or advice. When you face what has wounded you, acknowledged your mistakes, and stopped asking younger generations to carry what you’ve been unwilling to heal, your memory becomes a kind of medicine.

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Our culture’s crisis lives within you: in your need to be right, your fear of change, and the places where you withdraw your love. You’re not responsible for the world’s troubles. Your inner life is just one place where repair can begin.

When you learn to stay with your grief, you’re able to accompany another person’s grief. When you meet your shame with compassion, you’re less likely to shame others. When you loosen your grip on certainty, genuine conversation becomes possible. When you face your own mortality, you’re less likely to be governed by fear. This is how personal healing becomes collective medicine.

The world doesn’t need you to imitate youth or possess all the answers. It needs you to become trustworthy: tender enough to feel, steady enough to stay, humble enough to listen, and courageous enough to bless a future you can’t control.

Elderhood and aging is not found at a certain age, it’s a practice. Perhaps the question now is not, “How do I survive these times?” It’s: What kind of elder are these times asking me to become?

What if becoming sincerely yourself is also how you become medicine for these times?

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I haven’t written in a few weeks and still, and more so, the chaos in our world reigns supreme. You may be holding the same question I have in my own heart: How can so much cruelty be mistaken for strength?

You see leaders rewarded for humiliation, tenderness treated as weakness, and frightened people gathering around promises of domination. You may feel grief, bewilderment, even a kind of spiritual loneliness like I do.

What happened to responsibility for one another?

I was recently listening to a podcast called The Emerald. I was reminded of the ancient stories that offer language for this predicament like Hercules. As a hero he is so often remembered for his extraordinary strength. There is a terrible sorrow beneath those muscles though. In one account, Hera drives him into madness, and he kills his own children. Afterward, he seeks guidance from the oracle at Delphi, who directs him into years of service and the trials that become his twelve labors. His strength has not protected what he loves because strength alone is insufficient.

I hear an initiatory question inside this story: What must accompany power if it is to serve life?

The myth doesn’t offer us a tidy transformation. Hercules remains a complicated figure, capable of protection and destruction. That complication matters. Great ability does not guarantee wisdom. Victory does not establish goodness. Power needs an ongoing relationship with restraint, guidance, and accountability.

Perhaps this helps name what is so disturbing in the world today: the celebration of strength with so little attention to what that strength serves or whom it harms.

In my work with initiation, the task is to bring your vitality into relationship. Courage must learn to protect, fierceness must learn when to stop, the longing to matter must find something worthy of its devotion.

This is the work of eldership: to accompany power as it learns responsibility, and to insist that love has a place in its education.

In the Sumerian story of Inanna’s descent, even a goddess must surrender her regalia as she passes through the underworld’s gates. Her restoration depends upon others: the attendant who seeks help, the god who responds, and beings who acknowledge the underworld queen’s suffering.

These are such complex stories, not simple lessons in goodness. I hear an initiatory teaching within them: power needs limits, accompaniment, and relationship. No one becomes whole through conquest alone.

This helps illuminate the present moment we are in, although mythology cannot supply the entire political explanation.

Research suggests that perceived danger can activate authoritarian tendencies, making submission to forceful authority more appealing. This is one pathway, not everyone’s response to fear.

Fascist movements give that fear a particular political shape: a supposedly humiliated nation, enemies blamed for its suffering, and a leader promising restoration through obedience, exclusion, and force. Fascism is considered a specific ultranationalist form of authoritarian politics; the terms are not interchangeable. Propaganda and the dismantling of democratic restraints help turn its promises into power.

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The longing for belonging can be recruited into this machinery. A movement offers identity and purpose while narrowing the circle of whose life matters.

Of course, understanding this does not excuse it, nor does calling it “uninitiated power” fully explain it. That’s just a spiritual lens. But it raises an important question: Where and how does a culture teach strength that become accountable?

This is where the teachings on elderhood begins.

An elder helps courage mature into protection, anger into discerning action, and longing into service. The feminine qualities of nourishment, receptivity, and fierce care belong here too, in people of every gender.

Because we are so disturbed by what we are witnessing does not mean our task is to carry the world alone. We all must find people with whom our grief can become sustained action, and make room to listen beneath the noise.

This is the intention behind my vision quest work. It’s a passage into deeper relationship with the living world, and inquiry into what your life is being asked to serve. It cannot replace political action or promise to heal an entire culture. It can and does, however, offer a place to deepen your attention, courage, and belonging that sustains your participation.

If this calls to you, contact me about the 2027 vision quest at www.illanaberger.com.

The question to carry is this: How can the love you feel for this world become a responsibility you share with others?

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One of the hero’s of my life has been the Baal Shem Tov who was a great eighteenth century Jewish mystic. He was a man of many wonderful stories. Here is one that feels relevant for our time:

I love this story and it feels more urgent and relevant right now.

We are living in a time when the darkness is no longer theoretical. It is erupting everywhere you look: Mount Etna pouring fire across the slopes of Sicily while Guatemala’s Volcán de Fuego is sending ash into the sky, forcing families to flee. Ancient forests are burning from Big Sur to Oregon and around Spokane, Washington and throughout Canada.

Smoke rises where old-growth trees have stood for centuries. Across Europe, relentless heat continues to settle over villages and cities. Animals, insects, plants and birds cannot survive these conditions and we cannot survive without them. The Earth herself seems to be speaking in her ancient language of fire, ash, wind, flood, and stone.

At the same time, another fire is burning within the human family. We have watched Gaza be reduced to rubble while countless civilians suffer unimaginable losses. Lebanon continues to live under the shadow of constant violence. Ebola continues to ravage Africa while the US refuses to help. Millions of ordinary people can no longer afford the basic necessities of life. In one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, many who are hungry, sick, elderly, or vulnerable are finding themselves abandoned by the very systems that were created to care for them.

It is difficult not to conclude that something is breaking apart and fast.

But the Baal Shem Tov would invite us to look again, to look deeper. Not away from the suffering but through it.

I am pointing here toward something deeper than our individual suffering.

The Baal Shem Tov also spoke of holy sparks that are hidden within creation. What if, today, the hidden spark are not simply within your personal grief? What if they are hidden within the collapse of our civilization?

I am not suggesting that God or Creation sent these catastrophes or that they are good. I am suggesting that the myths we have been living by—endless growth, separation from the Earth, domination over nature, nationalism, consumerism, the illusion that happiness comes through accumulation—are burning before our eyes.

Perhaps this is what the mystics have always known: that sometimes the sparks are hidden inside what is ending and our task is not just to grieve the world that is passing, our task is to become midwives to the one struggling to be born.

We cannot simply endure the darkness, we must also recognize that we are living through the death of one story and the birth pangs of another. I am calling forth all the midwives and midhusbands to stand at the threshold of what wants to emerge. If you aren’t willing to face what is here, you cannot see what is coming.

And this is where the work becomes yours.

If This Beautiful and Difficult Time Article speaks to you please share it with 5 other people who might enjoy it too! This post is public so feel free to share it.

If This Beautiful and Difficult Time Article speaks to you please share it with 5 other people who might enjoy it too! This post is public so feel free to share it.

A midwife doesn’t create what is being born. She listens. She stays close. She knows when to act and when to wait. She trusts the life that is already trying to find its way into the world.

Perhaps that is what is being asked of us now.

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Can you stay close to what is dying without turning away? Can you grieve what is being lost while listening for what is trying to emerge?

Because something is trying to emerge.

A different relationship with the Earth. A different understanding of enough. A deeper belonging to one another, the Earth and her creations. A different understanding of what it means to be human. And perhaps a new language that is a language of love, reciprocity, kindness and generosity.

We do not yet know the world that is coming. But you carry some small piece of it: a way of loving, a way of tending, a wisdom earned from everything you have lived through, a refusal to abandon each other. These are the sparks.

Perhaps you are not here simply to witness the ending of an age.

Perhaps you are here to help birth the new one.

If this speaks to you, please share it with at least 5 other people who might be willing to join in as a midwife.

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The question that is at the heart of this Substack has been living in me for a long time. It’s not, What is happening to the Earth? We know what is happening, we see it and we hear it everyday.

The question is, How do you meet this?

How do you meet a world where forests burn across continents, oceans grow warmer, storms become more violent, rivers dry, coral reefs bleach, and the ground itself quakes beneath your feet? How do you live when every week seems to bring another fire, another flood, another hurricane, another species slipping silently away?

Many people respond with despair. Others retreat into distraction. Some wait for governments, technology, or someone wiser and more powerful to solve what has become the defining challenge of our age.

But there is no one else. There is only you. Not because you can save the world alone, you can’t. None of us can. But because every transformation in human history has begun with ordinary people who chose to live differently.

The Kogi people of Colombia have carried a remarkable message for decades. They call themselves the Elder Brothers, guardians of an ancient understanding that human beings belong to the living fabric of the Earth rather than standing above it. They warned that if humanity continued to sever its relationship with the natural world, the balance that sustains all life would begin to unravel.

Whether you take their warning literally or symbolically doesn’t really matters anymore. Look around. The Earth is speaking. She isn’t speaking to punish or to seek revenge - those are human failings. She speaks as every living system speaks when it has been pushed beyond its capacity to restore itself.

When your body develops a fever, it is not betraying you, it is trying to heal you. Perhaps the fires, the storms, the floods, and the changing seasons are not just disasters. Perhaps they are the fever of a living planet struggling to regain equilibrium.

The deeper question or us to grapple with is not whether the Earth is speaking, it’s whether we are listening. Listening asks something very different from you than fixing. It asks you to remember. To remember that the air entering your lungs was released by forests you may never see. To remember that every drop of water has been cycling through clouds, rivers, glaciers, plants, animals, and human beings for millions and millions of years. To remember that our lives have never been separate from the lives of mountains, fungi, whales, fires, stars, insects, moss, and soil.

We have forgotten our kinship, and everything follows from that forgetting.

So what do you do?

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You begin where every genuine transformation begins: with relationship.

• Know the creek near your home.

• Plant something that will outlive you.

• Learn the names of the birds that greet you in the morning.

• Reduce what you consume, not from guilt but from love.

• Support those restoring forests, rivers, and communities.

• Speak for those who have no voice in our political systems: the salmon, the redwoods, the bees, the oceans, the unborn children.

• Gather with others.

• Grieve together.

• Celebrate together.

• Remember together.

These may seem like small acts in the face of planetary crisis, but they aren’t.

Civilizations collapse when people believe their actions don’t matter. Cultures are reborn when enough people remember that every gesture of love strengthens the whole.

Perhaps the hero you have been waiting for was never meant to arrive from somewhere else. Perhaps the hero is the ordinary human being, you, who chooses, every single day, to live as though the Earth were alive because she is. To be a hero today you must:

Refuse to abandon wonder.

Refuse to abandon compassion.

Refuse to abandon responsibility.

The old stories taught that heroes slayed dragons. The new story asks something far more difficult. Can you become the person who no longer needs enemies? Can you become a person that remembers how to belong?

The Earth is not asking you to save her. She has survived ice ages, extinctions, and unimaginable upheavals. She is asking whether you are willing to become the kind of human being who can remain in relationship with life no matter what.

That is the real initiation before all of us. And no one else can live it for you. You are the hero of this story. Don’t wait for someone else to fix it, heal it, reverse it or soften it. It’s up to you. Let’s find each other for it is not up to you alone.

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“The Amazon is sending us a warning signal we can’t see with our eyes... During the record 2023–2024 El Niño drought, trees in the Amazon began releasing never before seen chemical compounds into the atmosphere... The rainforest is not just a passive victim of climate change. It is actively, chemically responding to it.” — Bernard Eng

There is something profoundly moving to me about this quote. Not because it tells me the Amazon is suffering. We all already knew that, but because it tells me something far more astonishing: faced with unimaginable stress, the forest did not simply collapse. It responded. It became more fully itself.

The trees began speaking in a new language to the universe in which they live. Not in a language of words, but of relationship. Molecules invisible to our eyes rose into the atmosphere, altering clouds, light, and perhaps even weather itself. The forest was not merely enduring its circumstances, it was participating in them. Offering something that had never before been needed. Wow!

I find myself wondering if this is not only the story of the Amazon. Perhaps it is the story of humanity.

For so much of human history humans have imagined ourselves standing outside the living world, observing it, using it, protecting it, praying to it or destroying it. We have forgotten something our ancestors knew instinctively: we are not separate from the Earth. We are one expression of how the Earth knows herself.

The forest is not over there. The forest is happening here.

In Zen you discover that everything is constantly responding to everything else. There is no isolated “self” making independent choices. There is only the vast field of mutual arising, each life affecting every other life in ways seen and unseen. It’s so beautiful if you really let yourself feel this, and it is terrifying knowing how so few humans realize this!

The Amazon’s chemical response is not separate from our nervous systems. The breath that enters our lungs may once have passed through those very leaves that now release chemicals of healing. The carbon we release becomes the work of roots and fungi. We live inside one another’s becoming.

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When I read Bernard Eng’s words, I heard an ancient teaching disguised as modern science: When conditions change, life responds creatively. Not by becoming something else, but by becoming more deeply what it already is.

A pine tree doesn’t want to be an oak. A raven doesn’t envy the scrubjay. Each meets the changing world through its own particular medicine, just like us.

I feel like this might be one of the deepest instructions for our time.

So many of us ask, What should I do? It is a sincere question. The suffering of the world calls out to us. We want to help. We want to lessen the harm. We want to protect what remains.

But perhaps another question belongs beside it: What is life asking to emerge through me now?

The first question often comes from urgency, fear, or the belief that everything depends upon us. The second question arises from relationship.

The second question assumes that you belong to something much larger than yourself. Just as the forest releases compounds no scientist has ever measured before, you too may discover capacities you did not know you possessed: Compassion you have never needed until now. Communities you have never imagined. Forms of courage that only difficult times can call forth. This is what participation looks like.

The Earth has always evolved through relationship and adaptation. Every living being carries within it possibilities that only reveal themselves when the world changes. The Amazon is reminding us that intelligence is woven throughout creation. The forest is not waiting to be rescued before it acts. It is already answering the moment with everything it has.

Can we do the same?

Can we listen so completely that our own hidden medicines can appear?

Perhaps every one of us carries a kind of invisible fragrance waiting for these times or a generosity that arises under pressure, a clarity born from your uncertainty. A fierce tenderness that knows how to protect what is sacred without becoming consumed by fear.

Today I drove to Mount Shasta to sit quietly in the presence of this great elder. I wasn’t looking for answers so much as connection. Mountains don’t rush to explain themselves or argue with the times in which they live. They simply stand, wholly themselves, offering their immense presence to anyone willing to become still enough to receive it.

As I sat there, I realized that the mountain was teaching the same lesson as the Amazon. Not through words, but through being. Its silent strength did not come from resisting the world, but from belonging completely to it. The invitation was unmistakable: be still, be present, become fully who you are.

Perhaps this is the medicine these times are asking of us. Not that we become louder than the chaos, but more deeply rooted than it. Not that we force our way into the future, but that we inhabit this moment with such wholehearted presence that what is needed can emerge through us naturally, just like the forest releases its unseen gifts into the sky and the mountain offers its unwavering presence to the Earth.

The old stories tell us that humans are the species capable of remembering.

Perhaps what we are being asked to remember is this:

The living world has never stopped teaching us how to live. The trees are still our elders. The rivers are still our teachers. The fungi are still weaving communities beneath our feet. The mountains show us how to be still and listen.

And now the Amazon has offered us a great teaching:

When the forest is under great stress, it releases a medicine into the world that has never before existed.

What medicine is this moment asking you to release?

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Yesterday I stood beside a tree I have known for many years.

I placed my hand against the rough bark, as I have done countless times before, but this time something shifted.

For a moment, I stopped asking what I was experiencing. Instead, another question quietly appeared:

What is it like for the tree that I am here?

The question dissolved something I hadn’t realized I was carrying.

Without noticing it, I had once again become the center of the story.

The tree became scenery. Nature became “environment.” The world became something I observed and was separate from. The tree and me.

But what if none of that is true? What if the tree experiences you too? What if the raven notices your presence? What if the ground feels your footsteps? What if we have never been alone, not for a single moment?

Perhaps one of the greatest losses of our culture has not been the destruction of forests or rivers, heartbreaking as that is. Perhaps the deeper loss has been forgetting relationship itself.

We have learned to think of ourselves as separate individuals moving through a world of objects but the living Earth tells another story:

Everything exists through relationship.

Everything is continually shaping everything else.

We breathe because forests breathe.

The soil is our body.

The stars are our inspiration, our breath.

The rivers are our blood.

The grief we feel for the Earth is not evidence that something is wrong with us. It’s evidence that our hearts still know the truth.

The Earth is not outside us. She is our larger body.

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I have been sitting with this understanding for many years now, and it has reshaped not only my practice, but the way I walk through the day. Separating is a spontaneous response to our finite mind. We tend to be more interested in the content of our experience rather than the experience of being, belonging, connecting, kinship.

Rather than asking, “How do I save the Earth?” maybe ask, “How do I remember that I have never been separate from life, the earth all beings?”

That question changes everything. It changes how you listen. How you grieve. How you pray. How you meet another non-human as well as human beings.

Out of my reflections on all of this a new offering emerged:

Returning to Our Place in the Living World - a four week email journey exploring relationship, grief, beauty, and shared being in a time of profound change.

Together we will remember that even in a world of uncertainty, we belong to a living community that has never stopped welcoming us home.

If this speaks to you, I hope you’ll join me.

The Earth is still teaching, generous as she is. Perhaps now we are ready to listen.

I'd love to walk this path with you. Each week you’ll receive 4 emails (1/day) with a teaching, a practice, a poem and a question to carry for the week.

Week One

Remembering You Belong

Week Two

Listening to the More Than Human World

Week Three

Grieving With the Earth

Week Four

Becoming a Blessing

This is not a course about fixing the world. Nor is it about escaping from it. It’s an invitation to remember that you have never been separate from the living community that holds you.

I hope you’ll join me:

Dates: The Weeks of August 10, August 17, August 24, August 31

Fee: $50

Registration Link: To Register: https://IllanaBerger.as.me/ReturningtoYourPlaceintheLivingWorld

In gratitude to the living world that continues to make us possible.

Illana: Zen Roshi • Elder Guide • Counselor

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I want to talk about groundlessness today.

I think we all feel that the future of this planet and our lives is uncertain; that the ground has been shaken loose. That the old structures are dissolving: climate disruption, political upheaval, illness, aging, death, economic instability. But for just this moment, notice where you are standing. Let yourself literally feel the ground under your own feet, and don’t allow your mind to fly into an escape hatch.

The recognition that the old structures are failing is not an interruption to your spiritual path. It is your spiritual path.

The invitation now is not to keep reaching solid ground but to notice that when your ground disappears, what remains is relationship:

Your relationship with the Earth.

Your relationship with each another.

Your relationship with the Great Mystery.

Your relationship with the more than human beings.

This deeper belonging can hold you when certainty is gone.

There is a story we often tell ourselves, without realizing it. It is the story that you are separate.

Separate from one another.
Separate from the Earth.
Separate from the Holy and the sacred.
Separate from the great unfolding mystery of life.

We all learned this story early. We were taught to become individuals, to distinguish ourselves, to build identities and boundaries. There is wisdom in that teaching, but it is not all of it. Somewhere along the way, many of us believe that our separateness is absolute.

And from that misunderstanding so much suffering arises.

Anxiety is often born from the feeling that you stand alone in an uncertain universe. If I am a separate self, isolated and vulnerable, then I must manage everything. I must protect myself from loss. I must secure my future. I must control outcomes that are ultimately uncontrollable.

No wonder you are anxious. You live in a consciousness of me, me, me - as if that is what is real. This separate self carries a burden you weren’t designed to bear.

The trees don’t wake up wondering if they belong. The rivers don’t question whether they are connected to the sea. The hawk circling above the valley doesn’t suffer an existential crisis about its purpose.

Only human beings have this peculiar capacity to forget that we are part of a larger whole. When you forget this, despair often follows close behind your anxiety.

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Despair is what happens when your separate self realizes it can’t control the forces shaping its life and you fight to push it down so you can have a “nice” day. What ensues is illness, changed relationships, depression. The future refuses to obey our plans.

The isolated self will always eventually encounter its limits.

When you believe you are separate, these experiences can feel like evidence that life is hostile or meaningless. You can become trapped inside the small room of your life surrounded by your fears, convinced there isn’t a way out.

Yet this kind of despair is more often an invitation. An invitation to question the very assumptions that created your despair.

Who is this “I” that feels abandoned?

Who is this “me” that imagines itself outside the web of life?

When these questions are held as living inquiries, something will begin to soften. The walls of separation will become less solid. Your surrender to not knowing becomes a relief.

Many are experiencing a crisis of meaning. Feeling disconnected from purpose, from community, from spirit. They are searching for meaning as though it’s an object hidden somewhere outside of themselves.

Perhaps meaning is not something you find. Perhaps it naturally appears when separation dissolves.

If you watch a grandparent holding a newborn child, or sit quietly with a dying friend, or plant seeds in spring, or listen to rain falling on the dry earth, you will discover that meaning does not need to be manufactured. It reveals itself through your relationship with life.

Meaning lives inside your belonging.

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The Indigenous peoples of the world and your own ancestors have long understood this. They understood that humans are not separate beings living on the Earth, we are expressions of the Earth herself.

The breath moving through your lungs was exhaled by trees.

The water flowing through your body has fallen as rain for countless generations.

The atoms in your bones were forged in ancient stars.

Your blood vessels in your body resemble the branches of trees.

You are not disconnected from the universe. You are one of the ways the universe expresses herself.

Zen speaks of this as no separation. Judaism sees all life emerging from the One. Mystics describe reality as everything belonging to everything else. These aren’t philosophies, they are direct experience.

It’s easy to speak of interconnectedness while sitting in a garden on a spring morning with the sun shining, food in your belly and a comfortable bed to retire to. It is another thing entirely when the earth beneath you begins to shake and your whole world falls down on top of you.

When an earthquake strikes, there is literally no ground beneath your feet.

When the phone rings in the middle of the night and someone you love has died, the ground disappears.

When the doctor quietly says, “The biopsy was positive,” the future you imagined vanishes in an instant.

When your retirement savings disappears with the markets, when your home is lost, when the world you’ve trusted no longer makes sense, you discover that the solid ground you thought you stood on was never really solid at all.

Certainty dies in these experiences.

Most of us instinctively tighten against these moments. We grasp for explanations. We search for someone to blame. We cling to the life that is slipping through our fingers.

But there is another possibility.

What if, in the very moment the ground disappears, you stop searching for ground?

What if you allow yourself to fall into something larger than certainty?

There is a strange grace that sometimes appears in catastrophe, because it strips away the illusion that you were ever separate or in control.

Instead, you notice the stranger who holds your hand. The neighbor who brings you food. The bird singing outside your window. The wind moving through the trees exactly as it did yesterday.

Life has not abandoned you. It is carrying you differently.

The separate self asks, “How do I survive this?”

The deeper self asks, “What is holding me even now? And What/Who is this me?”

These questions change everything.

It turns your attention away from what has been taken and toward the vast field of relationships that have never disappeared.

The Earth is still beneath you, even when it shakes.

Love remains, even when your beloved dies.

The Holy has not withdrawn simply because your plans have collapsed.

Perhaps awakening is not finding solid ground again.

Perhaps awakening is discovering that your true ground was never certainty.

It was belonging.

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I took a journey to Mt Shasta many months ago and just sat at the waters’ edge with Ponderosa and Juniper towering over my head. The sun was beginning to lower in the sky, casting long shadows along the earth. The gentle stream rippled past me with the sound of the rapids both behind me and in front of me. But right there, right there in that moment was the song of frog, the sweet, joyful song of frog.

I know me as this place. As a child I was called Laurie Bird. When I turned twenty-one I became tree. I have had many tree names throughout my life. Sistertree. Shining tree. Forest Waters. And most recently, Great Tree of Perfect Enlightenment. As I sat at the waters’ edge, I remembered who I am. I am the Cedar before me. I am the Pine before me. I am the Douglas Fir beside me. I am the Juniper behind me. I am the small mosquitoes and the little flying beings. I am the bird who dips herself into the water and fluffs her wings. I am the babbling stream and the roar of the current. I am the song of the forest.

“I want more of this,” I hear myself say. And in that very moment, I leave “this” looking for more or different.

The only thing that stands between this very moment and every moment is some crazy idea that it isn’t be this. This very moment, however, is every moment.

We get to watch the wanting closely; “I want more of this.” Underneath that lives its twin; “I do not want that.” Not this news. Not that grief. Not these times, so full of cruelty and noise and breaking. The mind that reaches for the frog’s song is the same mind that turns from the headlines, from the fire, from the face it cannot bear to look at.

We have become very good at refusing our own life. We say, not now, not this year, not this country, not these people. We wait for a better moment that never arrives. And so we miss the only moment there is.

There is a quieter refusal that is harder to see. It sounds like this: “I am not like them. I am not the one who hates. I am not the one who looks away. I am not the frightened, the foolish or the cruel.” You draw a small line in the sand and place yourself on the clean side of it.

If you sit at the waters’ edge long enough, the line dissolves. You begin to notice that the current does not push away the rapids. The forest doesn’t cast out the fallen tree, already feeding the soil. I hear myself say “I am the Cedar and I am the rot at its root. I am the singer and I am the silence.” If I am the song of the forest, I am also the ones I would rather not be.

This is the harder practice. To stay. To let these times be these times, and to remain inside them, awake. To meet the difficulty and let it stay difficult, without flinching and not making it someone else’s fault, someone else’s failing or someone else’s problem. The world is asking you to show up inside it, exactly as it is.

So I ask you what the waters’ edge asked me, “Can you stay with this life, just as it comes? Can you stop dividing the world into yours and theirs, sacred and ruined, worthy and not? Can you let even the hardest thing be held in the same arms that holds the frog?”

The wanting will arise. The turning away will arise. Let them. Underneath both is the life you were given, the only one you were given: these difficult and beautiful days. It was never somewhere else. It was never some better time.

This moment is every moment. Come and embrace this life - the one you were given.

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Someone recently shared a quote inspired by Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy that stopped me in my tracks:

Hope is not something we wait for. It is a choice to tend life and keep planting for a summer we intend to see.

I found myself wanting to change a few words. Not because I disagree, but because at this stage of my life I am less interested in hope and more interested in viability.

Hope sometimes becomes a form of waiting. We hope things will get better. We hope someone will fix it. We hope humanity will awaken in time and remember we are each other, we are the Earth.

But a viable future is something different. A viable future asks something of you and of me. It asks us to become a participant rather than a spectator.

Joanna Macy spent decades helping us understand that despair is not the opposite of possibility. Despair often arises because you care deeply. You grieve because you love. You ache because you belong to this living Earth and to one another. Yet she continually invited us to turn our attention toward what remains possible.

This is what might be called disciplined attention.

Most of us spend a great deal of our lives focusing on what is missing. What is missing in our relationships. What is missing in our finances. What is missing in our bodies. What is missing in our world.

The mind easily becomes a collector of deficiencies. And when you continually gather evidence of what is absent, the world begins to feel barren and small.

But possibility asks a different question. It asks what is here now that could be nurtured? What wants to grow? What small seed, if tended faithfully, could become shade for future generations?

The elders of many traditions understood something that our culture often forgets; you do not plant only for yourself.

The oak tree does not bear fruit for the one who planted it. The forest matures long after the planter has become soil. The most important acts of a human life are often completed by those who come after us.

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Some of you have written to me. You sit in meditation, you practice presence, you know something true about the nature of mind, and then you open your phone, your computer or the news.

Gaza. Ukraine. Epstein. The machinery of empire grinding forward. Children. Rubble. Silence from the powerful and noise from the rest of us.

And someone, maybe me, maybe another teacher, says something about consciousness, about how you are not separate, about how the world arises in awareness. And you feel, for just a moment, that you are being asked to look away, or to put a silver bow around the tragedies of these times.

Zen has always held two truths at once, not as a contradiction to resolve but as a Koan to inhabit.

The absolute: the vast, undivided, prior to name and form. The sky that holds every weather. The silence underneath every sound. This is what you touch in deep sitting: the ground that does not shake. In the absolute there are no stories, no sides, no victims or perpetrators, no good nations and evil ones. There is only awareness itself, luminous and undivided, prior to every judgment you will ever make.

The relative: this moment, this body, this child, this border, this bomb, this corruption. Particular. Irreducible. Real in its own way, on its own terms.

Neither cancels the other. The Zen teacher Dogen taught that because all things are Buddha nature, you must look directly at suffering, without flinching and without fleeing into abstraction.

The absolute is not a place to hide. It is a place to stand.

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Here is something your practice is quietly teaching you, whether you have named it or not.

What you give your attention to becomes your world, your reality, your experience.

Not in the sense of a spiritual self-help formula: think positive thoughts and good things will happen. That trivializes something profound. What I mean is more fundamental than that. The finite human mind: brilliant, pattern-seeking, meaning-making, cannot hold all of reality at once. So, it selects. It narrows. It focuses. And whatever it focuses on begins to feel like the whole.

Pay attention to cruelty long enough, and cruelty begins to feel like the nature of things. Pay attention only to beauty, and you become someone who cannot bear witness to what is actually happening. Pay attention to your fear, and the world arranges itself into threats.

None of this is good or bad. It is simply how the finite mind works. It is not a flaw. It is the condition of being human.

In the realm of the absolute, none of these stories exist. Awareness does not have an opinion about Gaza. Awareness does not take sides, carry grief, feel outrage. Awareness simply is: vast, present, uncontracted. The conflicts, the opinions, the feelings, the judgments - these all arise within awareness, like weather in the sky. The sky does not become the storm.

But we are not only sky. We are also the storm. We are the finite mind that forms opinions, expresses feelings, reads the news, weeps or rages or goes numb. This is not a failure of practice. This is what it means to be alive in a body, in history, in relationship.

The question is not whether you will have opinions and feelings. You will. The question is whether you know what is having them.

When I am identified only with the finite mind: with the story I have formed, the side I have chosen, the emotion running through me - I am inside the weather, convinced the storm is all there is. My activism hardens. My grief collapses into despair. My outrage begins to feed itself.

When I am grounded in the absolute, even partially or momentarily, something else becomes possible. I can hold the opinion without being imprisoned by it. I can feel the grief without drowning. I can act from clarity rather than reaction, from love rather than fear, from presence rather than the need to be right.

This is what Bernie Glassman pointed toward with Not Knowing. The willingness to meet reality before your finite mind has finished its story about it. To bear witness without your conclusions already in place. To let what is actually happening land, rather than confirming what you already believe.

Here is what I see happening with some people, and perhaps with you.

You have tasted something real in practice - a spaciousness beneath the chaos, a sense that you are not only this small frightened self. And that taste is genuine. Do not doubt it.

But then the news comes. And because the teaching has sometimes been delivered unclearly, as if awareness means detachment, as if presence means indifference, you don’t know what to do with your grief and your rage. You wonder if feeling them means you haven’t understood or that you must abandon practice because you care about what is happening in the world and can’t reconcile this teaching.

You do not dissolve the relative into the absolute. That is spiritual bypassing, and it is a form of violence against those who cannot afford to bypass anything.

What practice offers is not escape from the relative. It offers a different quality of presence within it. When you are grounded in awareness, not running on ego, not burning the fuel of fear, you can stay. You can bear witness without being consumed. You can act without needing the action to save you, to save everyone on the planet.

So, pay attention. Carefully. Consciously. Know that what you attend to shapes the world you inhabit. Choose your attention not to avoid difficulty but to stay clear enough to meet it fully.

Some of you will carry this work quietly holding the field, steadying the ground around you. That is powerful.

Others will carry it outwardly in the streets, in classrooms, in the conversations no one else will have.

What the absolute offers both of you is the same: a root system deep enough that the storm does not take you down with it.

The sky does not stop being sky because the weather is terrible.

You do not stop being awareness because the world is on fire.

Sit with that. Then rise and answer your hearts compassion in action

Thank you for reading This Beautiful and Difficult Time! I make my writing available to everyone because these times are so challenging and we need each other, but if you enjoy receiving this or know someone else who might, please consider gifting them a subscription. Your support means the world to me

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Something is shifting not only in our country, but in the world. The numbers reveal what is taking place quietly in plain sight: 57% of Americans now seldom or never attend religious services. Yet 86% still believe in something they would call a soul, a spirit, a presence larger than their “self.”

People are not losing faith. They are losing faith in the old container.

Researchers at Cornell have a name for what is rising in its place. They call it DIY faith - individualized, values-driven and practiced outside any institution. The move away from organized religion, they say, does not look like disenchantment. It looks like re-enchantment through something other than the church or temple.

I have been watching this for a long time. And the hunger humanity feels is ancient. The forms are simply failing to feed it.

The sacred is not a doctrine, it’s an encounter. You can’t manufacture it. You can’t schedule it between work meetings and a potluck with friends. It arrives when you stand at the edge of something vast: the ocean, your own mortality, grief that has no bottom, when the small self goes quiet. In that silence, something else is present.

The institutions have forgotten this. It has substituted belief for experience, attendance for practice and membership for transformation.

Guess what? People have noticed. Not everyone all at once. But in the way that people begin to notice that they are no longer being fed. It’s a slow turning away, a checking of “none if the above” on a form, and a return to whatever actually works.

For millions of people, what actually works is Mother Nature.

I recently sat with a man navigating the wreckage of his divorce. He was intelligent, searching, earnest and utterly lost. The story he had built his life around was causing him harm and he noticed that he didn’t know how to shift it or how to begin the next chapter.

We talked for a long time, and I felt moved to suggest a mushroom medicine journey.

I say this plainly because I have walked this path myself, and I have held space for others to walk it. What happened for him was not what the culture imagines when it hears “psychedelics.” There were no colors, no visions of God, no cosmic entertainment. What happened was more radical than that.

He came face to face with his first wound. The story he had been living since childhood - the one that shaped every relationship, every choice, every grief. The medicine did not create this encounter. It cleared the brush so he could finally see what had always been there. Nature showed him his own nature.

That opening became the beginning of everything. The first wound, once seen, begins to lose its power. A person who can name their wound can begin to change their story. When you can change your story you can change your life.

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This is what rites of passages have always known. This is what the vision quest, the wilderness fast, the threshold ceremony have offered across every culture that has not yet severed itself from the earth. You go out. You are broken open. You return changed.

This is why I lead Wilderness Earth Quests. Not as recreation. Not as therapy. As initiation.

There is something that happens when a human being spends time alone in the wild, without distraction, without performance, without the noise of ordinary life. The earth speaks. The body remembers. Something in you that was asleep begins to stir.

Modern people have forgotten, in our relentless efficiency, that we are not separate from nature. We are nature. The same intelligence that turns a seed into an oak tree, that moves the tides, that knows exactly when to die and when to bloom, that intelligence runs through all of us. It has never left. We have simply stopped listening.

Zen speaks of this as your original face: the one you had before you were told who to be. Before the first wound, before the conditioning, before the long forgetting. The practice of sitting, the practice of holding a Koan, the practice of wilderness, they all point to the same thing: come home. You were never actually gone.

The research shows that meditation practice is the only spiritual variable that has grown in recent years. People are sitting down. People are going outside. People are saying no to the institution and yes to direct experience.

This is not a crisis of faith. This is a reformation.

And the reformation needs guides. Not people who have all the answers: Zen has never been interested in answers. But people who have walked the territory. People who know what it is to be broken open by loss, by the wilderness, by silence, by the medicine of the earth herself. People who can say: I know this place. I am not lost. I am right on time.

If you are one of the millions standing outside the old container, wondering what comes next, the earth has not forgotten you. The silence has not abandoned you. The next chapter of your life is not behind you.

It is waiting, just past the edge of what you think you know. Come. Let’s walk toward it together.

Dr. Illana Berger is a Zen Roshi, pipe carrier, and elder guide based in Watsonville, California, on Amah Mutsun Territory. She leads Wilderness Earth Quests, individual spiritual guidance, and the Aging as a Spiritual Journey program through Seven Directions Zen. Join her November 1-7, 2026 in Mt. Shasta for this years Wilderness Earth Quest. Visit her website for more information or to apply.

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I want to tell you something that happened to me not long ago.

I was dysregulated. Agitated. The world was doing what the world does in these beautiful and difficult times - churning, threatening, demanding a response. My personal life had its own weather system. And I found myself in a sharp moment with my partner, the kind of moment where the air gets thin and everything feels too close.

Then something shifted. Not dramatically. Not with bells or whistles.

A simple question arose, quietly, the way a question sometimes does when your mind is exhausted from its own noise: Is there anything missing from this moment?

I stopped because the question was strange enough to interrupt my trance.

Look at your own life. Right now, wherever you are reading this. You are carrying the weight of these times. The news is relentless. The political ground keeps shifting beneath your feet. The people you love are frightened. Your own body holds more than it can easily name. Most of us are carrying several things at once, and the weight has become so familiar we’ve stopped noticing it’s there.

The finite mind, and it is finite, bless it, fixes on what is broken. This is its job. It scans for threat, catalogues grievance, rehearses argument. It runs its loops with great efficiency. And you follow it. Down the corridor of what was wrong, what is wrong, what will surely go wrong next.

This is not a character flaw. It is a human inheritance. And in times like these, it runs hot.

But notice: your mind’s focus and reality are not the same thing.

When I stopped in that charged moment with my spouse, something became visible. The room was there. Completely there. The light through the window, ordinary and generous. My own breath, rising and falling without my help. Her face, which I love, even when I am too constricted to feel it.

Nothing was actually missing. Not one thing.

The difficulty was real. The feelings were real. The state of the world is real - let no one tell you otherwise. And underneath all of it, beneath the story my mind was furiously constructing, life was simply happening. Complete. Whole. Not waiting to be fixed before it could be itself.

This is the shift I am pointing toward.

It is not positive thinking. It is not pretending the clouds are not clouds, or that the storm outside your window is anything less than serious.

It is noticing that clouds have never once removed the sky.

The great blue sky - call it awareness, call it the ground of being, call it what the ancient teachers called Buddha nature, is not something you earn. It is not a reward for sufficient practice or the right politics or a calm enough nervous system. It is what is already here, right in the middle of the beautiful and the difficult, both. The vast, open, untroubled background against which every storm, every argument, every catastrophe, every grief moves and passes.

Meeting these times does not mean mastering them. It means being present to them without getting consumed by them. It means bringing the whole of yourself: your grief, your outrage, your love and your confusion, into contact with something larger than the story your mind is telling you.

That something is not far. It is the awareness in which all of this is happening.

One small pivot. One honest question in the middle of the argument, the despair, the scroll: Is anything actually missing here?

Not as escape but as opening.

The clouds part because you finally looked past them to what was and is always already clear.

You are that clarity.

Even now. Even here. Even in this.

Illana Berger is a Zen Roshi, elder guide, and founder of Seven Directions Zen. She writes at "These Beautiful and Difficult Times" on Substack.

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We are all pilgrims on the journey of our lives

We have always been on this journey. You have always been on it. The moment you drew your first breath, you became a pilgrim. Not because you chose a spiritual path, or joined a sangha, or found a teacher. But because you placed one foot on the ground, and then the other, and then again and again. That is the whole of it. That is the pilgrimage.

We use the word pilgrim as though it belongs to the devout, to those who walk The Camino to Santiago de Compostela with worn-out boots and a scallop shell pinned to their coat. I did part of the Camino a few years ago. It was an amazing experience. But those journeys are not what makes a pilgrim. Pilgrimage is so much older than any shrine or church or trail. It is the oldest human act. Moving through uncertainty toward something you cannot yet name.

Right now, the ground itself feels uncertain. The political world is fracturing and re-forming. The climate is speaking in a language of fire, frost and flood. Old institutions are breaking apart and crumbling. Trust is almost non-existent. And underneath all of it, a collective grief that most don’t know how to hold.

This chaos is not separate from your pilgrimage. It is your pilgrimage.

The road was never supposed to be smooth. The medieval pilgrim did not expect comfort. She/he expected difficulty - bandit-prone roads, illness, loneliness, exhaustion, the death of a companion. She/he expected to be changed by what she/he encountered. The hardship was not an obstacle to the journey. It was the journey’s method.

What you are carrying right now - the anxiety, the uncertainty, the heartbreak for this world - is your pack. It belongs to you. It is shaping you even when you cannot feel the shaping.

Life does not ask you to transcend the difficulty. It asks you to walk with it. To let it walk you. To notice that even in chaos, the breath is still breathing. The body is still here. This moment is still this moment.

I have walked enough of this road to tell you: you will not find yourself at the end. You find yourself along the way. Not in some grand revelation, but in small unguarded moments. A morning where grief loosens its grip and you notice the light on the water. A conversation where you speak your truth without flinching and you are heard. A silence in which, suddenly, something in you goes quiet.

These are the way-stations. These are where the real pilgrimages happen.

There is a teaching I often return to: The way is not somewhere else. The way is here, under your feet, in every step. The Koan says: “Step by step in the dark, if your foot’s not wet, you found the stone.” It’s not about the destination, it’s about the step. Just this one. The destination is always receding. The step is always available.

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I’m not asking you to pretend the world is fine. It is not fine. I’m not asking you to find silver linings or practice toxic optimism. I’m inviting you to remain a pilgrim. To keep walking. To notice what is beautiful alongside what is breaking. Both are true at once. Both belong.

Beauty is not the reward for getting through the hard parts. Beauty appears in the hard parts: unexpected, uninvited, and somehow more piercing for it. A wildflower in rubble. A kindness between strangers. Your own resilience, which you discover only because you were asked to use it.

This is who you are becoming. Not who you were before the chaos. Not who you will be when things settle down. Who you are right now, walking this particular stretch of the road, in these particular times, with everything you carry.

The pilgrim does not wait for better conditions.

You just walk. Discovering, one step at a time, that you were always capable of the road before you.

And you are.

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There is something quietly dissolving in these times, and if you’re aging, you probably feel it more intimately. It doesn’t arrive with an announcement or sense of clarity. It comes as a loosening of what you once took to be solid. It’s most noticeable, initially, in your relationship to time.

But time is not just personal. It’s not only the ticking of a clock or the arc of your individual life. There is the time of the Earth, deep time, stretching back through infinite ages. There is the time of the cosmos, deep space, where stars are born and die across billions of years. When you begin to sense this vastness, something in your familiar sense of time begins to shift.

Your life, once felt as a long and central story, is revealed as a brief flicker within an immeasurable unfolding. And yet, rather than diminishing you, this recognition can begin to soften the boundaries of what you call “self.”

Time, as we once knew it, has begun to change. The past no longer arranges itself in simple, accessible narratives. The future has lost its sharp edges of anticipation. What was once imagined as a wide horizon, has actually narrowed. In that narrowing, your sense of self, that has been so tightly bound to your memories and projections, has now begun to thin, to open, to lose its insistence.

This can feel very unsettling. We have all been taught to measure our understanding by how well we remember and how clearly we anticipate. So when your memory falters or the future no longer calls as loudly, fear can arise. As a culture we name this as “decline.” We tend to worry about loss.

But what if what is falling away is not your essence, but your illusion of scale?

When you sit in meditation, or lose yourself in the simple rhythm of washing dishes, or pause to watch a small bird sing at dawn, you may notice that time compresses. In those moments, there is no past to consult and no future to manage. There is only this: immediate, vivid, ungraspable. In that immediacy, your life is no longer measured against years or accomplishments. It is measured against presence itself.

And something profound is revealed: the same awareness that contemplates deep time and deep space is not bound by them.

We resist this. We cling to the continuity of identity because it offers us reassurance. Yet when you look closely, the “self” that you defend is assembled from fragments: memories, roles, preferences, none of which endure in any fixed way. In the vastness of deep time, where are these fragments? In the immensity of deep space, where is the boundary you insist upon?

There is a practice that I recently learned about that Matthieu Ricard taught: to walk through the rooms of your mind as if searching for a thief. This “thief of self” cannot actually be found. Looking within, you will find all sorts of mental stuff but none of it will qualify as a self. When you open each door: thoughts, sensations, images, and perceptions, no solid owner will appear.

This is not failure on your part, it is a doorway.

When the grip of the “self” loosens, even slightly, your mind’s habit of circling: ruminating, defending and rehearsing, begins to quiet down. There is more space and in that space, something reorients.

You are no longer a separate figure moving through time. You are an expression of time itself. You are not apart from the vastness, you are within it, of it, as it.

From this recognition, your heart shifts.

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Care arises more naturally. The suffering of others is no longer distant. In deep time, we all share the same origins. In deep space, we all share the same ground of being. Compassion is no longer a moral effort; it’s a recognition.

To meet these transformative times, your mind must release its insistence on centrality. It must bow to vastness, to not knowing, to the humility of scale. And as your mind bows, your heart opens: wider, quieter, more inclusive.

This is the practice.

Can you live without anchoring yourself in a fixed past or an imagined future? Can you allow your life to be as brief and luminous as it is, without resistance? Can you feel yourself as both fleeting and continuous, both small and inseparable from the whole?

In this way, what feels like diminishment reveals itself as liberation.

The “self” softens. Time deepens. Space opens.

And your heart, unbound by the illusion of separateness, begins to know its true work: to love unconditionally and without limit.

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I have been pointing toward this day for many weeks now.

The literal sky above you, right now, as you read these words has seven celestial bodies gathered in Aries, all at once. This is taking place for the first time in the recorded memory of those who watch the heavens.

Seven: Your wounds and a new beginning arriving together, inseparable, as they have always been.

This moment calls for something rarer and more difficult than a teaching. It is calling for your presence. Your willingness to be here, completely, without armor and without an explanation, for what is moving in the sky, in the body of the world, and in those tender, unfinished places within you that have been quietly waiting for exactly these conditions.

Sit with this for a moment before you read on.

Aries is the first breath. The spark before the plan. The cry of a newborn before it knows what it has entered. It arrives, and in arriving, it changes everything it touches.

Seven planets in that fire simultaneously is a summons.

Humanity itself is being asked to begin again. The actual humanity we are: fractured, brilliant, grieving, fierce, capable of extraordinary tenderness and extraordinary destruction. The whole of it. Called into a fire that asks only one thing: your full presence.

We are never ready. That is the first teaching of Aries. You go anyway.

What is arising in you today carries purpose.

It may feel like grief or fear without a name, or anger arriving with sudden terrible clarity and, beneath it, unexpected tenderness. You might experience an aliveness so acute that it is almost indistinguishable from fear. Something long-held, finally, dangerously, loosening.

All of it is the fire doing precisely what fire does.

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Here is the caution I offer, as one who has sat with fire. You may mistake reactivity for truth or impulsivity for clarity. The Aries sky shortens the distance between feeling and action in ways that can feel like liberation, and sometimes is, and sometimes will cost more than you intended to spend. Decisions made today carry long consequences.

Your task is to contain the fire : to let it burn fully, do its work and move through every defended place within you.

A forge contains fire. A hearth contains fire. The breath contains fire in the body, moving it, using it, letting it transform without burning your house down.

Can you allow the fire to move through you fully, honestly and without managing who you become on the other side?

This is the question before humanity as much as before you.

Every institution built on the old story of dominance and accumulation is feeling this pressure. Every relationship running on habit rather than truth. Every self that has been waiting, sensibly, patiently, for a safer moment to be fully alive.

This is that moment.

Seven planets in Aries. The sky has gathered in a way your lifetime has never seen. The new beginning is here — and you are already inside it. What are you willing to let go of in order to become that which you are alive to express?

Today is the day to claim this fully.

A Ritual for the Day the Sky Caught Fire

Find fire, a candle, a hearth, even a single match held until it burns close to your fingers.

Look into it.

Speak aloud to the fire, to the sky, to no one and everyone, one thing you are ready to release from the life you have been living. Say it plainly. No poetry required.

Then speak one thing you are willing to become. Say that plainly too.

Let the flame take both.

Bow.

Go outside and stand barefoot on the earth for one full minute in silence and let the sky above you and the ground beneath you know that you showed up.

That is enough. That is everything. Now watch what unfolds.

I don’t know about you, but my nervous system feels shot!

Many of us are so concerned about what is happening in our country, in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Hawaii and Hungry . . . . we wake up immediately reaching for our phones before we reach for our self.

Maybe you scroll through all the latest reports: the policy reversals, the alarming headlines, the thing someone said that cannot be unsaid, and before your feet have touched the floor, you’re already bracing, gritting your teeth. Your shoulders are up near your ears, your jaw is tight and you feel vigilant.

Vigilance is exhausting.

I am not going to say you should stop paying attention. These troubles are real. The threats are real. There is so much that is genuinely frightening in this time, that pretending otherwise is not peace, it’s dissociation. You are right to be concerned. You are right to care.

But I want you to think and feel into this question: At what cost?

Your nervous system was not designed for this. It was designed for the meadow, the creek, the fire circle, the unhurried dark. It was designed for a world where the horizon is near. Now you are holding the entire horizon, every horizon, all at once, and calling it staying informed.

You pay a high price for that, in sleep, in joy and in your capacity to be fully present with the people you love.

So let me offer you something. Not a bypass, but a widening.

Right now, as you read these words, spring is arriving without asking anyone’s permission. The birds have not checked the news. The plum tree in your neighbor’s yard is rioting with blossom. The light is changing. If you step outside at dusk tonight, the sky will do something that cannot be photographed, cannot be posted, cannot be argued with.

And somewhere above you, circling at seventeen thousand miles per hour, astronauts look down through a small oval window at a blue sphere with no lines drawn on it. No fences, no borders, no nations. Just ocean, cloud, continent: one living being, breathing.

They come back changed. They always come back changed. They have seen what we have forgotten: that the divisions we are fighting over are human projections on something that has always been whole.

They actually have a view from the sacred. Both things are true at once, the brokenness and the wholeness. The trouble and the wren singing at first light. The fear and the fact that somewhere a child is being born into the same astonished confusion and beauty you were born into.

Can you hold both? Not as a spiritual exercise, but as a practice of survival?

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I believe, in my bones, in twenty-seven years of sitting with people in the most tender passages of their lives, that humanity is in the middle of something enormous. A shift so large we cannot see its edges from inside it. Old structures crumbling. Old certainties gone. And in the space where certainty used to live: thinning.

The veil between what you can see and what you can feel is becoming translucent. You may have noticed this in your own experience: a dream that was not quite a dream, a knowing before the knowing, a felt sense that something is moving through this time that is larger than politics, larger than any one nation’s crisis.

Trust that. Your intuition is not wishful thinking. It is an instrument tuned for exactly this.

And here is the teaching I keep returning to, the one that never fails: reality is a reflection. Not of what is happening out there, but of what is happening in here. What you believe about the world shapes what you perceive in the world. What you fear, you amplify. What you trust, you tend toward.

This isn’t magical thinking. This is the most rigorous spiritual work I kow: changing your inner state when everything outside seems to demand only reaction.

So here is my invitation to you.

Act from your highest excitement. Do the thing that feels most alive, most true, most you. Not because you know how it will turn out, but because alignment is its own reward. Move toward what calls you. And then release the outcome entirely.

Release the outcome because your grip on the outcome is costing you the very aliveness that would make you most useful.

You cannot control what is unfolding. You can control what you cultivate in yourself. You can choose, again and again, to be the kind of being who holds the view from the moon: all one people, one home, even while you act with fierce tenderness on behalf of what you love.

That is the deepest form of power I know.

Step outside tonight. Let the evening receive you. You are not alone in this. You never were.

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I am so aware of the tightness in people, including myself, these days. This morning I was awakened at 1:46 AM to an earthquake that felt and sounded like a train was going right through the walls of my bedroom. It feels as if the nervous system of the world is shaking too.

You may or may not be aware that solar activity has been wild, but you do know that the political ground beneath your feet is constantly shifting. And underneath all of it, something older: the sense that thresholds are being crossed that cannot be uncrossed.

Today, I sat with my tea and noticed that I was leaning toward irritability. I noticed a small, hard place in me that was ready to defend, to judge, to pull back into the safety of my own corner.

This is what I’m working with, I thought. This is my practice. To notice.

You may be feeling this too. A quickness to anger you don’t quite recognize. A tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix. A sudden selfishness, not the comfortable, familiar kind, but something sharper, almost animal. You maybe find yourself less generous with the driver who cuts you off. Less patient with the neighbor whose dog barks. Less interested in the stranger’s difficulty.

This is what it means to be a porous creature living in a porous world.

You are not separate from what is happening. You never were. The storms moving across the atmosphere are also moving through your nervous system. The corruption you witness, the greed, the cruelty dressed as strength, lands somewhere in your body, even when you think you’ve protected yourself from it. The cosmos is turning. The old forms are being tested. Of course you feel it.

The question is not whether you absorb it. The question is what you do with what you’ve absorbed.

In the Zen tradition I practice there’s a teaching that I return to often: do not add.

The world hands you confusion, don’t add more confusion. The world hands you fire, don’t add your own fire to it. Not because you should be numb or passive. But because you have a choice, in any given moment, about whether your energy feeds what is breaking or feeds what is trying to mend.

Being a good neighbor right now looks like this: noticing the tightness before it becomes a word. Pausing before the snap, the dismissal, the small cruelty disguised as honesty. It looks like actually seeing the person in front of you: the checkout worker, the overwhelmed parent, the elderly man who is taking too long, and asking yourself: what does this person need from me in this moment?

Not grand. Not heroic. Just: am I adding or am I mending?

The Indigenous teachers I’ve been privileged to work with speak of right relationship: with the land, with each other, with what is unseen. Repair. Reciprocity. The understanding that nothing moves in isolation, that every gesture either deepens the wound or turns toward healing.

I know how hard it is, on an ordinary Tuesday, when I am tired and the world is heavy and someone says something careless and the tightness in my chest has been there since before breakfast.

This is where my practice lives. Not on the cushion. Here. In the friction. In the moment before I speak.

You don’t have to fix the storms. You just have to choose, again and again, to be the one who brings a little more steadiness into the room.

That’s enough. That’s everything.

There is a practice I return to throughout the day. You might try it, gently, without making it into another demand.

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Pause.

Feel your feet on the ground.

Notice your breath without changing it.

And then, silently, ask: what is being asked of me here, in this moment, to support life?

Sometimes the answer’s to speak.

Sometimes it’s to listen.

Sometimes it’s to step back and not add more noise.

Sometimes it’s simply to soften your body, to unclench your jaw, to allow a little more space inside.

This is not small work. This is how the field shifts.

You’re not separate from what is unfolding. The instability you sense is real, but it’s not only “out there.” It’s also an invitation. To become more conscious carriers of energy. To participate, however imperfectly, in repair.

A good neighbor doesn’t fix the world.

A good neighbor tends to the space between.

Right here.

Where you are.

Where I am.

And perhaps, if enough of us are willing to practice in this way, not perfectly, but sincerely, something will begin to change. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But in the quiet, steady way that life heals itself when given the chance.

This is what I am trusting today.

This is the practice I am keeping.

Let’s all practice being good neighbors. It is what heals the world.

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Illana Berger is a Zen Roshi and elder guide offering teachings at the intersection of Zen practice, Indigenous wisdom, and the art of conscious aging. She is based on Amah Mutsun territory in Scotts Valley, California.

In a world that is moving very fast right now, I find myself wanting to slow down, deeply listen and not miss what is gathering right now.

Let me begin here, with what feels true:

Something is gathering. Itis gathering in our collective field, in the body of our world and in the rare quiet spaces between the noise of these times. You know what I mean. You may have felt it too: in the strange weight of your mornings, in your conversations that at times trail off into silence, in your early morning sleeplessness, in the grief that arrives without a warning as well as in the aliveness that flickers unexpectedly beneath all of it.

This is not a moment to look away. This is a moment to meet.

For thirty years I have walked with people at the great thresholds: the passages that ask everything of you. Elderhood. Illness. Loss. The death of what you thought your life was supposed to look like. And, what I know, from having sat at those fires with so many souls, is this: the people who came through transformed were not the ones who managed their crossing most efficiently. They were the ones who showed up for it. Fully. With their whole, imperfect, tender and courageous selves.

That is what I am inviting you to now.

I have created a four-week email practice: four emails per week, beginning April 13th — called Through the Fire. Each week holds a short teaching & practice, a Koan, a simple ritual, and a poem chosen to carry you through a particular passage each week. Together the four weeks form an arc that mirrors the shape of every genuine initiation:

Emptying. Witnessing. Crossing. Planting.

I created this practice for the weeks leading up to a convergence of 7 planets aligning in Aries and bringing with that alignment incredible energy. It is arriving in mid-April. This alignment has not been seen in our lifetime. It is a wound made visible. A new beginning pressing through. A threshold that, if you meet it consciously, has the power to change not just what you do but who you become.

The timing is not accidental. These four weeks are designed to carry you into and through that window with presence, with the full weight of your wisdom, and with the particular courage that belongs to those who have lived long enough to know: the fire does not consume. It clarifies. It purifies.

This is work we were all made for.

If you have been a reader here for any length of time, you know that what I offer is not comfort for its own sake. I am not interested in spiritual bypassing, in making hard things sound prettier than they are or in offering you a way around a threshold rather than through it. What I offer is companionship. The kind that says: I see what you are carrying. I have walked this ground. Come, the way is here.

Through the Fire runs four weeks, beginning April 13th. The offering is $40.

If something in you says yes — trust that. Registration is open now at the link below.

And if you are not ready, or if this is not the right moment — that is also a true and honorable answer. The practice will be here when you are.

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Either way, I am grateful you are here. In these beautiful and difficult times, your presence in this community matters more than I can say. Please pass this invitation onto anyone you feel has heard the call.

With love and unwavering faith in what elders carry,

Illana

Dr. Illana Berger, PhD — Zen Roshi, Elder Guide & Counselor - Scotts Valley, California — Amah Mutsun Territory

[REGISTER FOR THROUGH THE FIRE — $40]

There are mornings when I open my eyes and the weight of the world arrives before the light does.

No one needs a list of what is happening in the world. We all already carry it. The ridiculous, unnecessary and unprovoked war in Iran, the fractured political ground, the climate unraveling at edges once thought were safe, the cruelty that wears the face of strength, the vitriol where wisdom once stood.

You scroll, you listen, you witness, and something in you quietly asks: Is it reasonable to hope anymore?

This is a real question and it deserves a real answer. Something true.

Optimism and hope are not the same creature. Optimism is a disposition, a leaning toward the probability that things will turn out ok. Optimism though, when the evidence presses hard against it, can turn into denial. It can look away. It can paper over what absolutely needs to be seen.

Hope , on the other hand, is something entirely different. Hope is not a prediction about the future. Hope is a relationship with the unknown. It’s the capacity to remain present, to act, to love, to serve, without requiring a guarantee.

Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki pointed toward this when he said, in essence: in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. Hope lives in beginner’s mind. It doesn’t need to know how the story ends to show up for the next moment.

This is why hope can coexist with grief, with rage and with the clear-eyed recognition of suffering. It is not the absence of darkness, it is the light shining inside the darkness.

When hopelessness descends on you, notice what it actually says. It says: I can see the trajectory, and I know where this leads. It claims the future as its authority. It presumes to know.

But here is what Zen reminds you: you do not know. Not in the way hopelessness insists you do. The very nature of this moment, of any moment, is that it is open. Conditions arise. Conditions pass. What looked immovable ten years ago has since moved. What looked permanent has since dissolved.

Meister Eckhart once sat inside a Church burning with its own corruption and spoke of a spark of the divine in every soul that no institution could extinguish. Hildegard of Bingen prophesied collapse and greening in the same breath. The Sufi teacher, Rumi, wrote of the heart breaking open — not breaking down, but open, as the very heart of spiritual transformation. The breaking is not the end. It is the opening.

Julian of Norwich received her famous vision in 1373, in the grip of plague, poverty, and violence. She was gravely ill. The world as she knew it was, by any measure, collapsing. And into that darkness came the words she would spend twenty years unpacking: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

She didn’t mean that nothing terrible would happen. Things already were terrible. She meant that the deepest nature of reality, seen from a vantage point beyond your own, is not abandoned. That the arc of being itself bends toward something that your limited frightened mind cannot yet perceive.

The saying “In the end all will be well; if it isn’t well, it isn’t the end,” carries a similar invitation. It invites you to locate yourself in a larger story. Not to minimize the suffering of this moment. But to resist the conclusion that this moment is the final word. Despair is often the error of mistaking the middle of the story for its ending.

So, where does hope actually arise? It doesn’t arise from circumstances, the news cycle or from whoever holds power at this time.

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Hope arises from contact with what is underneath circumstances. It’s called by many names: the Ground of Being, Buddha-nature, the Great Mystery, the Living Presence or the life force moving through all things; the web that holds even what appears broken.

You have felt it. In the moment of still silence in the forest, in the face of your grandchild, in that instant after weeping when something inside releases and you discover you are still here, still breathing, still capable of love. That is the source of hope. It’s not a feeling, it’s the ground of being.

And that ground has never not been present.

So what do you do with the weight of the world?

You do not look away. You witness what is actually here. You let it land. You grieve what deserves grief. You rage at what deserves rage. And then you turn toward the smallest possible act of care within your reach and stay awake. You need only offer what you actually have to give.

All shall be well.

It isn’t over yet.

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Dr. Illana Berger is a Zen Roshi and elder guide offering transformational counseling at the intersection of Zen, Indigenous wisdom, and the rites of the elder years. Find her at [These Beautiful and Difficult Times on Substack].

Last night I received a note from Joan Halifax inviting us to remember that we must act from love even in our anguish.

This morning I woke just after dawn, an hour when the world is still quiet enough to hear the breath of life itself.

I lit a candle and sat. The room was still. The sky was just turning toward morning. For a few moments there was only the rhythm of my breath, the soft rising and falling that reminds me that I am alive.

Then suddenly, the anguish that Joan spoke about rose within me. It came without warning, like a wave moving through my body. Perhaps you have felt this too in the past week or two.

You wake up, and before the day even begins, the weight of the world presses into your heart.

The Middle East is literally on fire. People can’t breathe. Cities have been reduced to rubble. Sacred sites destroyed. Families shattered. Children buried beneath the decisions of unscrupulous and powerful men. Elders who have seen too many wars now watch another unfold. The animals and creatures of the earth fleeing flames and bombs that have nothing to do with them.

So much suffering.

And alongside the loss of life comes something equally devastating: the erosion of trust. Nations manipulating truth. Leaders turning human tragedy into strategy, spectacle, or advantage. Here, in our own country, the suffering of others becomes a kind of political theater, a game played with human lives.

When you witness this long enough, something inside you can begin to numb. You cannot let this happen. This numbness is dangerous. Because the true loss is not only the loss of life. It is the loss of your humanity.

Zen practice does not ask you to look away from suffering. It asks you to turn toward it fully, without flinching. To sit in the fire, becoming the fire yourself to burn through not only the numbness but the helplessness.

There are at least two things that must happen now.

First, we must stand together in nonviolence. Not as an abstract idea, but as a living commitment. The cycle of domination and revenge that has haunted humanity for centuries cannot be ended with more domination and revenge.

War has never produced peace. It only produces the next war.

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Our voices calling for an end to this destruction must be heard, clearly, courageously, and without violence or hatred. Silence in the face of suffering is not neutrality. Silence becomes complicity.

But there is a third thing that is just as important, and perhaps even more difficult.

Allowing yourself to feel the anguish.

Many people try to bypass this step. It is simply too painful. So you distract yourself, harden yourself, or retreat into your ideas and concepts.

But your heart knows better.

The grief you feel when you see a child pulled from rubble is not weakness. The trembling you feel when another war erupts is not naïveté.

It is your humanity speaking.

In Zen we sometimes say that the bodhisattva is the one whose heart has broken open wide enough to hold the suffering of the world. Not broken in despair.

Broken open.

When your heart breaks open, something remarkable happens. Compassion flows through the cracks. Love begins to move where once there was only fear. And from that love, wise action becomes possible.

If you act only from rage, you become what you oppose.
If you act only from despair, you withdraw from the world that needs you.

But if you act from love, fierce, courageous love, then something entirely different becomes possible.

Love does not mean passivity. Love means refusing to surrender your humanity even when others have lost theirs.

Love means speaking for peace even when the drums of war grow louder.

Love means remembering that every life, every child, every elder, every creature, belongs to our same living earth.

This morning, sitting in the quiet, I realized something simple. The anguish rising in my heart is not a problem to solve.

It is a call.

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A call to remain human in a time that is trying very hard to make me forget.

So today, breathe. Feel what you feel. Let your heart break open.

And from that open heart, speak for peace.

The world desperately needs voices that have not forgotten how to love.

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