Old Irish saying: Saol trí mhíol mhór saol iomaire amháin, saol trí iomaire saol an domhain.

Three times the life of a whale is the lifespan of a ridge, and three times the life of a ridge is the lifespan of the world.

-From Thirty Two Words for Field by Manchán Magan

This week, my town is fuller than it’s been all summer. Everyone is returning from visiting family or paddling remote rivers. The dwarf birch have turned yellow, the fireweed have released their seed and I got the annual text reminder about my kids’ bus route. Of all late summer rituals, these point to the obvious: school starts Monday.

But for the first time in fourteen years, I won’t be foraging for last-minute lunch ideas at 7:00am, driving kids to tournaments or replying ‘C’ to confirm that we need a bus seat. I’m now what’s called an “empty nester” as the whole of my human brood has fledged.

There is grief hiding in both sides of my neck as I write this to you. The house is quiet– the I’m-not-sure-what-to-do-with-myself kind. My daughter, university-bound, is saying her goodbyes to friends and coaches, in between adult errands. When she’s out, I’ve been busy sewing Ohio Star quilted pillows, so her dorm room will feel homier. Next to her IKEA glow lamp, I want her new nest to have a piece of me in it.

Instead of big adventures this summer, my husband and I stayed close to home. Like two hovering Whisky Jacks, we chose to experiment with our new greenhouse, which gave us an excuse to hang around when our kids were home after work.

As I face this moment of motherhood and reflect back, I could tell you that I’ve loved every age. Each has brought joy and worry, excitement and grief, confidence and doubt. I could tell you how I was broken open by their kindness, forgiveness and wise seeing. How they showed me to stretch my heart open, even when I thought I was open enough. I could tell you how much I loved watching them learn the little and big things: balance, coordination, reading, making friends, whitewater canoeing, physics, tarot and Cantonese. How they learned to be fully present with their grandfather as he was dying.

I could tell you how it made me a mother not just to them but to snails, stray dogs, droopy flowers, and dirty stuffies. I could tell you how becoming a mother helped me deeply appreciate the gentle expansiveness of my own mother, the fierce dedication of my grandmothers and all versions of mothering.

But all this telling doesn’t touch the depth of what I feel.

What I feel comes closer to time bending. To worlds worlding. What I feel comes closer to what’s conveyed in this Old Irish saying shared by the late Manchán Magan in his beautiful book Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape: “Three times the life of a whale is the lifespan of a ridge, and three times the life of a ridge is the lifespan of the world.”

Putting my hand deep into the pocket of this saying helps me pull out a slightly adapted version. If I were to scratch the surface of what it’s meant to mother and be mothered, I would say:

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At a recent retreat, I offered to take a four-month-old baby off a new mother’s hands, so she could eat her lunch. “Do you have children?” she asked, as I gently bounced her child. “It seems like you just know what to do.”

“I have two. An eighteen- and twenty-year-old,” I replied.

Smiling, she replied with some disbelief, “How did I not know this about you?”

While I was enjoying a cuddle with her soft-haired babe, I didn’t tell her about the strange grief and loss I was feeling as my family was rearranging itself. It wasn’t a good time.

But like the Irish saying, mothering alters time and space. It shapes perception because whether I am now an empty-nester or in my “free bird” era, mothering has meant being remade by love over and over again.

My words, like the tiny stitches in the pillows I’m making, feel too small to describe it.

The Old Irish saying helps me name the depth and solidity of what I sense. Or, more accurately, what other creatures, ecologies, and worlds help me sense. I need the help of leviathan monsters, heather-crushed ridges and time itself to bend the limited calculations of identity, roles and meaning-making. I need other words to cast spells on my tongue, so I can whisper what really matters.

Whether I’m a bird perched on the rim of a gutted nest or on the cusp of a new sky, mothering has fundamentally altered my perception and experience of how deep and wide we love.

None of the thousands of diapers I’ve changed, peanut butter sandwiches I’ve made, lullabies I’ve sung, or TikToks I’ve danced in can measure the scale of making and unmaking.

And so the closest I can come to telling you about this tender moment is this:

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In the midst of our fascination with and resistance to Large Language Models (AI), it strikes me that we long even more for the awkward human voice. Like all major technological advancements, there’s a tension between our thirst for optimization and anxiety about the human and more-than-human cost.

Whether you’re an early adopter of AI, intrigued by the possibilities of relating subject to subject or vehemently opposed to how it scrapes the earth like a bottom trawler on the ocean floor, resistance to this technology speaks to a bigger human longing.

Just as Plato worried that writing would limit human exchange, like a painting, “preserve[s] a solemn silence”, many of us are worried that AI will compromise the trembling awkwardness of human expression. We’re concerned that art, books, philosophy and ideas will become flattened into efficient patterns, destroying livelihoods and watersheds along the way. Our resistance highlights (even here on Substack) that being human with one another is what counts and has nothing to do with optimization.

What charms me most about our resistance to AI, aside from rising carbon emissions at a time when we need to be carbon negative (h/t Dr. John England), is that our human hearts are genuinely looking for the imperfect, the idiosyncratic in each other.

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A person who magnifies the imperfect and idiosyncratic is the Irish bard, the late Glen Hansard. A street busker of abundant talent and lead-singer of The Frames, he made room for imperfect intimacy, with anyone, almost anytime through the magic of music.

Fame didn’t distract or distance him from street folk, pub-goers or awkward up and coming musicians. He had a regular gig at his local pub, pulled strangers up on stage to sing, and encouraged new artists with a kind of feral soul-optimism. Once he invited a large audience up on stage so they could all escape a sudden, cold downpour.

While its easy to gloss over the contradictions of any given life, I’m touched by the abundance of stories that share how others were transformed by his willingness to exchange passionate wails and whispers of the human heart.

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My enchantment with this remarkable artist turns around the question of what actually moves and brings humans closer together. In contrast to what we’ve been conditioned to believe by a multi-billion dollar wellness and self-improvement industry, the relentless pressure to improve, perfect and optimize just aren’t it.

What we long for and are moved by is what’s uniquely human. By art and song. Bard-traveling, heart-wrenching trying. Our vulnerable and invitational, soft-sweatered ballads of incompletion.

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We all have our sweaty ways of wrestling with some version of what we think we should do and what calls us. For me, this is currently in the form of a difficult puzzle or koan. As I’ve shared in Season 4 of my podcast, Tension of Emergence and preludes to my current book-in-progress, The World Doesn’t Need Your Saving, I struggle between two polarities– saving and savouring– when I try to make sense of my role at this cultural moment.

Today, I want to give you something. It’s my small imperfect offering is the season’s finale. I don’t offer you a tidy conclusion nor a soft decrescendo. Instead, this 30 minute episode is like a small, half-lit stage that shows what’s moving and working my heart in real time– including a challenging real-life situation that strikes at the heart of my saving/savouring koan.

What I deeply appreciate from people like Glen Hansard, and you reading here with me, is our passionate trying. The unabashed, doubt-filled angst to give all our imperfect offerings away. To somehow trust in the creative potential that comes from our idiosyncratic hearts beating with grief and joy, no matter how incomplete or lost.

I’m encouraged, through the ironic distance between me and someone I’ll never meet, that we can savour the heart-break of it all (including a life gone too soon) while doing our messy part to save what we love in this briefly gorgeous planet.

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LISTEN HERE TO THE SEASON FINALE

AUDIO PAIRINGS 🎧

Pair this reflection with one of these beautiful idiosyncratic human encounters:

🎧 Falling Slowly by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová

🎧 Unlearning Perfectionism with Rachel Blackman and Jennifer England

🎧 Give it Away (A Practice) with Jennifer England

When I opened my computer last Friday, I knew what I had to do. For the last six months, a tightness in my chest and a sense of “ick” had grown and it was feeling unbearable.

Honestly, I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to ignore the gnawing ache. But after a cup of coffee on Friday morning, I finally got the courage to do it.

I deleted 95% of a foundational chapter in my book-in-progress.

It wasn’t that what I wrote wasn’t true. But the book, behaving more like a wild mountain river, decided to take a sharp bend and take me into another valley.

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As I write to you from my sticky kitchen table, a surface that has endured countless spills over twenty years, the twist in my book is both difficult and a relief. But staying true to what it wants to become is not an isolated event. It belongs to a week of ordinary and remarkable happenings.

Ordinary: I climbed a mountain (photo above) with some decades-long friends, where we talked about our changing family constellations as our kids move away and we experiment with playful freedom. I was energized by the ways my women friends continue to grow, on behalf of pure joy and creativity. Some of us are learning to use power tools. Others are writing books or finding Free Store costumes for electronic dance temples. With strong conditioning to “do”, we’re collectively learning to relax, even hammock, with intention.

Ordinary/remarkable: I asked the universe for a breakthrough about a week ago. Instead I got another tension headache that lasted an agonizing four days. After months of no pain, I angrily opened up the Curable App and tried new visualizations and a free-writing exercise to unearth the hidden story that might be driving the pain. While my headache wasn’t the breakthrough I wanted, I received a clear memory of when my headaches first started: after I’d changed schools for the third time. I was only seven.

Remarkable/ordinary: I faced a sobering realization. An uncomfortable kind of close: the rejection-shame-self/critic-pain connection. As the Zen koan goes, delusion is enlightenment. This week, I felt how an old story still lives in my body.

Remarkable: After a random phone call with my Dad years ago, I learned that he not only knew Brother David Steindl-Rast but lived with him in a tiny trailer outside of Boulder, CO in the 70s. Close spiritual friends, they read Teilhard and Zen and Brother David was at my parents’ wedding. Surprised by their friendship, I got the crazy idea to bring them together for a conversation about climate change. It took me months of emails until miraculously Brother David (then 96) wrote me back, delighted to hear from the daughter of his old friend.

While our conversation started my audio-art project, most beautiful of all it rekindled their friendship. This past weekend, my parents joined Brother David in person to celebrate his 100th birthday.

Remarkable: With a growing possibility of an open pit copper mine in my neighborhood, I spent thirty hours volunteering last week to learn about and organize against the threat of expanded exploration. Just when I was feeling a lack of community, neighbors gathered in my living room to eat rose petal shortbread and strategize. How remarkable, this dose of solidarity, when we’re listening to the land we love.

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In the midst of these ordinary and remarkable moments, I began to see the deletion of my chapter differently. While painful to do (I am a slow writer!), it was asking me to really listen to what the book wants to say. At the same time, my seven-year-old self worried that the strangeness I’m hearing and devoted to, will set me apart or cost me belonging.

But something tells me that turning towards what I know to be most true requires honest reckoning with my delusions. This week, my pain offered a reminder that I needed to reckon with an old story. The story that my ideas, words and gifts might not be enough for recognition, mutual understanding or belonging.

While I want, for selfish reasons, to finish my book on time and make something useful, Brother David Steindl-Rast reminds us that hope is not the belief that everything will turn out OK. Instead, hope is when we’re so present to the fullness of our lives, that we’re surprised again and again.

After the deletion, I now sit with thirty-two pages of blankness. It was too long. Too coach-y. Too certain. Too tame. I haven’t sat down to re-write the chapter yet. I can sense what it wants but there’s no certainty. The only thing for sure is that when I do re-write it, my writing guides will be pain, delusion, resistance and strangeness: sourced from the ordinary and remarkable breaching of the banks.

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AUDIO PAIRINGS 🎧

Pair this reflection with one of these strange and enlivening conversations:

🎧 Hope in a Climate Crisis with Brother David Steindl-Rast and Dr. John England

🎧 Breaking the Trance of Pragmatism with Báyò Akómoláfé

🎧 On Matrimony, Mothering of Culture and the Undoing the Self with Stephen Jenkinson

🎧 Untangling Our Minds through Language, Love and Laughter with X’unei Lance Twitchell

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Life is bolting here. With a sun that doesn’t set, we’re ushering in a short and intense summer of long days and daily confusion: you can’t tell if it’s 5pm or 10:30pm.

I’m living under a summer disco ball. The north is giving off a glittery, show-stopping whirl where every being vibrates with life. Whether plant or animal, we’re flooded by photons; bombarded by nourishing light. The midnight sun is my good, stay-up-late kind of friend.

The winds have died down and its warm in the mornings. After seven months of the minus monastery (aka deep winter), the robins, lupins and mountain slopes are shaking it off.

But in the midst of all this vibrancy I’ve been noticing a strange counterpoint.

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I’ve been getting a nagging sense of insufficiency; the ghost-rider of abundance. It seems to whisper to me under its fearsome cloak something like: there must be more than this. “This” meaning the life that’s already here. The dandelions. A morning of writing. Parenting. Teaching.

“More” meaning the creation of a new or different universe that only humans can reveal. The belief of this voice goes: if I play a role in the discovery of something else then my life will be meaningful.

It feels helpful to notice where our human-centered obsession with self-importance creeps in. In my current version of it, it’s a pressure to bring more “value” to whatever is already here. If I can accomplish that, then I’ve made enough of a mark.

Do you have that felt sense sometimes? When you are surrounded by abundance yet feel a gnawing sense of not-enoughness?

This voice of insufficiency doesn’t belong to you or me, as individuals. It is cloaked in a fantasy of human exceptionalism, with little to do with our erotic energy. It is the opposite of photons twirling from the Earth’s disco ball.

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In The Agony of Eros, philosopher Byung-Chul Han talks about how love is threatened by contemporary individualism, the capitalist marketplace, and the global forces that drive it. He names the incongruence I’ve been feeling: between life bursting like a rain cloud and the stifling preoccupation as to whether I’m making a difference.

Han reminds us, in contrast, that true love refuses the market and the illusion of a tightly bounded self. Instead love offers a “radical experience…. of the existence of the Other.”

Because of living under a summer disco ball, I’ve been more aware of the pull of Eros: the photonic dance of life, this dance of the Other.

As I stand knee deep in a field of yellow dandelions, I’m both haunted by the ghost of ‘do more-ness’ and watch the weeds disrobe it. There’s real power to this simple erotic magnet: it helps make the trap of modernity apparent. As Vanessa Andreotti says in a recent reflection on plant medicines, “What if their work was not to save humanity, but to trouble the pedestal on which humanity has placed itself?”

In this short, intense season there’s nothing better than watch the clam-shell rhubarb leaves expand to hold the rain or the new rituals of adulting in my youngest child. I love stepping through a hatching of dragonflies, their translucent wings catching my hair. There’s enough erotic life force in one square meter that I find myself able to relax my obsession with productivity.

Bowing down to weed, teenager, insect or fowl is to witness and be present to life in all its glitter– an earth dancing us back into abundance.

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So if your mind is quiet and your skin craves the sun. If you want to put your pen, phone or urge to prove down- perhaps this is not evidence of insufficiency (or laziness) on your part but the pull of Eros inviting you to love and be loved by what is already here.

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xo

Jennifer

AUDIO PAIRINGS 🎧

Pair this reflection with one of these Eros-inducing conversations:

🎧 Hope in a Climate Crisis with Brother David Steindl-Rast and Dr. John England

🎧 We’re not the Main Character with Sophie Strand

🎧 The Cabin Doors are Always Open with Bobbi Rose Koe

🎧 Escape the Money Matrix: Building a Civilization of Love with Mark Anielski

When the last pile of snow melted two weeks ago, we noticed two snowshoe hares on our front lawn. After a severe winter, a winter everyone continues to talk about, the fact that any hares survived feels like a small miracle.

They came daily and so began infiltrating our family group chat. Did you see the bunnies today? Where were they? Was it the Mama one or the baby one?

But last week in the middle of the night, we were all woken up by a screeching commotion of coyotes. They were close to our place– around the area we suspected the hares had their winter burrows. As I lay there listening, I worried, “did they get the bunnies?” As they yipped, the coyotes sounded more than pleased with themselves. I thought, “After all that work surviving, those hares are going to be gonners.”

The next morning, it was clear we’d all been worried. We gathered around the kitchen nook with breakfast cereal bowls in our hands, looking outside for any camouflaged movement. I didn’t see any until I caught sight of a large gray moth, hovering near the lilac bush. But quickly I realized it wasn’t a moth, but the back of the hare’s long ears tucked close together, mimicking an insect.

We waited to see if there was two. But over the next couple of days it was clear, only one survived: the baby.

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Dinner conversation last night was about another killing. This one brazen- mid morning.

My husband was driving to work and spied a young fox as he was pulling up to his building. The fox was on one side of the road. Then we spied a coyote, huddled in the stalk position, behind some poplars on the other side. He slowed the car down, noticing how oblivious the young fox was, distracted by a midden of ground squirrels. He watched the studious rigor of the coyote who was following, low to the ground. The coyote was closing the gap, ready to dart behind the car, across the road and pounce.

After work, my son asked me with sadness in his voice, “Did you hear Dad saw a baby fox get killed this morning?”

When I asked my partner about it he said, “No, I couldn’t watch”.

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I feel that often. That I don’t like watching. There’s part of me always trying to escape this animal world. I don’t like the act of hunting, stalking or even sensing the prey-drive in animals. Everyone’s gotta eat. Someone is going to suffer and lose in the bare-knuckle round of the animal world.

But my husband said “he couldn’t watch” not only the fox get killed, but didn’t want to see the coyote go home empty handed either. After the winter we’ve had, you can find yourself uncomfortably on both sides of this animal conundrum.

This typical northern story reminds me of the book I’m writing; the tension between saving and savouring. I often feel the pull to save and urgently act amidst the hundreds of concerns in my own community, let alone my nation, Canada, or the world. I can feel the urgency on the liberal left, which is often easy to participate in, alongside those who are working overtime to protect against the backslide of democracy, ecosystem integrity, and gender equality. Many organizations are flailing and change makers are experiencing disillusionment and burnout.

On the other hand, I also see the valid criticism towards those who fall into a more passive stance in the midst of accelerated authoritarianism, resource extraction and aggression. In the most extreme versions, this might be those who see meditation, prayer or individual wellness as a convenient spiritual bypass to structural inequality. This tension is not lost on me. I can feel the tug in my own being.

Yet, both perspectives are valid but incomplete. Over the last week and a half I’ve been reflecting on a Zen koan: Thirty blows of Tokusan. Answering thirty blows. Not answering thirty blows. As I understand it, the invitation of this koan is to see how life will continually bring me difficult challenges, no matter what I do. I will get sick, lose loved ones, experience heart-break, professional loss and go through cycles of fear-inducing uncertainty. I will also unintentionally be part of wider-scale harm, as humans continue to scramble to defend against and dominate each other and the ecosystems they depend on.

But I’m alert to the false illusion of separation between our efforts and matter itself, like when we try to keep love out of the realm of politics, as surfaced by Hannah Arendt. I can see how hard we try and police “right and wrong” actions, in the flight of urgency. With our nervous systems kicking into high gear, given how much is at stake, I get how enticing it is to be incisive, direct, and morally clarifying- based on one’s politics.

And yet, we live in a world that is constantly remaking itself, often in unpredictable ways. The Buddhist concept of karma, Karen Barad’s idea of agential realism, and Nora Bateson’s idea of combining each point to a reality in which matter, relationship and perspective are always in motion. This is the heartbeat of the creative universe.

I’ve started calling this a “conchoidal ontology”, inspired by the way certain rocks break open along unpredictable lines. It expresses a way of seeing how we’re reshaped and remade, while we shape the world too, one intimate encounter at a time. Through that breaking open, I sense an electric force of creativity.

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So when I find myself between hare or coyote, championing fiercely for one side of the animal kingdom or the other, I remember that no matter who wins, there is loss and heart-break. When I find myself pulled into easy binary debates about politics or spirituality, morality or ethics, doing and being, I will return to the koan of Tokusan’s thirty blows.

The electric invitation of this universe, I think, is to meet life as fully as we can. Whether we are breaking up with modernity, fighting in the streets, meditating in the Zendo, or raising a toddler while hustling to make ends meet on the side– this wild existence is often beyond our comprehension and control. But in the end, I want to participate wholeheartedly in my short lifetime, in all its unpredictable combinations.

I do not have to fret “what is mine to do” because I’m already taken, already moving– whether I’ve defined or named it or not.

Where do you sense an electric invitation to participate in a creative world? How do your actions, no matter how tiny, matter? Who are the poets, philosophers or teachers (including the more-than-human) who feel most encouraging so you engage in your own unique way?

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From the land of hare and coyote,

Jennifer

*A creative way into exploring a fiesty, yet powerful human emotion that touches so many of us.

An open letter to Anxiety [“you”],

I’m not sure why I didn’t write sooner. You’re like, the worst of the worst– at least in my opinion. If I can be frank, a part of me hates you; even though I was taught that “hate is a strong word”.

But letter-writing is cathartic and I will burn this tonight anyway.

I. Disturbance

You come and disturb the night. You come like a kitchen faucet leak. Quickly, without warning. You saturate neurons and cellular communication, taking over musculature, breathing apparatus, and sweat glands. I’ve heard people say that they do not know why you come nor how to get rid of you. How did you get permission to enter the liquid doorway of worry?

I hate your ruthlessness. You take cells like prisoners and force them into a cramped, breathless space. I hate how you keep me awake. I can hear your flip-flopping from afar, as you dust up the fairies and owls seeking sanctuary.

How I hate that you disturb confidence, with the “what ifs?” I hate how mindfulness, the soft prop of wellness culture, can’t hold you back sometimes.

It seems like you live to disturb the peace.

I heard you say carelessly once, peace is for the dead.

Fuck off, will you?

II. Logic Stealer

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t love logic. Logic is the death of poetry and poetry is life.

But as much as I recoil from rational linearity, I resent also that you come for what little there is. Hunt it down and devour it under the cover of fear.

Somehow you’ve disarmed every fact I use to convince you to take off eh?

The likelihood of the plane falling out of the sky is pretty much nil. You know your stuff, the exam/job interview will be fine.

Once logic is gone you can pretty much panic all you want. Also, I hate that attempts to suffocate your dumpster-fire of urgency comes off like a death threat.

Your panic seeps from below ground and temporarily becomes my own, even though logically I understand: you don’t own me. This happens before I can swipe open Notes on my phone to remind myself how to endure your endless waves.

Don’t you know, I’m trying to take off the heroic onesie and sit still with Life’s pain?

III. Small World

I’ve never been to a race track with cars or horses but I have witnessed the agony of racing thoughts. When you’re present, it doesn’t take much to be suspicious. Not to get too macro, but you get amplified by white modernity too: 100 ml in an airport security line or a teen with their hoodie up.

Without realizing it you back us into a corner, where it’s an irrational fight or flight. Fist fights or full retreat. Either way, you leave us with a smaller, fragile world. A hopeful chance to control the uncontrollable.

Are you unsure about a world continually remaking itself? Never trust that there’s a place for you to curl up and take a nap?

IV. A Place to Curl Up

Despite the fact I don’t like you, bully of the night, I softened in that last line. Do you want me to go back and re-read it?

“never trust that there’s a place for you to curl up and take a nap”.

A part of me is trying (again) to appreciate that you disturb for a reason. That you highlight things that we should pay attention to. The situations, people, or conditions that undermine our safety and well-being. Vigilance is not wrong or bad. Often it’s fiercely protective and necessary. You aren’t here just to make us worried sick.

You help us protect our soft bodies and open hearts because we’ve been harmed before.

As I’ve started this letter, I can already see you’ve toned down. You’re not as loud and twitchy. I can now hear the robins singing.

Is that all you need? Some sweet ‘ol attention? A little huddle? Reverence even?

You sure have a feisty way of showing it.

V. A Gash, a Rash and Purple Bumps

Now that we’re kinda talking, did I ever tell you about my favorite Shel Silverstein poem?

It’s called “Sick” and it’s in his famous Where the Sidewalk Ends. I must have read it three hundred and sixty four times before I was ten. It’s the one where a little girl lies in bed and laments all her pains and aches, worries and gripes.

It starts: “I cannot go to school today, says Little Peggy Ann McKay. I’ve got the measles and the mumps. A gash and rash and purple bumps. My mouth is wet. My throat is dry. I’m going blind in my right eye.” The poem goes on with a long list of usually benign occurrences, including a “belly button’s caving in.”

At the end of the poem, after a litany of racing thoughts she suddenly says:

“What? What’s that? What’s that you say? You say today is Saturday? G’bye, I’m going out to play.”

Yes, now that I’ve got this far I notice that the sun is out. The robins are hunting for daisy seeds. I saw you get up out of bed and walk out the door. You were listening to music. Prob’ly Noah Kahan’s new album.

I’m sorry for being so frightened of you. How big I can make you, while you’re just doing a decent job protecting. How I misinterpret your signals as a green light to fix and change you, when you’re just trying to keep us alive.

The next time you come haunting, may I pull up the blankets and tuck you in. Make you a little nest, so you might curl up and take a nap.

Love,

J

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BEAUTIFUL NEW BOOK IN THE WORLD

Speaking of befriending what aches us, Lisa Olivera (author of Already Enough and writer at Human Stuff) has a new book out. It’s called When The Ache Remains. Lisa offers a tender read of what it means to be human, helping us go underground into the fertile territory of pain, appreciate its wisdom while recognizing the abundance of aliveness and beauty that co-exist.

Order: Order When The Ache Remains through your library or local bookstore and follow Lisa here on Substack.

Listen: Listen to Lisa and I explore the FLUENCY OF FEELING in Season 4 of my podcast, Tension of Emergence.

Watch for: Watch for a live conversation here between Lisa and I, as we dive into the tender territory of grief, heart-brokenness, belonging and compassion that flows within and between everything we do and feel. Plus…the magic of writing and creating with nature, memory, somatics and trust.

I’m lucky to have a circle of poets as friends. They have different interests but bring a fierce curiosity to anything that calls with aliveness.

My mother is one. She is a scientist and taught me about tiny things. She listens to mosses as they rebirth themselves under glaciers. My dear friend Cecily Nicholson is another. She walks this earth with a heart bigger than the moon. She wrote a book of poems about the daily flight of crows in her city without using their proper name. My other friend Regina is an astutely observant poet, activist and hiker. She thinks and loves like the cosmos.

A circle of poets makes for soft ground, like the patch of Kinnikinnick I found last week. Poets help you notice things you might ignore, skip over or downplay, like how grief mirrors the ache of stars. They help you befriend hard truths. Like how crows teach us that “being unwelcome and hostile is not a crime,” as Cecily writes.

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I’m learning how to notice these kinds of things in the soft ground of my first book. I didn’t begin that way. In fact, at the beginning I had a tight plan. I reverse-engineered the chapters and outlined each one. Even though some of the logics didn’t feel right, looking back I realize that my earnest fortitude helped me get off the ground.

But this last winter of writing was long. My words flowed thick and slow, mirroring the bitter cold Pacific current. I wrote like a held-back tide, advancing one paragraph at a time, searching for clues until I could feel my way through the next one. Often the arc of each chapter changed multiple times, hiding its flexible selfhood until the very last hour.

The snow has melted twice since I started.

However slow it has been, I’ve noticed now that I’m in the thick of it. There’s an angry thrash of letters, words and ideas. A raucous party of chapters that I’m fond of. Even though it feels hard, I appreciate the precarious wire that holds both my burden and elation as the ideas finally get along.

If I look down at what I’ve made so far I can see that my book has a spine and two wings. There are pickings of poetry, philosophy, personal stories and cultural criticism; a tell-tale sign that I’ve travelled a ways. And yet, there may be more winters and springs before it’s ready for a wider circle of readers.

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But time isn’t the most important consideration. Making soft ground for creativity is.

Last week I listened to author Ocean Vuong talk about writing with David Perrell. Late in the conversation he talked about trusting our strange concoctions and vivid imaginations. He said the worst thing one can do is adhere to the capitalist rubric of the publishing industry; that it would do us a lot of good (in my words) to throw ourselves head-first into a stoop-dive into the creative life.

And then, simply to trust it.

Ocean’s encouragement to follow my strange and poetic instincts felt like a burst of sun. For a long time, I thought my book had to be useful. As a professional coach, seasoned executive and long-time spiritual practitioner, I thought that the book needed to distill and outline its value if it was going to have a chance.

But the more I banged out imperfect chapters, generating enough lift for a first draft, I realized that the book has more poetic than useful bones. While its still rough and ragged, its gift is that it illuminates soft ground and offers a place to gather.

So if you are a writer, scientist, mother or citizen of the heart, may this be a humble reminder to honor the strange, creative impulse of your own flight path in whatever creative act you do. Take refuge in your messy sketches, tiny observations or confusing paragraphs. Allow the long winter to darken distraction. Delight in the miracle of the again-spring.

Your willingness and trust in the uplift will bring you (and us) to soft ground.

I’m sick today, cuddled up in a yellow Irish wool blanket on the couch, happy to write to you. I’m listening to the drip, drip, drip of melting ice and snow. I’ve been desperate for those crystals to show some disobedience; to angel-kick themselves off our metal roof like a punk skateboarder.

In the midst of my impatience for Spring, I’ve been low-key enamored with Artemis II. I like imagining myself in that claustrophobic spaceship, untethered from gravity and war. As if the silent uterine aloneness of space-time could erase my ache for an earthen spring or envelop our species with a new moral chrysalis. Sometimes I want to eat my own fragility but also want us to be resurrected into it.

But mostly I like to watch the four-square captains talk, especially when they are in the midst of the “overview effect.” That sudden perspective, common to astronauts, when they first catch a glimpse of our watery blue iris from their floating tin can.

With gravity gone, there’s nothing to hide their muscular tenderness. In plain view for all of us is how space digests solid ground; dissolving every cell of independence to make room for a bigger personhood.

*
I think most of us ache for this kind of dissolution. The dissolution of narcissism but more importantly the destructive illusion that we’re separate from each other. Most of us would say that we don’t want to fight, protect and preemptively instigate aggression. I believe that most of us reject the dangerous and unimaginable situation where a leader of a country threat-tweets about destroying other countries overnight.

How untethered and silent we can be, in the race to stay on top.

*
As I was driving home yesterday, I saw a spiral of snow geese stepping gingerly over the ice-covered Yukon River. Six feathered pilgrims stood silently above a slit of opal water. They were back.

I was so excited to see the gaggle of geese, I almost didn’t make the curve in the bend of the road. My instinct was to stare. To lean on the horn and wave at them crazily like they were popstars. “You’re baaaaaack!” I exclaimed out loud.

After the jolt of excitement, I realized I was relieved. They’d chosen to descend to mostly frozen ground, knowing they’d find the soft sponge of springtime, somewhere.

*

Hours after I’d seen the geese, four American F-35s unexpectedly touched down, refueled and took off again at our airport.

In the wake of their assured metallic arrival, I did not wave.

*

In just a few hours from now, the Artemis II astronauts will find a slit of open water. They will fall into the Pacific south of me. They will bring to our oxygenated chrysalis their partially-digested selves and the starry flesh of new becomings.

It is not their return that touches me most but their implicit trust that somewhere, they’ll find soft ground.

When they come, I’ll wave frantically.

But this time, big like the sea.

When I can’t answer “what to do” in the midst of harrowing politicized aggression, I go to the forest. I turn to poetry. I feel my feet on the ground. I call a dear friend.

It seems that we’re stuck in patterns that we don’t want: escalating violence and wars coupled with responses that seem to limit possibility.

When I feel my chest tingling with impatience and anger, I’m trying to channel it towards anything that might contribute to an enlivening, new beginning.

I’m more and more interested in strange happenings. The trickster-esque that defies logic. Intimacies from the periphery. Beauty in the midst of unshakable grief. Whispers from the unseen.

I say this even when, in my own professional capacities, I know how much I’m relied on for strategy and efficiency.

I am listening for what we long for but can’t name or hear.

*

Many years ago, my family and I stayed at an Eco-Camp in eastern Borneo in a majority Muslim community.

One sunny morning, we noticed that a new group of travelers had arrived. They had fancy large cameras, a green pop-up changing tent and two bikini-clad models. As the women ran out with new outfits, men from the conservative village were intrigued, while trying not to look intrigued.

Women from the village took one look and got on with the day’s chores.

At the camp, this meant unplugging a blocked kitchen drain linked to the sewer system. As cameras clicked just a few meters away, the hard-working women cooks gathered around the hole with a snake and a bucket.

They didn’t flinch at the smell of raw sewage. But as the stench rose up from their snaking, my husband and I discreetly relocated for relief. Looking around for my feral kids, I noticed my son Miša (age 11) had hit the waves. When I looked for my daughter Sarah (age 8), near the oohs and awwws of the fashion shoot, I didn’t see her.

When I turned back towards the hearty kitchen crew, I saw Sarah sitting with her arms encircling her knees, giggling with the women as they cursed the drain with jokes and eye rolls.

Since Sarah was a shyer kid, I was surprised. Often in new villages she was glued to me or my husband’s hand. But there was something about the dirty, necessary and communal grit of making the water flow that drew her in.

I moved my head between three scenes: the fancy models posing, the group of men watching, and the kitchen ladies snaking. Glamour and grit. Sex and the mundane. Sweetness and sewage.

*

I haven’t thought about this story for many years. Yet, in the recollection of it, I’m invited to listen differently. It isn’t simply a contrasting story of glamour and grit in a small Bornean village.

I feel like it’s reminding me of something we’re all longing for: how intimacies can emerge from the periphery. From strange places. From grit and dirt and the shit of everyday life.

It asks me to consider how sewage might be invitational. How it might be the star of this story, shining bright with aliveness. How it reveals its own kinetic magnetism– to muscle our way into entanglement.

After the drain situation was resolved, and the sun set day after day, my daughter was welcome in the private kitchen. She got to watch the making of family recipes and listen in on the hush and giggles of women’s talk. Because of her willingness to join them, a quiet kinship had been established- and perhaps an extra strawberry on her pancakes.

This might feel simple. Maybe too simple. But in this moment where we’re finding more reasons to disconnect, we need the unexpected– to remember how kinship is made and remade outside the flash of the fancy cameras.

This week I’m curious to know where you’ve kindled kinship across difference in an unexpected place? What did it teach you about fostering reciprocity and intimacy with others? How might this help us collectively, as we wrestle with so much violence, aggression and harm?

See you down below in the comments my friend!

Jennifer

When the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared at Davos weeks ago that our international rules-based order had experienced a rupture, many of us exhaled.

Citing the Czech poet and former President, Václav Havel– someone my philosophical father-in-law often quoted at the kitchen table– Mark Carney not only named the trouble but pointed toward a possible way out.

At a critical point of his speech he said, “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

To a fractured global table, Mark Carney brought what many were waiting for: a courageous break in silence about the harm caused by a superpower. Then he added a healthy dose of values-aligned pragmatism, proposing a path forward: multilateral opportunities for middle-power nations struggling with threats and tariffs.

So while Carney’s appeal to pragmatism struck a chord– something about that word stirred an inner discomfort.

Pragmatism.

Is his approach simply more of the same but with smaller players?

Might his version of pragmatism hide other subordinations– like the northwestern BC pristine wilderness or human rights abuses in China?

*
I don’t often use the word “pragmatic” but I notice that part of me likes it. It evokes simplicity and efficiency; if we could all focus on the task at hand the muddied waters will be made clear.

But as seductive as this approach is during a time of chaos, my spidey sense is up. I’m reminded by one of my teachers that the pragmatic logic of modernity doesn’t exhaust other ways of relating to the world. Or as Nigerian philosopher Báyò Akómóláfe has warned: “What if the way we’re approaching the crisis is part of the crisis?”

Long before Cynthia and Bayo’s time, the Swiss poet and philosopher Jean Gebser said something very similar in his seminal book, The Ever-Present Origin:

The condition of today’s world cannot be transformed by technocratic rationality, since both technocracy and rationality are apparently nearing their apex; nor can it be transcended by preaching or admonishing a return to ethics and morality, or in fact, by any form of return to the past.

Yikes.

Does this mean we should be skeptical of pragmatism? Is it truly problematic?

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If we understand that we’ve partially gotten ourselves into this mess, through a blend of enthusiastic capitalism, unbridled colonization, and unabashed racism –then it follows that this tipping point we find ourselves in, or “rupture” as Mark Carney suggests, might indeed mean that modernity, and its favored mental structure of consciousness, have reached their limits.

In other words, the ways we’ve built our cities, nations and economies are no longer in a reciprocal dance with the earth we’re living on.

So now what? What wisdom can we turn to?

Perhaps other ways of viewing time, human relationships, entanglements, and reciprocity could be helpful. Back to our Swiss friend Jean Gebser, who speaks of structures of consciousness other than mental (of which pragmatism is a star student), I’m intrigued by what he calls the integral structure of consciousness that doesn’t replace other ways of seeing the world, but includes their wisdom: the archaic, magical, mythical, and mental.

*
As I’ve shared before, I’m working on a book that explores a lifelong koan: how do we save what we love, without reproducing harm? This koan features a tension between a number of polarities: saving and savoring, action and stillness, sovereignty and community, compassion and harm.

But the very idea that we should resolve these tensions drops us back into the pragmatic. In a culture of urgency, politicians, CEOs, and community activists are expected to act fast!

Get the cat down from the tree! Put out the fire! Update the system! Say something, do something!

But when we’re entangled in worlds upon worlds, with endless combining (as systems theorist and filmmaker Nora Bateson would say), most of the time ‘what to do’ isn’t obvious or pragmatic.

*

As mystical traditions, quantum physics, Indigenous wisdom, and queer ecology all suggest, our sacrosanct sovereign “self” is deeply entangled. How we decide what to do in the world is conditioned by how we see it. So when we’re encouraged to act fast, we forget our entanglement and separate matter into tidy opposites for simplicity and speed.

This approach can make a situation far worse– and we don’t have to look very hard for examples these days!

Through this troubled time– conflict, competing values, dominating superpowers, war and climate existential threat– the question of “what to do” will never be easily resolved. No amount of cognitive gymnastics or brilliant diplomacy will fully resolve it.

This is a muddy field and I’m sinking as much as the next person.

But my hunch, for what it’s worth, is that our tender world is gesturing towards new horizons; stranger happenings beyond the pragmatic. While I’m not suggesting we throw out the pragmatic–or the tactical openings suggested by Prime Minister Mark Carney– there are other ways of seeing and acting that may surprise us.

Instead of trying to solve these maddening riddles, I’m approaching my koan by getting curious about what disrupts the polarities I’m working with. Encouraged by Gebser, who reminds us that human consciousness unfolds through magical, mythical, mental, and integral structures of awareness, I’ve begun to think that our ways of seeing and acting actually fracture in unpredictable ways– what I’m calling “conchoidal.”

In other words, sometimes the most promising liberation comes when cracks in our ways of seeing and acting cascade strangely through them all. For example, perhaps our urgent times call for more mythical and magical ways of knowing, instead of boxing ourselves into the mental.

To ground us, I’d like to offer you a hot-off-the-airwaves conversation with my friend and philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé as we near the end of Season 4 of Tension of Emergence.

Báyò and I talk about the trouble with pragmatism, while also doing our best to keep our boots on the ground in the mystical, muddy, and magical world of this human life.

Here’s a sneak peek:

So while I didn’t resolve anything for us here today, I invite you to add your perspectives into the mix. Here’s a prompt for you that might prime the pump for a story, insight or comment below!

Consider a current, complex challenge of yours. Where do you find pragmatism helpful? And where does it get in the way? What strange happenings have you noticed that somehow cracked open how you saw and acted with the challenge? Any surprises?

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Share Evolve with Jennifer England

With tender curiosity,

Jennifer

The following story is one of my father’s, told much better by him in this podcast conversation with Brother David Steindl-Rast on hope in a climate crisis. But I want to share it with you here as it gestures towards new ways of being that feel exciting at this cultural moment.

*

Once there was a young, feisty grad student named Jess who spent a summer in a remote and isolated campsite in the high Arctic tundra to study land forms and rocks.

Although Jess was at home in pubs and university libraries, she loved spending her days walking rugged terrain to look for things most people consider boring.

Of the personal items Jess brought, her leather hiking boots, were most important. More than scotch, dark chocolate or the milk for her tea, they kept her feet dry and her soft body safe on steep slopes.

But one morning, when Jess went to put on these trusted boots she only saw one. She looked outside her tent, hobbling on one foot. The search extended in circles far beyond their camp with no luck. Given the boot’s mysterious disappearance, Jess figured a wolf, who they’d seen around and affectionately called Bob, had stolen it!

In any case, it required emergency intervention. A call was made to the research base to put in an order for a new pair of leather hiking boots from a far-away store in a far-away city. It would take many days for new ones to come, traveling by jet, then tiny plane and finally helicopter.

After she’d gladly broken her new boots in, the very next day her missing boot turned up.

And it was Bob, the wolf, who brought it back.

In the expansive tundra, a landscape of mountains, glacial ice and green river valleys, we might assume the land is simply a backdrop. Further, we might give animals the benefit of the doubt that they can think. But this story tells of a stranger scene charged with humor and trickery.

Bob, the jester on the periphery was now bringing accidental amazement.

*

Our traveling canine friend is a disruptor in this story. The wolf playfully toys with productivity (Jess couldn’t hike well without her boots) with a sneaky steal. He banters and barks, observing humans perhaps better than they do. As a trickster, he stunts the flow of science while also entangling Jess and her assistant with the more-than-human world.

So what does a strange story about an Arctic wolf, named Bob have to do with breaking open new futures?

This story introduces us to “conchoidal” movement.

Conchoidal means a fracture or break that happens in unpredictable planes or lines. If you’ve ever touched flint or quartz or obsidian, you’ll get a good idea of what I mean. Maybe you’ve held a piece of flat stone with jagged edges, where breaks are convex in shape and reveal undulating lines of mineral beneath? Because of this conchoidal property, some of these rocks, like flint, were used for hunting and other tools because of their sharpness.

Likewise, quartz breaks in curved and strange places because it lacks what’s called a preferential cleavage plane. If I am understanding my geology well, a preferential cleavage plane is when a mineral breaks along a direction that is more likely to separate because of the way its atoms are arranged and bonded.

Zooming out to familiar cultural and political approaches, we tend to focus on preferential cleavage planes. Consider: will this election fall to the Republicans or Democrats? Will the tariffs help or hinder Canadians? Is that patriarchal goon evil or actually good? Will we win or lose? Our focus and approach centralizes binaries of all kinds. We separate most matters along a straight line that delineates here from there.

But the challenge with approaching our world along anticipated cleavage planes is an endless flip flop between two sides.

There are good guys and bad guys. But who’s who? The left believes the left side has them. The right believes the right side has them. In a post-modern time, who’s good or bad depends on the context you’re socialized in.

But to me this is a simplistic way of relating to human relationships. Our cultural politics are too calculating, predictable and limiting. We thrive on conceptual clarity and separation. We strategize for years so we can beat out the political competition.

Spontaneity, strangeness and freshness of the crack-in-time now somehow appears too threatening.

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But I am here to encourage us towards new metaphors. New ways of seeing. I am here for unforeseeable, playful fractures. Curved surfaces. Undulating ripples of stone, sediment and mineral. A new currency that centers unpredictable breaking and remaking.

This is the essence of Bob the Wolf. This is our strange encounters with the natural world, like drunk moons. This is what’s possible when we untangle our colonized minds.

While grief swirls amidst the testing of democratic institutions, progressive policies, and oligarchical power it’s natural that everything can feel like it’s breaking.

I believe it is but not in the direction we expect or fear.

Now is the time for hidden geopoetics, human imagination and the erosion between the seen and unseen worlds. Now is the time for an understanding of evolution that does not unfold in straight lines (notice the backwards “E” of this newsletter?). For a new understanding of hope that doesn’t depend on everything turning out well, but how well we’re attuned to surprise.

In the tenderness of time, I want to be awake to a different kind of politics and human relating; one that teases us into the conchoidal.

One that keeps me on my toes, with a heart and mind wide open.

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Jennifer

I’m not sure how I’ve managed to still write.

Without going into vulnerable details, we’ve experienced a series of events beyond our control. Add to that a piercing loss of a loved one, together they shook our family to the core. And given the serious downs of political threats and violence, its been hard to have any extra energy for my book project.

Honestly, it’s sucked.

And yet, somehow I’ve been able to make progress.

In a year and a half, I’ve managed to draft a book proposal, a prologue, an introduction and thirteen chapters. Along the way, I’ve walked and skied hundreds of kilometers through the twists and tears of doubt. I’ve rewritten chapters, lost huge sections by accident, and thrown out and re-envisioned the entire second half.

The journey has taught me more about myself than I imagined. I’ve made peace with my discovery-style of writing, despite solid advice, which refuses well-crafted structure. I’ve learned to welcome and trust a way of thinking and writing that is unpredictable and synergistic. I think best with the poplars, poets and philosophers who offer shade in a world of hot takes. I’ve come to trust that writing takes time and good writing takes work.

*

Since I promised to offer an inside peek into the ups and downs of a first-time book project, here’s what’s helped me keep going– even when it would be tempting to stop.

Most days, I get up and make my bed. Stoke the fire and meditate. Feed the dog, tidy the kitchen and get lunch ready for my daughter. I go to work and journey with top-notch clients, thinkers on my podcast, and when able, sit my ass down at my kitchen table and write.

I want to emphasize that I do none of this perfectly. Like many of us, I feel the tug between generating income and making art in the midst of existential angst.

But no matter the stretch, somehow I’ve been able to pick up the pen and write.

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Here are 9 things that have helped:

1. Embrace beginnerdom. Janet Fitch, author of the famous novel White Oleander, says that no matter if you’ve written one, two or twenty books the act of making is vulnerable. You start fresh every time. Taking her advice, I’m cutting out a large “L” (for Learner) like they do for young drivers. I’m going to paste it on the back of my laptop to signal gentleness to the parts of myself that don’t know what to do.

2. Ask for help: I find it hard to ask for help, especially if I think I should know better. I get sweaty and confused, uncertain about what I need. But my partner, friends, sister and parents and teachers in my life, are patient. They offer me time and non-judgment, so I can fumble my way toward the ask. With them, I experience a bedrock of care so I can give it to myself when the inner critic gets ugly: don’t compare, keep going, follow your own path, enjoy the process, share your work.

3. Feel it All: I lean on my decades-long embodiment and somatic training. I have more courage to face my worry and fear about making something vulnerable like a book. Facing means feeling fully. I untangle the tight braid of thought, feeling and sensation and stay with whatever sensation is in my chest, thighs, jaw or shoulders. To do that, I need long walks with the dog. I follow sensation like a diviner, until it eases. I honor what’s right about what I’m feeling, then move into action: a re-write, a deletion, a vulnerable share or chapter outline.

4. Gather in Creative Circles: I gather with a small circle of creatives in my home town. We meet monthly for fancy cheese and wine to share our poetry, visual art, and writing. We share first drafts, wild visions, tender dreams and quiet doubts. I also get myself to monthly gatherings of Yukon poets and writers, who share with a wider circle of avid readers. Both are an invaluable source of receptivity, community and friendship.

5. Listen: I listen to conversations about craft, joy and torture of writing. Ha! Yes it can feel like torture. Recently, I’ve been enjoying the Memoir Nation podcast with and . Together, they create conversations that feel like a roaring campfire, offering craft advice with generosity, especially on the days I feel like giving up.

6. Be Useful: My regular writing practice comes in handy for political activism. Words flow more easily when I’m inclined to bang out a letter to my Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA)– most recently on our territorial government’s position to opt out of the national gun buy-back program. Using my gift to take small actions on local issues helps enliven my political agency.

7. Meditate: I try and meditate as often as discipline and devotion allow– ideally in the mornings. The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche says that we can approach our art with the subtle demand of mindfulness or open awareness. When I let go of any demand to “get somewhere”, even mindfully, I can appreciate the bewildering pleasure of channeling word to page.

8. Share: When I cross the invisible line between working solo and sharing my work, I experience the whole point of this writing thing. The surprises that happen between aloneness and community is where I feel the deepest satisfaction. I must again and again, come out of hiding.

9. Read challenging work: I read writers and thinkers who challenge my view of the world or how a book ‘should’ be written. This encourages me, more than anything, to trust my instincts and go off script like so many off-beat, visionary writers have done before me.

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Now over to you (here catch my ball!)

As you witness or experience scary and/or challenging things in your life, what helps you stay in relationship with your art? What helps you abate shock, freeze and overwhelm? When you manage to continue to practice your art, in whatever form, what have you discovered?

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I am writing to you at the end of a heavy week for me. If you read my last piece, Dropping out of the New Year Race, you’ll know that this year began with heft.

This letter is later than I expected. I lost an Aunt who was really special to me. I knew her the best of all my aunties because she and I often overlapped for weeks when I lived with my grandmother during hot East coast summers as a late teen.

While she had many challenges (including being dependent on formal care for most of her adult life) she was a powerful teacher to me. In the midst of great vulnerability and struggle, her capacity to be curious and interested in everyone she met was unrivaled.

In the last couple of days, she spoke little. But at one point, she told my cousin very seriously that we mustn’t “forget the Love Boat.”

The Love Boat? Like Capital L, Capital B?

For those of you who grew up in the 70s and 80s, you’ll catch this reference. The Love Boat was an American love drama on the MS Pacific Princess. Since most of us only had three TV channels when we grew up, chances are you spent part of your Saturday night watching that hunk of a Captain Stubing.

When my Aunt shared this wisdom, with a serious tone, I wonder whether she might have meant something else besides the show that came before Fantasy Island.

*

To be with my grief, I’ve been taking lots of long afternoon walks. On one of them, the Sun pierced through two months of near-constant gray. It was as if she knocked on Earth’s door and forgot to take off her shoes.

As I made my way up a ridge, I saw something I’d never seen. It wasn’t a classic sun dog, those rainbow like horizontal sun spots. But a gigantic beam of light interpenetrated by diamond snow crystals that looked more like a cosmic vertical universe opening up its arms.

Here it is…caught in real time.

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All I could think of was the song Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes by Paul Simon. I also couldn’t help but recall that gorgeous Tlingit name for sunbeam, shared by my friend Lance X’unei Twichell in his book of poems G̱agaan X̱ʼusyee / Below the Foot of the Sun.

Stunned by this solar phenomenon, I stood still for what seemed like ages. It felt good to take in something that felt inherently counter to the violent global mood.

*

Earlier this week I wrote “While there are some who want us to believe that power is wielded by force, intimidation, threats and violence- and that there’s no use in resisting- somehow these subtle cosmic sky crystals reveal a different truth.

Yes to principled and pragmatic, diplomacy and dialogue. But an even bigger yes to the wilder, stop-me-in-my tracks, strangeness of solar surprise.

There is magic in unforeseen futures- not necessarily a certainty we’ve been wanting. But for wilder seeings that come in dreams, deaths and deluges.

Perhaps it comes as a thousand cell phones witnessing ICE. A river of meals for those who cannot leave their homes.

Or maybe it comes as a flood of diamonds we’ll never own. A spiral of falls we cannot prevent. A light so fierce we must squint to see.

I don’t know what the sky was trying to say, but I’m on my knees listening.”

*

Maybe this blue-green orb is the Love Boat.

Not an idealized place where we fall in love, sip champagne, and dance till dawn—
but a place where we become the shoes our entangled planet needs to walk somewhere new.

Here’s that Paul Simon’s song with Ladysmith Black Mambazo accompanying.

I just blocked off my mornings with the name “attend to what’s needed”. While there is other work to do– strategizing, writing, client sessions: sometimes the world wants me to deviate.

While everyone appears to be rushing into 2026 with big goals, I’m being hushed into the land of unpredictability. There is a dissolution at play. A disorienting dance of uncertainty. I feel like I’m trapped in one of those Sherlock Escape Rooms.

*

Last night I had a dream.

I was walking with a friend on a railroad track nestled into a cliff face. I was gigantic-sized. The track was tiny. It appeared to be duct-taped to a crumbling rock wall. The ground was a mile below me and I was on the verge of plunging to a terrifying death. One tiny misstep and it was over.

In the presence of this sweat-inducing fear, I managed to tiptoe around a corner. I came upon a group of people and begged for a rope to rappel to safety. Just then, the railroad evaporated and I was sitting in a kitchen. The people were still there, along with a massive drop, but no rope.

I had no choice but to slip off the edge. As I did, my feet hit the hard, linoleum floor. Like a first-time paraglider, I breathed out a huge sigh of relief.

*

If I applied a post-Jungian analysis, as dream worker Toko-Pa Turner encourages, I would ask about the emotional flavor of the dream. I could easily explore fear, given the death defying drop, but relief feels more interesting. Not as a future arrival point, but right now.

In other words, how might my feet be already touching something solid and trustworthy?

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Since returning to “work” after the holidays, the New Year seems to be kinked with cultural grief, disorientation and anger. I listen to the news and experience cognitive dissonance about how events and actions (especially in the US) are being portrayed. What is presented as “normal” doesn’t feel normal to me, even with gentle reminders from philosophers like Bayo Akomolafe that what we’re really longing for is predictability, not sanity.

With an earnest fidelity to predictability in all forms, I admit: I used to love this time of year. As the calendar ticks forward, I have often punctuated it with a new sweater or inner development goal. These predictable “new” things bring the relief of change. A new look, a new spiritual milestone!

You can feel this not only in yourself but our cultural obsessions.

A new political party! A necessary narco-war! A pill for the anxious generation! An email template that will revolutionize your world! The Once-ler’s Thneed.

But our love affair with the “new” around this time of year doesn’t only promise a sweeter future. It does something better. It helps us forget what we’d prefer to leave behind: uncomfortable truths, difficult moral decisions, what truly matters, our ache for this world. Our best laid plans, chapters, projects and marketing strategies help us maintain control on the cliff rather than feeling our feet on the ground.

This is part of the annual race: New Year, New Me. It promises a revolving, short-lived high.

But what if your New Year begins with a dose of cliff edge: grief, disorientation and fear? What if your waypoints have changed and you find yourself without a rope?

Going back to my dream. I found myself not on the cliff but on a kitchen chair. Even so, it still felt like I was dangling in the void. Hanging in space, desperate for a rope. But when I let go, I was just inches off the floor. Relief.

So perhaps that is why I slated in “attend to what’s needed” in the prime time of my weekly calendar. It reminds me to find my feet as a shapeshifting mother, creative, writer and coach. It helps me oscillate between cliff edge and hearth and between action and surrender.

As I wrap up this first letter of 2026, I want to say it’s OK to drop out of the New Year’s race. While our love affair with the new is natural (and exciting if truly enlivening), finding our feet can be enough. It can sometimes be just the tincture needed.

May you find relief at the edge of uncertainty. May you trust your cognitive dissonance with fearless humility. May you do the dishes and spit-shine them clean for strangers ready to be welcomed. May you wear gentleness all year round. May your heart expand when life pounds you flat, remembering the resilience of your bones. May you be soft and compassionate with yourself throughout these unfamiliar midnights.

May you trust your feet as you slip off the kitchen chair.

Reflection for You (feel free to share in Comments below!): Where is relief between your fingers, beneath your feet? What is holding you, as you navigate a challenge or an unknowing? What perspective shift (this is a chair not a cliff edge!) has felt most helpful? Where is the heat of your love leading you?

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PS. Notice anything different, if you’ve been here for a while? I have a beautiful new (ha!) art and font for EVOLVE from the talented Leigh Maneri. I will say more in a couple of weeks, how the imagery speaks to me and my thoughts on why “Evolve” in a post-humanist and Zen context is meaningful to me.

On repeat, as I make sense of this life.

It’s -48 C and piercingly quiet with a sting of ice. In our wider circle, pipes are freezing and planes cancelled while abandoned cars line the highway. Weather nucleates every conversation, like a snowflake. Texts to my family down south are boring and predictable, with daily updates sharing some version of “surviving”.

This is the second week of extreme Arctic temperatures and the earliest in the season in about thirty years. So far, we’re faring well. But honestly, miracles are everywhere. A car starts. The chimney hasn’t iced over. Plumbing still functions.

Today, one car has gone to town because there are dentist appointments and grocery pick ups to do. Preparing to drive fifteen minutes to town feels like gearing up for battle. It takes reconnaissance. Reverse-engineering. Smart wit. At pilates last week, the warm up talk was accompanied by comparisons of emergency jump cables. Dewalt? The MotoMaster Eliminator?

That’s tuff, my teen would say, as I affix propane heater blankets and prevent tire blow outs while my partner’s away. What’s tough is pulling a young friend out of the ditch 1:30am, while she’s wearing bunny slippers (ill-timed party theme?) at -45.

It’s so cold that frost has moved into every window crease in our house. It serves as our daily warning to bundle up. Our back door looks like a white fungus invasion, snow crystals occupying every bit of metal hardware. Outside, skin freezes within minutes. In a rush yesterday, I accidentally touched a metal door handle with my bare thumb and was instantly pierced by a sharp pain. I’m glad I’ve outgrown the tongue-on-metal antic, otherwise I’d be at the hospital.

As difficult as the weather is, it delivers kindness like a reliable trickle charger. After weeks of this, the intense cold becomes self-discharging; causing many of us to lose stamina. So it matters that everyone begins looking out for one other; including the stray dogs. On local Facebook groups, folks offer battery warmers, propane tank heaters, baked goods and even check ins on our collective nervous system, ‘how’s everyone really doing out there’? There’s a psychic weight to extreme cold, especially when it’s got you by the throat with little reprieve in sight.

Recently there was a massive search party for a shelter dog. He escaped within hours from his new foster humans, causing a ripple of panic in the neighborhood. Live traps filled with crock pots of bison stew dotted the streets. Yesterday he was found, skinny but alive.

Some of us were in tears upon hearing the dog was found. It made me think of a different kind of “overview effect”—the one astronauts describe when they see Earth from space. That sudden and transformative experience that arrives when one sees our miraculous testament of survival. One that often creates a shift in perspective that centers the “we” not the “I”.

*

I can’t help but wonder how many of us are experiencing what I call the “underview effect”. Not from above, but an entangled below. That similar eclipse of awe that happens when you’re taken by the miracle of kindness, when “under” the wallop of extreme weather. Buried in shivers and the uncertainty of metal and plastic, the trickle of care from strangers offers a shift in perspective that’s needed more than ever these days.

Political differences dissolve like boiling water tossed into Arctic air, as we check in with folks we don’t know. We wrap each other in blankets, clean up basements and miss work meetings because we choose to huddle and keep each other close. Across personal distance, group affiliation and culture, we reach for each other, when things get real.

No matter how many decades I’ve lived, I’m taken with awe every time. Just like when I watch the ravens make space for one another on the top of light posts and building vents.

In the midst of climate warming, I’m secretly loving this “right to be cold” as Canadian Inuit writer Sheila Watt-Cloutier would say. I love that it reminds me of our human proclivity to be generous. Perhaps that’s what makes an “underview” effect possible. Like our astronauts up there, we, laden with the pitch dark and -45, are reminded that so little is guaranteed. That we’re rolling the “knuckle bones”, as Stephen Jenkinson says, taking our chances as we grapple with the burden and beauty of our lives.

And when the hair on the back of our necks is alert with staying alive, nothing is more relieving than receiving the support of another human.

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Two nights ago, I arrived home just before it got dark. I saw something that I’d never seen after twenty years living on our little piece of land. As I walked into the house, I didn’t realize that there were four moose (a mum, two one year olds and a young bull) munching on our raspberries, about fifty meters from me. I gasped and when they heard me, ran to the forest.

When I got inside, we spent the next eight hours tracking them as they moved from bush to bush in my carefully tended food forest. Moving window to window, we could hear them cry, dig out snow, and urge each other to move on to the next saskatoon, haskap, flowering almond and current.

One by one, branches were snapped taken by their snow-covered snouts until the cosmic sky lit up. Part of me wanted to protest quietly on the window pane. Just a little roll of the nails on the glass to say, “please, not that one!”. But it was -48 and I wanted their steamy-beast of a self to make it.

I’ve never been a handful of feet from four moose for hours. Amidst this deep freeze, their long-legged guard hairs, were thick and healthy. Eyes were wide awake and curious. Stamina a marvel. A Solstice gift. A midnight moose monastery.

With all the beautiful reflections on Solstice rest and rejuvenation, I’m taken this year, by an energetic counterpoint. This time of year also implores us to become more awake. To stay electrifyingly connected. To be ready. To be stunned, again and again by the eclipse of awe that expands our wholeheartedness.

So here’s a reflection for you:

Given that you and I are unlikely to head into space to experience the “overview effect”, when have you experienced what I’m calling the “underview effect”? Perhaps it was an experience that ushered in a profound shift in perspective. One that tenderized your heart. Or one that offered a paradoxical sense of vastness, even when you were entangled with material solidity of every day life?

If you care to share, I’d love to hear in the comments below!

From the depths of piercing cold,

Jennifer

Around this time, a few years ago, I looked back at my year and felt like I’d barely accomplished barely anything.

I wasn’t alone.

Ever look back and feel that your artistic, personal or professional goals were like a torn fishing net, frayed and flailing, never catching what you reached for?

Maybe a big project hasn’t come to fruition. The book you’re writing feels monstrous and confusing. A desired change hasn’t emerged in the way you hoped. You’ve navigated a huge loss, and haven’t had the energy to attend to much else. Despite all your good intentions, you reckon you’ve been devoured and by the holiday season you’ve got little left in the tank.

Many of my friends and clients go through periods of time where external validation is driving the assessment of success. Did I hit tenure? Land the next book deal? Get the big job? Be a well-attached, grounded parent while the world goes to pot? Do enough to speak out against the political issues that matter?

But what happens when you and I didn’t?

What happens when we were undone by loss, grief, a tough parenting stretch or a setback at work that kept us up long past your bedtime?

Our culture is oversaturated with messages about an independent, linear and progressive life. Success, we’re told, is getting up at dawn, hoarding the best nets and casting them out early to get a ‘leg up’. All to fill a prescribed set of accomplishments and enjoy the fleeting hearts after sharing them on social.

No wonder our rituals of to-do-lists, New Year’s resolutions, and performance reviews reinforce the idea that our external accomplishments are paramount.

But see, here’s the trap.

When we chase external success, we feed the myth that we can control life and that we’re separate enough from our entanglements to make things happen on our own terms. This is the free world after all, isn’t it?

But I like to remind myself, and those I deeply care about, that we’re not separate from each other, nor in control of much at all. And when we start from this premise, a year end ritual gets a lot more interesting.

*

So I’d rather ask when were you caught off guard? Had to pivot? Thrown off balance? How did you respond when all the bets were off? Instead of throwing the nets in the ocean did you cast yourself into the deep? If so, what did you uncover? Learn to trust?

My hunch is that this territory is different from quantitative externals.

It’s watery and fluid.

One that invites us not into a game of milestone gluttony but a dynamic dance between our intentions and wild improv.

So that is what this week’s gathering, Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Year of Intention and Improv, is all about. And I’d love you to have you with us- there’s still space.

Details:

• Who: An intimate group of change-makers, leaders, artists, weavers, and big thinkers.

• What: We’re looking back at 2025 and forward to 2026 (reflecting, harvesting improv, setting intentions)

• Vibe: Fun, light and playful.

• When: Friday, December 12th 12-1:30pm MST (11am PST, 2pm EST, 7pm GMT +0)

• Where: Online (Zoom)

To register: Old school, please hit reply to this email.

If you can’t make it, may you know and trust the depths of your resilience, imagination and care, in the darkest of waters.

Jennifer

Dear reader,

As the calendar year comes to a close I have two invitations for you in December. The first is a classic. The second is brand new :)

I’d love you to come to one or both! Details below.

#1. Looking Back/Looking Forward: A Year of Intention and Improv

For the last three years a beautiful group from North America and Europe has gathered for a year-end ritual.

It’s not the usual.

We don’t count our wins or gold. Rather, we reflect on how we were undone, thrown in the deep, or caught off guard.

The purpose of our gathering is to make sense of the experiences that have grown and stretched us the most, as we till the soil for the year ahead.

We celebrate resilience, creative grit, endurance, imagination, softness, and the willingness to try again and again in our messy human lives.

In short: we bow to our big heart and flexible mind.

If you haven’t tried it yet, please come. If you’ve already marked this down, I can’t wait to see you again.

DETAILS

When: Friday, December 12th 12-1:30pm MST (time zone conversions below)

• 🕚 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM Vancouver (PST)

• 🕒 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Toronto/New York (EST)

• 🕗 7:00 PM– 8:30 PM London, UK (GMT)

Where: On Zoom (you’ll receive a link after you register)

How to Register: Old school. Hit reply to this email to confirm your seat (MAX 25).

What to bring: A friend (send them this invite), a cup of tea, journal/pen and a tincture of spaciousness in what’s otherwise a hectic season.

*

#2. Savoring vs. Savouring: A Meta-Relational Gathering (for Paid Subscribers only)

I’m hosting a special 75 minute co-wondering for paid subscribers a live, spacious exploration of the themes in my book-in-progress and the creative process behind it.

Part reading, part storytelling, part behind-the-scenes glimpse, we’ll sit together in the fertile tensions shaping our lives: action/rest, doing/presence, saving/savouring, joy/suffering, spiritual/political and self/community.

The purpose is not to resolve the tensions but wrestle, explore and compost the deeper questions (or koans) that animate our creative, relational and intellectual pursuits.

This is a vulnerable invitation. My book is still becoming. And it’s a heart-felt thank you to those who’ve generously supported my creative work.

DETAILS

When: Friday, December 19th 12-1:15pm MST on Zoom (time zone conversions below)

• 🕚 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM Vancouver (PST)

• 🕒 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM Toronto/New York (EST)

• 🕗 7:00 PM– 8:15 PM London, UK (GMT)

🌓 Already a paid subscriber and want to come? Hit reply to this email and you’ll receive the private Zoom link.

🌓 Not yet a paid subscriber and want to come? Here’s a Solstice Special for you.

Get 20% off for 1 year

Can’t wait to co-wonder with you!

Hot In (the Air): New Micro Episode (7 min) on the Tension of Emergence Podcast

In this short episode, Jennifer builds on her conversation with Zen teacher Diane Musho Hamilton and facilitator & executive coach Gabe Kegan Wilson to explore one underrated superpower in our “growing up” toolkit: listening well.

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We’ve all been in those harder conversations—at work, with a partner, a teen, or a family member—where we’re either talking over each other or shutting down. In this episode, Jennifer offers a simple, relational practice to slow things down and listen in a way that softens defensiveness and deepens connection.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why reflective listening is such a powerful practice in conflict and everyday conversations

• How to shift from listening to confirm you’re “right” to listening from a place of not knowing

• How slowing the pace of a conversation can change the entire field of relationship

Jennifer reminds us that reflecting back doesn’t mean you agree. It simply shows that you’ve heard what matters to the other person and are willing to be with it—without rushing to fix, solve, or convince.

That’s all my friends! I hope to see/meet you at one of the Solstice events!

Jennifer

I had the most surreal experience this past week. On a whim, I felt called to invite neighbors, friends and community members to a spontaneous solidarity run/walk for women and girls’ safety.

About a week ago, a woman in our community was attacked in broad daylight on a trail used and beloved in the heart of our small city. While sexualized assault happens frequently, this was the second attack on this trail this fall.

A rupture. A shock.

As I digested the news with friends and colleagues, something in me felt called to gather people. I could feel the collective fear from the rupture, under a canopy of spruce and pine usually associated with freedom, joy and movement.

I put out something small on Facebook, the place everyone in our town checks in for goings-on. The word spread fast and the invitation resonated.

*

So there I stood, with the support of my friend Jen Massie (a.k.a. ecstatic dance whisperer) and we watched the glow of headlights move down the highway. I had no idea how many people would come, whether ten or sixty. All I knew was that a group of men from a local company were bringing coffee and Timbits (small round favorites from Tim Hortons), Natalie was preparing a warm up and Jen was bringing a JBL speaker.

My body was nervous that morning. My legs pricked with electric current and my mouth was dry. A part of me worried intense emotions might overflow the banks. I glanced towards the river, as if looking for advice. You don’t have to hold this all, it seemed to say as the mist-gray sky drew us together like a blanket. Ravens above ka-loo-kooed their abundant trickster energy.

So I breathed out, just a second longer, as I saw a long line of cars in both directions, with their headlights brighter than the rising sun. I knew then something bigger had arrived; awake with energy like the cold current beside us.

Within minutes the parking lot was full. Hundreds of walkers and runners, with babies, dogs, grandparents, Dads, Aunties and Uncles, got out of their cars in all directions. A gentle roar of their voices as they waited to surge as a human tributary of solidarity and care.

*

Building up to the event, and afterwards, many reporters and journalists asked genuine questions about who, what, why and where. I did my best to answer them. They also wondered what outcome I wanted? Would this happen again? What next? The question implied that I was looking for a certain result beyond the immediacy of now.

But when I really thought about it, my expectations were not gripped to the future. While some might see that as short-sighted, my gut intention was to gather. To be with other bodies. To run and move and feel our breath coiling around the hearts of our town.

In some ways, I didn’t feel we were reclaiming anything. We weren’t taking back the trail or the night or the day, even though it’s partly true. We were walking as community, to remember how good it feels to be together. To find heart-centered ways to work through fear, shock, rage and even natural impulses for revenge.

Safety (or peace or justice…) isn’t a final destination or arrival point. Safety is something we must walk into being again and again, alongside the material life of bodies at the heart of our communities.

Old bodies, young bodies, brown bodies, white bodies, strong bodies, weathered bodies, scared bodies, pregnant bodies.

As I trusted my instinct to invite the community, I thought about my kids moving into adulthood. I realized how much I want them to feel belonging in their bones. Belonging not just to immediate family or their friends, but the larger community they play, work and live in.

I want them to know that even when we’re scared or overwhelmed about things like this or future doom of our beloved earth, that something shifts when gather with kindness, strength and care.

From a gathering like we had, I do not pretend to know or guess the outcomes. While I could pen a list of concrete ideas hundreds of lines long, if I’m honest, I only wanted one.

The material, the somatic, the embodied realm matters. Spontaneity matters. Grassroots matters. We matter.

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It was me this time. Next time it might be you or my friend Jen. Or the guy down the street who happens to have a little extra time. This time it was safety; next time it might be for Chinook salmon.

Gatherings are like snowflakes, dark wind and winter storms. They are unpredictable, uncatchable and untameable. We cannot pin them down because they are made of human imagination and heart. We do not have to ‘organize them’ for our community but be with and receive the wild energy of what’s already here.

Then let’s listen and pay attention.

Who will take the snow and make an angel? Offer their oversized dog for accompaniment? Call a friend and check in? Envision the next wrap-around service? Organize a fundraiser? Bring an offering to the river?

No doubt new actions will ripple. They might look different than we expect or risk new shapes. But somehow I trust that each will leave a magical imprint.

Then with arms open wide, a tiny sigh of relief that none of us have to know, carry or hold it all.

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Defensive to Anti-Fragile: A new Tension of Emergence podcast episode!

Ever try and meditate your way out of a conflict? Or get rid of all desires and weaknesses to feel peaceful belonging? I have!

This week we explore the importance of both emotional maturity and spirituality (two, not one!) to grow up and wake up.

Join me and Zen teacher and mediator, Diane Musho Hamilton and my friend, facilitator and Executive Coach Gabriel Kaigen Wilson in this juicy conversation.

Click here to listen:

Other spontaneous synergies this week:

• The superpower of reflective listening featured in Maria Popova’s newsletter

• The both/and of spirituality and responsibility for our conditioning with writer and embodiment therapist, Prentis Hemphill

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Yesterday morning I was out with the dog at 7:03am. It’s pitch dark, now.

This is his routine. A pee, then a cup of kibble. He thanks me with a brief cuddle and then goes back to bed for hours, like a teen who knows true rebellion is the refusal to stay vertical.

November is here and I haven’t yet adjusted. To the darkness. To short days. To shy suns.

As I head out the door, I’m cold. Impatient. I decide to put on two old jackets, both full of holes, to stay snug.

As the dog pulls me toward the forest of pine and spruce, and that’s when I realize I forgot my headlamp. I look up. The full moon is low in the sky, setting.

I faintly make out the path to his favorite place to sniff.

I’m unsteady in the dark, not yet used to its density. Suddenly he yanks the leash right, catching a scent of wild: a fox, coyote or grouse.

As I’m tugged off the trail, a sharp sting pierces the outside corner of my eye. “Fuck me” I say out loud, as a branch barely misses my eyeball.

Just then, my cell phone rings.

I grab it from my back pocket and glance at the caller ID. I don’t recognize the number.

*

[Phone rings.]

Jennifer: Hello?

Drunk Moon (slurred speech): Helllloooooo, Jennifer?

Jennifer: Who is this?

Drunk Moon: The moooooon.

Jennifer (heart beats faster): Dune?

Drunk Moon (offended): No, Moon. As in, sky.

Jennifer: Sorry, I can’t hear you well. Is this Dune?

Drunk Moon: No, Moon!

[Long pause.]

Drunk Moon (confesses): I’m a little drunk.

Jennifer: I can tell. You out late?

Drunk Moon: All night. Had too much of that human vodka stuff.

[Jennifer presses speaker phone.]

Drunk Moon (slurring): What…. jacket….are you wearing?

Jennifer: Sorry?

Drunk Moon: Are you wearing two?

[Jennifer touches her chest and has hard time breathing]

Jennifer: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

[Dog pulls on the leash, annoyed. Jennifer unzips her first jacket. ]

Drunk Moon (slurred): I want to talk with Jennifer.

Jennifer (annoyed): You are.

Drunk Moon (obnoxious): I want to talk with Jennifer!

Jennifer (frustrated): Wait…. who is this?

Drunk Moon: I called to say you’re over layering.

Me: My jackets?

Drunk Moon: Voice.

Me: What do you mean?

Drunk Moon: Less is more.

[Jennifer squints.]

Drunk Moon: I gotta go.

Jennifer: Okay.

Drunk Moon: Remember…. undo your voice.

[Moon hangs up].

*

It is easy to be anxious when darkness returns, to long for lighter seasons past or to come.

So thank god for spillage. For drunken moons with muted light. For strangeness that lurks in the dark.

When work doesn’t flow, my newsletter is late or my voice can’t quite find the right pitch- I sometimes contract.

I focus on the absence. I absentmindedly poke at damp wood that refuses to burn. I fill in the void with plastic confetti, only to say goodbye to its glitter at the dump.

This, dear friend, happens repeatedly. With most liminal spaces. Most stretches. Most thresholds of any kind.

To orient ourselves, we kick up the heat, only to find our efforts strangely anemic.

And yet, what’s most honest, most true within thresholds is made visible by soft light. Moonlight vodka.

Drunk and generous, brilliantly perceptive it seeks our bare skin. There under the goose bump chill of ordinary life, we can get to the heart of what matters.

Dreams. Longings. Art. Quietude. Imagination: the stranger, the better.

I have to remind myself I can begin anytime, no matter how layered or weighed down I’ve become.

I can even start with the most boring of routines: taking the dog for a pee.

Because you never know when you’ll get a call from a drunk moon, a forest ghost or cresting sea.

They call to remind you of beauty, of the magic of ordinary life. They call to remind you that they just want you and your bare skin.

No more, no less.

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Psssst….

Hey you! Yes you, Overwhelm.

Geeze you’re fucking busy. Can you stop for one minute?

I’d like to check in.

You sent me a voice note the other night, joking about having a drink mid-week because you’re barely coping. The planetary crisis is just too much.

You are managing all the things. And so you text while you drive, put out every work fire, prioritize your kids’ basketball games and do more keynotes than any human reasonably should.

Damn, you look good. Calm on the outside, like a Spanish bullfighter who’s mastered the unpredictable ring of Life. You’re someone who keeps it all together. Who takes Life by the horns and embraces the heat.

But maybe there’s no bull to fight today. No cape or ring, either. Maybe the chaos doesn’t need your taming (or the world, your saving).

*

Seriously, from my angle, I think you’re coping well.

Even though I know you’re hardly breathing. You’re exchanging oxygen like it was a scarce resource, like you’ve got the lungs of a shrew.

I know it’s hard times. Crazy times!

Tariffs suck, people are getting laid off, pipelines are in the works and there’s trouble at the border. There’s ICE and, of course, the horrific wars. How many fires can we start? What a shit-storm the kids are coming of age in.

All this chaos makes you feel like you’re not doing enough. For a political person, you should be more up on the local election. You’re considering joining another non-profit board struggling with cut backs. You’re fighting the banned books initiative and organizing a friend’s wedding in a month AND you’ve already pre-planned how to nix any anti-DEI talk.

My friend, that is a lot to keep track of. No wonder you worry about stopping. About being less helpful or irrelevant if you let down your guard. Who’s going to notice if you don’t???

And then, to top it all off, there’s that strange increase of coyotes in the neighborhood. Now you have build a higher fence for the dog. You secretly wish he was in charge of himself so you could take a break. What is it with the vulnerability of wild things?

*

But you too, Overwhelm, are a wild thing.

You with your tender heart and generous eyes. Your compassionate mind and open gaze.

Your steady gait and Milky Way tears.

While you say that only big things make you come alive, I want to share how you are already alive, even in miniature.

As your heart beats, you mother the swallows of time.

As the corners of your mouth curl up, you move more effortlessly.

As warm water pours down your back, your head tilts.

As you taste butter on fresh bread, you digest a hand-made life.

As you collapse in a beam of sun, you comfort the Soil.

As you ask the backyard Oak for help, you decenter Kingship.

As you extend an exhausted hand, you are trusted by another.

As you feel the impossible stretch of your heart, you are a trampoline of resilience.

As you whisper, I can’t go on like this, you become an atmospheric river of compassion to everyone else who can’t either.

*

Maybe you can’t let down your guard today.

Maybe you need to stay in charge until 11:30pm.

Maybe you can’t let go, because someone really, really depends on you.

*

But in the middle of all the insanity, I wish for you these things:

For fire– to burn what isn’t needed.

For cracks– in case you like it upside down.

For meanderings– in case you desire a little anonymity.

For oversized lilies – to remind you of your pollinated heart.