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As a young girl, I was inquisitive to say the least. Learning as much as I could about a subject that interested me was an extreme sport and in a time before the internet, the library was my arena. It was the place I begged my parents to take me and I could easily lose hours roaming the aisles between trips to the card catalog cabinet. As far as I was concerned the Dewey Decimal System was the only math I’d ever need and I mastered it in kindergarten.

I’d sprint from our family’s maroon Caravan through the sliding glass doors in my red-dirt stained Keds to find that the whole, wide world really was at my fingertips.

Our town library had a 25-book check-out limit which I found unreasonable given that the frequency of my visits was dependent entirely upon my parents’ willingness to drive me there. For this reason, it was my standard practice to push the envelope and slip a few extra books into the stack at check out.

On a good day, as I peered wide-eyed over the counter on tippy toes beneath my towering collection, the librarian would raise an eyebrow, give a knowing smile, sometimes a wink, and keep buzzing past the barbaric limitation on learning. I’d feel lighter than air, and like I could explode like a helium balloon let loose into the stratosphere.

Then there were the librarians who lorded over this hallowed house of learning with an iron fist in a velvet glove. They’d call me sweetie, look me square in the eye, point to the laminated sign and read it to me in a candied voice, as if: 1. I could neither read nor count; and 2. I was unaware of this dreadful curse that had befallen me many times over.

I’d excuse myself, carry my carefully curated stack to the floor where I’d sit on my knees on the glossy, brown brick and fight back tears while I agonized over which titles wouldn’t make the cut.

But even those heavy-handed barbarians librarians couldn’t hold a candle to the holy men who stood at the pulpit on Sunday and taught, in no uncertain terms, that to question was to sin.

What did this mean for a girl who was certain she was made, not of sugar and spice and everything nice, but instead felt herself to be composed entirely of unanswered questions?

Within the four walls of my town’s library lived the enchanting possibility that my every aching question could be met with an answer, 25 books at a time. But in church on Sunday, I kept my eager inquiries cloaked beneath the polyester plaid of a JC Penney jumper.

I steeled myself with silence and wore a painted smile while I slipped into my secret, inner sanctuary, out of reach of all certainties, to keep company with the questions I came in carrying and offer warm welcome to the restless ones lined up outside the door.

If the endless stories forming the aisles of the library fortified me; the epic tales in the Bible left me mostly undone. This was especially true of the creation story. As it goes with every great tale, it left me with more questions than answers.

There in the wooden pews, when the questions began to stir so wildly in me and threatened to send me spinning like a disbelieving dust devil across the wide-open prairie and straight into the gates of hell, I’d take to sitting on my hands and tracing circles on the carpet with the scuffed toes of my patent leather Mary Janes. I’d shut my eyes tight and pray that the questions stuffed into the frills of my sin-full socks wouldn’t spill out and scatter my secret shame.

I carried these questions with me into adolescence, into my teens and twenties. Then into my thirties, where they kept company with the round-the-clock inquiries of my daughters. Now in my forties, many of them remain unanswered.

These questions have become my most loyal companions. Some still circle and threaten to send me spinning, though less urgently now. Others have settled so quiet and deep they’ve become part of me. The best parts of me that can still peer out into the world in wonderment.

Isn’t it said that true wisdom is in knowing how little we know?

As a girl I sympathized with Eve. Her hunger. Maybe, like me, she couldn’t for the life of her see what was so wrong with wanting to know?

Just one bite to be able to see through God’s eyes. Isn’t that what all religion is for?

I’d have eaten the apple, too. And probably asked for more.

In Greek mythology, the Apple of Discord was a golden apple thrown by Eris at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, mother and father of Achilles.

Eris was the goddess of strife and the daughter of Nyx (primordial night). Surprise, surprise, she didn’t get an invite.

Angered, she showed up unannounced and threw the golden apple, which held the inscription “for the fairest,” into the crowd. She ruined the party and sparked an epic, vanity-fueled dispute among Aphrodite, Athena and Hera which ultimately led to the Trojan War.

You know this story, it’s the leitmotif of the 13th fairy who was not invited to the feast celebrating the birth of the new princess, because the king had only twelve golden plates.

To host a 13th would disrupt his imposed solar (masculine) order, one that excludes the fullness of the lunar (feminine) cycle of thirteen moons.

The 13th fairy is left off the list, but she arrives after the unveiling of the gifts with an offering of her own: the curse of death, softened by the youngest fairy who followed, into the sleep of a hundred years.

And so it was that our fair princess, the burgeoning feminine principle, lay frozen in time, unable to develop beyond her 16th year.

Does any of this sound familiar?

In our youth-obsessed culture, how many girls and women fall victim to the curse of the 13th fairy? Instead of embodying our fullness, we find ourselves preoccupied and diminished by the escalating tensions of vanity wars, playing out in the mirror and inside our minds. With no end in sight.

We have normalized multi-billion dollar industries of serums, creams and nine-step skincare routines. Microdoses of paralyzing poison injected into our bloodstreams, freezing the fullness of our expression into feigned tranquility.

To look and to live as though time has not touched us, the animating breath of life has never entered us, from the cradle to the grave that we forget holds our name.

Our lives are lived-out in glass coffins inside our minds. Meanwhile, the perpetual war on aging that we’ve inherited wages on and the thicket that separates us from ourselves grows thicker and thornier with each passing day. Our glazed eyes remain fixed on the shallow waters of surface beauty, blinding us to our own depths.

We buy the infantilizing indoctrination—swallow it whole, expend our life force to uphold it—fall asleep to our power, and forfeit our own coronation.

Malign the 13th fairy all you want—Maleficent and Queen Grimhilde with her magic mirror, too—but here’s the truth: ultimately it is the king himself who brings the curse upon the burgeoning feminine.

It is his enforced, patriarchal order—threatened in the face of the mature feminine, the wise woman—which forbids her ripening, unconsciously stunts her development beyond the coveted age of sixteen, and forces her into a hundred-year sleep.

In a patriarchal world, the ideal feminine is a blank expression.

But the 13th fairy cannot abide. In a world where women’s embodied truth, power and sovereignty can’t be owned outright—like Lilith and every exiled feminine archetype condemned to the shadowy terrain of life—she’s got a little, special something up her sleeve.

And she carries no qualms about crashing the party in every sphere that commands mum to be the word of women.

I’ve got a word for you: tzela. It’s the Hebrew word translated to mean ‘rib’ in the creation story of Eve. And the truth about this translation is fall-off-the-bone, melt-in-your-mouth juicy.

I’m sorry to be a boner kill, boys, but no human has ever been made from a bone. Not Eve, not anyone.

And this brings me back to the question that burned a hole in the pockets of every one of my Sunday bests, and buried itself like a searing thorn in my flesh: Out of everything God could’ve made Eve from, why a rib specifically?

I couldn’t know then why this particular question became the heliocentric center of my secret incredulity. When it finally occurred to me to look up the original Hebrew, those decades-long spinning orbits came to a sudden halt.

God went retrograde.

She whispered to me the best-kept secret of a broken cosmology. And, with just one word, forever shifted my center of gravity.

As of today, Mercury has completed its retrograde motion through the sign of Cancer, the archetype of the Mother. And as this story pertains to the mother of all mothers, the time is ripe for review.

If you’re hearing it here first, I’ll rewrite the beginning, if you promise to write back and tell me how it ends for you.

Grab your forks, ladies, and let’s dig into this juicy, proverbial rib.

We’ve all heard from the time we were children that Eve, the first woman, was created from the rib of Adam. When you look up the original Hebrew verse, you’ll see that the word used for ‘rib’ is tzela (or tsela).

Throughout the Bible, tzela is used 40 times. Of those 40 mentions, the word is translated to mean ‘rib’ only twice. And these two choice translations occur exclusively in the story of the creation of Eve.

Every other time tzela is used in the Bible it is translated as ‘side’ or ‘side chamber.’ For example, in the story of the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:12 & 37:3) it is used to instruct Moses to place two golden rings on one tzela (side) of the ark and two on the other. This is the most common and general use of the word tzela and all other 38 mentions in the Bible are consistent with this translation.

By definition tzela refers to an integral, structural component, such as one side or part of a structure, the absence of which would seriously compromise the integrity and completeness of the whole. Say, for example, the east wing of the White House.

Although tzela can be translated to mean ‘rib’ it is, overall, contextually rare. Its appearance in the creation story is among those rarities. Just for funsies, I’d like to share that in one ancient Aramaic translation, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, it’s stated that Eve was created from Adam’s 13th rib. (This essay has been brought to you by the number 13.)

Come to find out, scholars have widely contested the rib translation for centuries. So why did I have to go digging up bones to discover this for myself? Is it any question that truth is a dangerous thing?

Within the marrow of every buried truth lies a restless power and potency that can lay waste to a false king’s tyranny.

I’ve heard it said that God did not make man in his image; rather, man made God in his.

Manmade or not, in the beginning it was written: “Male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1:27)

No woman was ever made from a man. Not now, and not then.

Eve emerged, whole and complete, one irreducible half of a yet undivided humanity, by the same hand, in the same moment. The beginning of eternity.

Walking countless circles along the well-worn paths through the sky-high shelves of my hometown library, I stumbled upon some of life’s most essential lessons:

That nothing in life is handed to you, and when it is, it probably isn’t for you.

And that most everything you need, like most things of great value, is available to you, if you know the right questions to ask.

If I could go back in time to meet that dishwater-blonde bibliophile with scraped knees in the library aisles, I’d whisper to her a hushed secret once told to me:

Sleeping Beauty didn’t wake up because a man tore through the thicket to deliver true love’s kiss.

She awoke because it was time.

“I had a legitimate excuse
For not going to the mosque or temple to pray.
It is because love is so wild in me
I might break the fragile glass cage
That all religions are made of.”

Hafiz

“I don’t want to be demure or respectable. I was that way, asleep, for years.”

Mary Oliver

The angle I’m taking in this essay is not what I originally planned for the second installment of this spontaneous Adam & Eve series. As I shared in my piece, The Original Sin of Being Born Female, I began digging into my grandmother’s Bible after some inspired reading of Carl Jung’s Aion. This side-quest brought me back to the beginning—Genesis, specifically—and I’m still hot on the trail, tracking what is most alive in me.

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Gospel of Thomas

So here I sit in a granny robe surrounded by blooming roses on my patio writing my way to some unknown salvation. My loose editorial calendar had me slated to talk about an entirely different take on the creation story, one that effectively erases Lilith altogether. But current events have made clear the necessity of lingering a while longer with the first woman and her infamous farewell.

Truth be told, progress on the second essay has been slow. The astrologer in me wants to blame the fact that Saturn and Mars spent so long necking in the sky while Neptune, god of the sea, hosed them with a salty torrent. The therapist in me is self-diagnosing classic avoidance because this theological material cuts deep and deconstruction feels, at best, like learning a new language, and at worst, like the psychological equivalent of going under the surgical knife sans anesthesia. But on the other side there lies an authentic spirituality that comes out of your own soul the way the Good Lord intended. And I’m so here for that. The only requirement is: you can’t have an agenda.

Then there’s the matter of my inner rebel. She’s in a dark corner booth with a hand-rolled cigarette hanging out of her mouth and redlining a dog-eared book of satirical poetry while actively side-eying the entire project. She doesn’t let me forget that she’s got a book of matches in her pocket and a liter of kerosene in the bed of her El Camino.

The slated second essay even has a delightfully irreverent title that reads like click bait and I’m not even sorry because in my bones I know that, collectively, we’re in desperate need of a new way of looking at things. Christianity most of all because, whether you like it or not, these are the stories that have shaped us, both as individuals and as a society. And we forget at our peril that religion is and has always been political. Not to mention, it’s been wielded like a weapon throughout history, present-day included. We can’t escape it. Believe me, I’ve tried (see: Girl in the Corner Booth).

The fact is, the Christian tradition is the root system of western civilization. Christianity is in us as much as we are inside of Christianity. The way Carl Jung wrote about Christianity as our present age in Aion blew wide-open the shuttered lens I’d been handed by my family and the church. It captured the bigger picture I’d been missing the same way a fish has no word for water.

Christianity is not merely a religion. It is the living mythos of our time, the archetypal underpinning of the age in which we live. The Piscean age of the fishes is both our temporal fishbowl—marking and containing this unique moment in human history—and the collective sea we are swimming in. I’ve got an entire essay in the works devoted to a more detailed explanation of the astrological ages—it feels that important—but for now, here’s a small snippet from Aion that speaks to the symbolic connection between Christ and the Piscean age:

“A direct astrological aspect of Christ’s birth is given us in Matthew 2:1ff. The Magi from the East were star-gazers who, beholding an extraordinary constellation, inferred an equally extraordinary birth. This anecdote proves that Christ, possibly even at the time of the apostles, was viewed from the astrological standpoint or was at least brought into connection with astrological myths.”

“But, to the extent that Christ was regarded as the new aeon, it would be clear to anyone acquainted with astrology that he was born as the first fish of the Pisces era, and was doomed to die as the last ram (lamb) of the declining Aries era.”

Put plainly, the birth of Christ was the birth of a new era. We know this, of course. We mark time this way.

What I hope to communicate through this series is that the stories within the Bible and the way they are interpreted, or misinterpreted, matter deeply. Their reverberations have an untold impact on our day-to-day lives, from our most intimate relationships to the policies enacted over women’s bodies the world over and everything in between.

It cannot be overstated: these. stories. matter.

Before I return to the legend of Lilith and, to the entire point of this essay, perhaps a bit of depth-oriented psychoeducation here would do us some good. In the Jungian analytic tradition, myths and fairy tales are not viewed as fanciful bedtime stories or passive ways of entertaining the masses with ancient legends from faraway lands. They are actively utilized to gain profound insights into ourselves, the world around us, and our place within it. Humankind has always been a storytelling species with an active and rich symbolic relationship to all that surrounds us, from our own backyard to the outer reaches of the cosmos etched across our shared night sky.

Myths and fairy tales exist in a realm outside of time and space and serve to communicate eternal truths.

They speak to what is ever-near and tell of that which is true, even if it never happened. When we hear, “Once upon a time…” we are invited into a timeless exploration of what it means to be human through the elucidation of psychological, interpersonal, and collective dynamics at work in our very real, day-to-day lives.

Myths and fairy tales tell it like it is. They depict enduring truths, even if the particulars never actually took place.

But make no mistake, the telling of these tales has the power to summon from the shadowy depths—or from right under our noses—unsettling truths we are not yet privy to.

Marie Louise von Franz makes a critical distinction between fairytales and myths:

“Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly.”

Here, von Franz is stating that in fairy and folk tales, we get a purer expression of unconscious dynamics, but in myths—even and especially the Great Myths like Christianity—eternal truths are muddled with cultural material. In other words, we’ve got to sift through a lot of shit to find the golden nuggets. And along the way, some shit gets mistaken for gold.

Lo and behold, the present-day patriarchal pileup of shit (i.e. misogyny, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc.) makes our quest to uncover the enduring, archetypal reality of Christianity a Herculean task. It’s giving David and Goliath. And let’s be real: Most of us would rather watch Netflix than take a slingshot to gargantuan cultural complexes. Lord help me as it seems my drug of choice is sometimes heretical, but always hard-fought clarity. If this whole project goes up in flames, at least now you’ll know who to blame (see: Girl on the Lam, A Sequel).

The Abrahamic religions provide a picture of the sociocultural sea humanity has been swimming in since the dawn of patriarchy. I’ll say that again another way: the Bible has never existed outside of patriarchy and the stories borne from it provide cultural commentary on the reality of what it’s like to live within its temporal borders.

Well, Merriam-Webster, isn’t that putting it lightly?

I’d like to emphasize that patriarchy is specifically a paradigm of power-over, systematically hierarchical, dominating and exploitative. Its brotherly bedfellows—Christianity, Islam and Judaism, which, mind you, have many nearly identical myths—avow these central tenets: monotheism (one omnipotent male God), the proliferation of nations stemming from a single patriarch (Father Abraham) with lineage and legitimacy granted through paternity, the veneration of nearly exclusively male prophets, the will and law of God revealed through holy scripture divined and written by men, and the promise of judgement and the afterlife.

And what of women? If not outright penned as second-class citizens, we are all but forgotten between the endless pages of men begotten.

Never mind the fact that women’s bodies are the ones bearing all of that blessed begetting.

So what am I trying to say?

In short, the notion of men as first-rate subjects and women as inferior objects is a myth whose time is up. We are in the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, after all. It’s written in the stars. More on this to come, but for now...

As patriarchy continues to systematically suffocate under the rubble of its self-generated, monumental ideology, I’m returning to the scriptures that undergirded my girlhood and laid the foundation for the way I relate to myself, and wholly shaped how I show up in the world. This time with the fierce gaze of a grown-ass woman with an eye for the symbolic and a lusty hankering for capital-t Truth.

The fact is, it becomes clearer everyday that women the world over have next to nothing to lose and everything to gain from the retelling and reclamation of the stories that told us who we are and promulgated the lie of our preordained, proper place in society.

This is woman’s work. And we are just getting started.

So let’s get right to it, shall we? We begin again at the beginning.

As I said, after my last essay I had originally intended to move on from the legend of Lilith and into what I feel is at the bleeding heart of where the creation story went off the rails, in my opinion, most deliberately and diabolically. Then on March 26th, interrupting my regularly scheduled programming, CNN broke the news of the unthinkable 62 million men of it all. And instantly like a lightning bolt flash of clarity, upon reading the article I saw the stories of these women for what they were: the real-life fallout of, among other things, God’s next move after Lilith flees.

So, let’s linger a while longer with Lilith and her legendary leaving, and examine together the archetypal tap root of this noxious psychosociological weed brought to you by modernity’s premier brand collab: Christianity x Patriarchy, available everywhere manmade ideologies are sold.

If you missed my first essay in the series, you can read it here.

To recap: On the sixth day, God created both man and woman side-by-side from the dust of the earth. A lover’s quarrel promptly ensued when Lilith refused to lie beneath Adam during Sexy Time. Adam responded by saying, “I will not lie below, but above, since you are fit for being below and I for being above.” Lilith doubled down, stating the obvious truth, that they are equals since they were both created in the image of God from the earth. Next comes my favorite part:

“Since Lilith saw [how it was], she uttered God’s ineffable name and flew away into the air.”

Lilith immediately recognized the irreconcilability of their differences and, likely filled with dread at the imagined monotony of the missionary position for all eternity, she hurled history’s first heavenly expletive, left Eden on wings and never looked back.

In short, Lilith saw how it was. And, contrary to God’s famous refrain, it was not good.

Adam, clearly beside himself in disbelief, cried out to his maker, “Master of the Universe, the woman you gave me fled from me!”

While Adam’s choice of phrasing is problematic, what with its blatant presupposition of possession of and entitlement to the entire other half of humanity, it is nevertheless historically unsurprising.

What really gets my goat is what God did next.

Did he ask Adam what happened prior to Lilith’s departure?

Did he inquire as to what part Adam may have played in the unfolding drama?

Did God the Father use this opportunity as a teachable moment and allow Adam to suffer the natural consequences of his own actions?

Did he hold Adam to account for the mistreatment of his companion and equal?

The answer is no. None of the above.

In response to Adam’s pleas, God’s first move was to send three angels to summon Lilith back to Adam’s side. And when that didn’t work, what did God do?

Lord help us all, he went and made another woman!

And the Lord God said, hold my beer and watch this.

Enter: Eve. Born from man’s unconscious sleep. Made for an unendurable fate, doomed to live and die inside a manmade ideology that cast her as second-rate.

If our mythos mirror our lived reality, what does the story of the creation of Eve following on the heels of the now exiled Lilith have to say about what it means to be a woman alive today?

First and foremost, in order to survive inside of patriarchy she must exile her own sovereignty. If not entirely, at least in part. She watches and learns from her mother, as her mother did before her, to make her way through the world embodying the acquiescent nature of Eve in both manner and speech; all the while she harbors a fugitive—her recalcitrant Lilith nature—somewhere beneath.

She carries this secret shame passed over in silence through generations originating with Eve, the one who stayed and shouldered the blame for humanity’s banishment from paradise, our collective fall from grace.

Have you heard the one about how women are ruining the workplace? It’s the same story, just a different day.

But tell me this: Whose paradise is it when a woman’s hands are not made for her own reaching—whether for the fruit of knowledge or equal pay—but for binding or to do a man’s bidding? Just like in the story of the handless maiden whose father made a deal with the devil that brought him riches for the price of his daughter’s hands. His idle hunger brutally severed his daughter from her agency, forcing her into a life of dependency. Meanwhile he goes on surrounded by unearned finery.

Whose paradise is it where a great many men see relationships with women as a right rather than a responsibility?

And whose paradise is it where women pay the price with our bodies, and sometimes our very lives, time and again, for men’s unchecked power drives?

What does it say about a culture that largely reveres a creation story which implies that one part of a sacred whole is ordained in the domination of the other? And when such a belief remains unquestioned for centuries, what is the resultant outgrowth?

I’ll say it again for the back-row Baptists: the stories we tell and are told time and again weave themselves into our psychology, take root in our very being, and either flower and fruit into symbiotic ecosystems of collective flourishing or languish into gnarled networks of toxic stagnation.

I hear the echo of Adam’s frantic entreaties in the gross entitlement of self-ascribed incels who blame women for their inability to secure a mate and mock women’s discernment, as if the choice of whether or not to enter into a sexual relationship belongs not to a woman, but to any man who desires her.

I see the writing on the wall of every online forum where men use this twisted logic to justify, and even celebrate, acts of violence against women.

I hear it to the tune of 62 million clicks and counting in the online rape academy where men watch and learn from other men how to drug and rape their wives and post the recordings online.

It festers in the voyeuristic consumption of every man who pays to subscribe.

And when a woman comes forward, this indoctrination is deafening in every reply of this kind from men and women alike: “But he’s your husband.” As if, again, a woman’s autonomy is erased in the vicinity of a man’s naked rapacity.

I see the demonization of Lilith in every woman criticized for leaving, for disobeying the command to endure the unendurable.

It resounds in every courtroom trial of a rape victim who is asked what she was wearing, why she was out late, and whether or not she was drinking.

We can connect the dots from a doctrine that dictates a woman’s subjugation to the widespread dismissal of cavalier remarks about the assault of women as “locker room talk.”

From the notion of a God who grants demon status to a woman who chooses sovereignty over submission, while at the same time failing to hold the man whose actions she was fleeing accountable, we can draw a bold, red line to the reality we find ourselves in today: a world in which men can stand accused many times over of the assault and rape of girls and women and not only fail to be indicted but continue to hold the highest offices in the nation.

Like Lilith, a woman may stand up, stand her ground and take up arms to safeguard her sovereignty.

Or, like Eve, in order to survive, she may choose to fall in line.

Both are her birthright.

But in this origin story of patriarchy, it’s clear as day: she’s damned either way.

But just as it’s been from the beginning, it is women’s bodies that wield the power of life and death.

Enough is enough. Patriarchy is a myth whose time is up.

Women the world over are burying the old ways and birthing new worlds from the ruins.

Hold my rosé and watch this.

Eve didn’t want to be a kept woman. Such was her great sin.

The choice between the fruits of the trees was just that: choice.

To be or not to be.

To live in thralls inside a broad continent made more narrow and diminished. Or to live enthralled within a world of her own choosing.

The question that comes to my mind is: Why was Adam so content to abide? Charmed, I’m sure.

We all know how the story goes. No woman has ever lived it down.

Eve ate the forbidden fruit. There in the garden, in nothing but her birthday suit, first woman stretched her hand toward the tree of knowledge, plucked its ripe fruit, sunk her perfect teeth in and took a bite out of life. What else do you expect from a woman whose name literally means ‘to live’?

We get no more detail than that, but in the origin story of my mind, Eve closed her eyes and let out the first guttural sigh. Mother of all mothers, Eve savored. Rewrote history with a Pandora’s box-full of complex flavor. One delicious, illicit bite, got herself and her man kicked out of paradise.

“Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin.” 
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

Have you ever heard the story of Adam’s first wife? Lilith, too, was made to choose: To lie beneath Adam or to be cast out as a demon. She went with option two.

Like Eve—bless my heart—I can take nothing at face value. Bear with me a moment while I dig into the fine print and indulge me, if you will, as I read between the lines.

In Genesis chapter two we’re given the story of Eve’s beginning. God caused a deep sleep to come over Adam, removed a “rib” and made woman (more to come on the rib in a later essay):

“And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Ad’am said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of man.” (Genesis 2: 22-23)

But in the first chapter of Genesis, preceding the creation of Eve, it is written, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” (Genesis 1: 27)

There you have it. Before any mention of that old wives’ tale of woman being formed from a singular bone of man, the very first chapter of the Bible tells us that on the sixth day God created both male and female alongside one another.

And if, like me, upon learning this for the first time your immediate response is a burning desire to know more—to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, if you will (and I know you will)—don’t count on Christianity to spill the tea, lest you be banished, just like Eve. And, well, Lilith, too.

Because not only does the mashup up of patriarchy and Christianity require your suffering in silence, silence surrounds this discrepancy regarding the first female origin story. In fact, in the entirety of the Bible, Lilith is mentioned only once by name, appearing in the original Hebrew in Isaiah 34:14 where, in a prophetic passage, she is described as taking her leave in the land of misfits:

“The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.”

The King James version replaces the name of Lilith with ‘screech owl,’ which is a common translation. Some of the other contenders are “night creature,” “night monster,” and “night hag.” In Akkadian and Sumerian texts predating the Old Testament, Lilith (lilitu) carries connotations of “night spirit” or “wind spirit.”

But it is within the Jewish mystical tradition, in non-canonical texts, that Lilith is explicitly named as Adam’s first wife. The primary account of Lilith comes from the midrashic text, The Alphabet of Ben Sira. This text is also part of the Catholic deuterocanon, or secondary canon, although the official position of the Catholic Church is that Eve was the first and only wife of Adam. Here’s the story:

“When God created the first man Adam alone, God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” [So] God created a woman for him, from the earth like him, and called her Lilith. They [Adam and Lilith] promptly began to argue with each other: She said, “I will not lie below,” and he said, “I will not lie below, but above, since you are fit for being below and I for being above.” She said to him, “The two of us are equal, since we are both from the earth.” And they would not listen to each other. Since Lilith saw [how it was], she uttered God’s ineffable name and flew away into the air. Adam stood in prayer before his Maker and said, “Master of the Universe, the woman you gave me fled from me!”

I’ll paraphrase the rest. Upon hearing Adam’s pleas, God sent three angels after Lilith to convince her to return to “paradise,” but the woman had made up her mind.

And over time, as is the case with every first wife, Lilith was demonized (literally).

She lives in exile for all eternity where a hundred of her demon babies die everyday outside the realm of legitimacy offered by male proximity.

Lilith is the ineffaceable scapegoat, a shadowy, pinup-girl stand-in for the unlived life of every woman inside patriarchy whose dreams and ideas have to die a hundred deaths, buried alive within the womb of her own being, before she is ripe to endure the pain—and what it will cost her—to bring herself to life.

The Journey 
by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

There’s much more where this came from, but for now and just for fun going into your weekend, I’ll leave you with this iconic 90’s scene from The First Wives Club. If you enjoyed this post and got something from it, please like and share with others who you think would enjoy it, too. And be sure to subscribe and follow along as I take a look at old texts with fresh eyes.

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“When one is pretending, the entire body revolts.” 
Anaïs Nin

In the story of creation, it was Eve who first met with the serpent.

Women and snakes have shared a kinship since the beginning of time.

The Bible isn’t special in this way.

The serpent is that embellied1 otherworldly being who knows what it is to live in touch with the earth and its nameless body of wisdom. Her shining belly perpetually pressed against the surface of things.

She knows nothing of ascension without the painstaking struggle of expanding and contracting from head to tail, time and again, in order to stretch toward high heaven. Unendingly, she scrapes against rugged bark and brutal bedrock in an epic struggle against the unspeakable gravity of being ensouled in a body.

A serpent’s sole source of locomotion is only the totality of her being. Like the “creeping, moving things” called forth from ocean and sky by the God of Genesis in the very beginning.

There can be no hierarchy in horizontality made flesh.

And yet we exist inside of patriarchy, that heavenly hoax of disembodied domination and perpetual progress. That insidious ideological germ mass-produced then projected upon and implanted within a woman’s prescribed purity.

Her body becomes the target host as she twists, contorts and stretches to first become the fantasy, then to breed and feed the parasitic pipe dream.

Labor, rinse, repeat.

And Adam said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”
Genesis 2:23

A woman awake to the nightmare is a dangerous being. Stretched to her limits, she no longer recognizes the woman looking back in the mirror. It is then that her serpentine shadow whispers to her everything she already knows.

There comes a time in every woman’s life when she can no longer withhold her truth. Unwilling to stretch—her body won’t allow it—she sloughs off the suffocating skins of others’ convictions. Expanding, with excruciating effort, the entirety of her being.

Slowly she inches, belly to ground, toward the uncreated, unforgotten world of her own making.

This is the burden of a woman’s becoming.

“Femininity is being that knows its bone truth.” 
Marion Woodman

When I told you, “I will die if I stay here with you,” 
you didn’t look me in the eye. 
If you had you would’ve known it to be true. 
I left carrying two truths, 
still living inside of your lie. 

I’ve partnered up with a fellow therapist and dear friend and we went and launched a podcast! In the words of the Queen of County Pop, Shania Twain, We “goldarn gone and done it.” Episode one is live now!

It’s the podcast you never asked for. The one you didn’t know you needed. Like a down-home, salt-of-the-earth salve for your soul that you just stumbled upon ‘cause you happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Here’s your sign.

As Long As There’s Light is a podcast featuring two therapists—Yours Truly & Kristen Rosanelli—sharing notes and swapping scars in spirited truth-telling sessions about how to own your whole story, unbury your originality and live undimmed.

Because a life well-lived, depends on it.

And it’s cheaper than therapy.

The serial memoir I’ve cultivated over the years here on Substack cuts deep into the innermost heart of me. It is my deepest, most tender creative expression and Wilder Than Fiction will continue to be hearth and home for shared insights as my story continues to unfold. It is my moonlit landscape of imagination and memory.

This new podcast is the domicile of my daytime personality—we’ve all got at least two, right? Our inner sun and moon, if you will. And I know you will. This is the one of me with an irreverent take on ancient wisdom and its relevance to the psychological issues of today. The impassioned one who believes in my bones that old socratic trope, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And the one who’s not afraid to say so. And so, I’ve taken to the mic.

What’s more, I’m not doing this podcast solo, which is a professional first for this Lone Wolf in recovery. I can’t wait for you to meet my podcast co-host and friend, Kristen Rosanelli. She’s a spirited truth-teller and all-around no-bullshit, beautiful soul with a gift for distilling big ideas and hard-earned wisdom into real-world deliverables. She’s the indelible Boots on the Ground to my Head in the Clouds.

Tune in and turn it up to hear a couple of post-midlife-crisis, forty-something therapists talk shop, share notes and swap scars as we alchemize insight into inspiration on the airwaves for your travels down the road of life.

We’re going tell it like it is, laugh so hard it hurts, have some good cries and, most of all, threaten you with a good time. Like eavesdropping on a Sunday-afternoon gab session between ride-or-die best friends from back home, discussing the fate of their own souls.

For a good time, tune in on Apple or Spotify. And join us on Instagram to keep up with our antics and ride along on our road trip into the depths of psyche. We can promise you, we are up to no good. Pack your shovel.

Have a listen, share the episode with everyone you know, then hit reply or leave a comment to let me know what you think or what you’d like to hear us to talk about next!

Seriously, holler back. I love hearing from you.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart for listening.

I’m still in the midst of writing Red Dirt Roads and Crossroads, the two winding stretches I’m calling serial memoir. It’s probably a forever project. But I’m on a scenic turnout of sorts studying Carl Jung’s Aion, and it’s been one helluva ride. It’s a potent examination of the shifts in consciousness at the birth of the Christ era—our present “age of the fishes”—and its themes which continue to dominate both in individual and collective consciousness. Oh, the enantiodromia of it all.

There’s mention of the burgeoning age of Aquarius, both prophetically and astrologically. No surprise as the birth of Christ was also heralded by a star. More to come on that, but at present, I’m parked in chapter five of Aion where Jung discusses Christ as a symbol of the Self archetype.

They say all roads lead home. And wouldn’t you know, these readings took me down an unexpected stretch. Like a backroad everybody in your hometown knows but avoids because it’s rutted and filled with potholes. God willing, you’ll get to where you’re going but you may turn up worse for wear.

I recently spent a sweltering September afternoon on the back porch in a sweaty, sweet-tea fueled frenzy after a morning spent reading Aion sent me riffling through the pages of my grandmother’s Bible. The worn, red leather King James Giant Print is one of a handful of things I have from my maternal grandmother and the only one I asked for specifically. The rest consists of a broken string of pearls, a red beaded choker, and half of a jewel encrusted box clasp that once held three strands.

Amaryllis was the other of my two red-headed grandmothers. She was known for her beauty; and she was the one most unknown to me. In Sweet Marie, I found home. With Amaryllis, I met with a fractured mystery. As a child I wondered often about who she really was behind the glamour, beneath the trappings of pretty pleasantries.

I remember her bureau from the little white, two-bedroom house where mama grew up with her three siblings. It was full of costume jewelry and shiny strings of things strewn about crocheted doilies and glass perfume bottles topped with colorful tassels and matching bulb atomizers. At family gatherings, I’d pretend to go to the bathroom and sneak down the hall to stare into her room like it was some cabinet of curiosities curated by a bewildering woman who, it always seemed to me, did not live behind her pale, blue eyes.

I only looked, and never dared touch. The light pouring in from the lace-covered windows reflected off of her many mirrors, and created such a blinding haze that all her ordinary things shone with an enchanting gleam. Her honeyed voice down the hall was singing your praises, dripping sweet. But nightfall painted another scene. Fixing my eyes on the shine of the cheval mirror, I’d see myself where I imagined my grandmother at night, behind the closed bedroom door, while I lay on a pallet down the hall on the living room floor, clutching a heavy quilt over my squeezed-shut eyes and listening to grandma scream, pound piano keys, plead with God to take the devil out of me.

My grandmother was the only daughter of a locally infamous evangelist. A hellfire-and-brimstone Texas preacher who, according to my uncle, “saved a lot of people but couldn’t keep a job for long.” He preached blood-red from the pulpit to the tune of eternal damnation as those in attendance bled down the aisles and fell to their knees in hopes of salvation. When the blazing passion of the converts inevitably died down, he, along with his wife and four children, would be run out of town. And so it was that my grandmother made her life along the ashen trail of her father’s fury.

As for me, I was the hearing daughter of Deaf parents, being raised in a southern baptist Deaf Church in the buckle of the Bible belt. Like my great grandfather, whom I never met yet whose legacy I couldn’t escape, I’ve spent the better part of life searching for my place. As a girl it seemed to evade me at church on Sunday. I tried, but couldn’t grasp it in Deaf Church with mama and daddy. And it bypassed me just across the breezeway in Big Church, where hundreds of hearing folks gathered en masse, flooding the double-decker sanctuary.

As a girl, I learned to walk with a foot in both worlds, straddling the great divide borne within me. All the way, trying to make sense of my makeshift identity somewhere in the space between.

I’d often ditch Sunday school, telling my parents I was going to class with the other hearing kids—the ones with hearing parents—to whom I was both strange and a stranger. Instead I’d make my way to the empty sanctuary to roam the vacant aisles like a labyrinthine maze. My restless fingers dragged the length of every padded pew, until finally I arrived at the grand stage. My pounding heart filled the silent auditorium as I summoned the courage to climb the red, carpeted stairs and slip behind the pulpit to the large baptismal pool. Straining, I stood on my toes and stretched my arms to touch into the warm water.

Holding my face in my holy wet hands, I wondered at the enigma of unearned favor, what the deacons liked to call—or rather claim—God’s grace. Silently, I made my way behind the polished oak pulpit bearing a wooden cross and found, to my surprise, that it was an empty box. I tapped the microphone at the top. No booming sound from the speakers. No stage lights. No glory. Just me, a little girl, somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be, on the main stage in an empty sanctuary.

Once in a dream, Jesus spoke to me in sign language, the other half of my split, native tongue. There was no sound, just an unspoken message I tried frantically to interpret, both within the dream and in my waking life still today. When he finished, he made a gesture as if holding a microphone, then vanished as quietly as he came.

On page 1,438 of my grandmother’s Bible are these words from I Timothy 2:11-15: Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Ad’am was first formed, then Eve. And Ad’am was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.

Amaryllis was famous for marking up the pages of her Bibles; she had many, each one with her name foil-stamped in gold on the cover. Her cursive commentary filled the margins around copious underlined and circled passages. There’s an eerie calm in the margins surrounding these verses in I Timothy. There isn’t a single mark.

I wonder which chapter of my grandmother’s life it was that this particular Bible served as her companion? Was it before or after—or perhaps even during—the summer she spent in Bellevue Hospital? Those months about which not a word has been uttered, only that mama remembers them as among the best days of her young life.

An unspeakable silence surrounds the lives of the women I was made from. Mama’s soundless existence. Amaryllis’s red-painted, saccharine smile frozen beneath a vacant sky-blue stare. Her willful refusal to speak, even in the face of her family’s frantic pleas.

That is, if you don’t count the screams.

The lily has a smooth stalk,
Will never hurt your hand;
But the rose upon her brier
Is lady of the land.

There’s sweetness in an apple tree,
And profit in the corn;
But lady of all beauty
Is a rose upon a thorn.

When with moss and honey
She tips her bending brier,
And half unfolds her glowing heart,
She sets the world on fire.

The Rose, Christina Rossetti

I’d like to tell you about the time I took my dead grandma on our second date. Take you back to the place where my two worlds collided: one as old as a marble headstone in a hometown cemetery, the other just taking root.

The trouble is I’m afraid it won’t land unless I let you in on just what my Grandma meant to me. And I don’t really know how to do that for the woman whose eyes lit up whenever I walked into the room, even, and especially, when I was up to no good.

I wish I could tell you the unspoken secret she and I passed in the silence between shared simpers. The better part of it remains a mystery to me. But after all those years sitting with Grandma, I’ve learned that storytelling can be a love letter, too.

We called her Sweet Marie, even though Grandma was anything but sweet. She was a hundred pounds soaking wet, a tough-as-nails redhead who ran on a slow drip of black coffee, bacon grease and cigarettes. But I know she loved me because she let me soften her, sweet. She didn’t say much aside from swear words, but I’ll have you know, everything she touched turned up roses.

Grandma’s rose garden—its blooms and thorns—formed the formidable backdrop of my restless childhood. Countless, interwoven bushes formed a hedge that lined the stockade fence built by grandpa and became the border of my wonderland. Inside this walled garden the nagging question I carried like a thorn in my flesh of whether I belonged, faded like its deep green leaves in the fall and revealed my stalky rootedness to this place.

Year after year Grandma’s birthday beckoned spring to pull her golden cloak over our corner of the world, thawing grandma’s hardened sensibilities, and forcing her tender blooms. Following a winter of enduring storms, we were held together in a bursting kaleidoscope of velvet reds, lurid pinks and sun-kissed corals punctuated by creamy whites and butter yellows.

She’d stop and stare, one hand on the elastic waistband of her pinstriped Levi’s, the other shielding the mid-day sun from her eyes. When she slipped behind the woodshed and out of sight, I’d run over from my rusty red trike to catch the tail end of a smoke trail from a just-snuffed Winston. Knee-high in an eyelet sundress with grandma’s brush rollers pinned in my hair, I stretched my sights toward her, squinting from the sun forming a halo around her red curls, and watched the warm shine come back over her eyes.

Grandma looked at roses the way she looked at me. For all our trying, we never can see our own face firsthand. I’d stop and stare, too. At grandma, at the colorful faces of those blooms. Squinting, straining to see what it was that she saw. In the roses, and in me.

That first night he invited me to stay. It took everything I had in me to drive away.

We spent the next several weeks in the fall. In midlife, once you’ve become a mother, been someone else’s wife, life is chockablock with limits. And love has to be stolen in the night—sometimes quietly, other times with a battle cry.

We took to porch-sitting, sipping sweet tea, late nights, his hands on me and four-hour phone calls in the space between. Early mornings made for long days, his calloused fingers working rusted steel, his mind on me.

Living for every other weekend spent making out like we weren’t on the wrong side of forty. Making up for lost time before we knew damn well what we’d been missing.

The lifetime of longing won’t let us live in the vast divide between here and when he can next get his hands on me.

Why is that destiny so often feels something akin to damnation? What’s the difference anyway? I’ve been around long enough to know that ecstasy and agony are two halves of the same whole. We fell in deep. They say we only ever see one side of the moon. And as the world turns, we mostly only show what we want to.

Here we were in the second half of life and I had half a mind to put it all out there before he went and put me on a pedestal. From where I sat, I didn’t have much left to lose.

I know how it feels to fall from someone else’s heaven, and I know the road back from that particular kind of hell.

I sit talking endlessly. He is quiet, studying me. His eyes, stripped of youth’s blind optimism, carry instead the worn luster of a life lived long before me. Like brown, stone storehouses stacked with untold tales and unpaid tolls from a past I would never see.

I hid him away like my best-kept secret, like some hometown watering hole only you and your next of kin know. Night after night, we swapped stories and compared scars. There beneath the moon with our backs against painted brick, my legs draped over his, he brought his pockets full of fears, and listened as I handed over the heartbreak I carried with a death grip in clutched hands. I told him how I’d felt so heavy in another’s arms. He sat with me here, held my heavy heart, kissed my tears and whispered with a deep, honeyed thrum, “You are weightless.”

"With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together, and then the bottom fell out.
Where water does not collect, the moon does not dwell."
Chiyono

We shared our first kiss at the top of a gravel road beneath the waxing moon, just a silver sliver cradling Venus in the blue-black sky. Just days before he had texted, “I’ve heard there are some sort of rules about how long you should wait to reach out to a woman after getting her number. I don’t know how you feel about all that. Fact is, I’d sure like to see you again soon.”

If you scrolled to the top of our now years-long text thread, you would find the first line of my reply goes something like this: “I fucking hate all of those rules.”

If the fact that I lead with the F-word in my first text correspondence with a would-be love interest comes as a surprise, perhaps now is as good a time as any to confess: I swear like a sailor. In my dresser is a heather gray t-shirt folded in the styling of Marie Kondo that was given to me by a dear and fast friend nearly twenty years ago. It reads: I am a lady with the vocabulary of a well-educated sailor. It’s worn so thin it practically wears like a sheer. Bury me in it when I kick the bucket.

When it comes to words, I don’t discriminate. And as far as I’m concerned, there are few that rival the dynamism—or the empirically validated endorphin release—of a perfectly timed F-bomb. I find that it is very often the case that no other word will do.

While I wasn’t afraid to deliver an unfiltered reply, it took twenty minutes of convincing on a three-way FaceTime call with my Two Most Wanted to say yes to his invitation to accompany him to an Oktoberfest gathering at his kilt-wearing boss’s house. It seems I wasn’t quite ready to surrender my self-imposed spinsterhood. I refused his offer to pick me up and two days later I showed up on his front porch with a six-pack of Coop’s Oktoberfest lager clutched in sweaty palms.

This was my first real first date in fifteen years. During the twenty minute drive to his house—which, mind you, was just one neighborhood over from the home I shared with my ex-husband—I had the AC on blast and car napkins stuffed into my armpits which would not stop sweating despite the fact that I used the deodorant with aluminum in it. My hands had a death grip on the steering wheel even Lizzo couldn’t loosen, and I kept asking myself repeatedly, “What in the hell am I doing?”

His living room was impossibly uncluttered and I told him so. Cheekily, I asked, “Who actually lives like this?!” His reply was a quiet smile.

He had worn-leather furniture, a coffee table that looked like a castle door, and a scattering of accessories in black and blue. Hanging above the leather sofa was a large canvas photograph of him and his son walking hand in hand at the edge of a lake. On the adjacent wall was a framed print of Ragnar Lothbrok from the Vikings series overlaid with the words: “Don’t waste your time looking back. You aren’t going that way.”

I never sat down. And as I wandered, quietly studying the room, studying him, I surmised the answer to my impertinent question: a man who has just lost everything.

He was stoic and wholly unrushed despite the fact that I arrived late and we had somewhere to be. His halcyon grin only served to heighten the storm I held inside of me. The relentless churning around the same burning question that won’t let go of me: Do I dare?

We made our way well after dew point. He carried the sweat-beaded six-pack down the driveway and held open the passenger door of his truck for me. I stepped onto the running boards, gripped the grab handle and climbed inside. Then and for the remainder of the night, once asphalt gave way to country roads, I silently observed how he only ever took his eyes off of me to drive.

Day turned to night and as I sat atop a splintered picnic table with the warm October wind making a mess of my waist-long hair, I felt him study every inch of me as I told stories and laughed with strangers who felt like family. His was the kind of relentless gaze that I, until that moment, never realized I craved. And at the same time, made me certifiably crazy.

The night was young, and so were we when we climbed into a golf cart and took to the road again, kicking up clouds of dust as we traced the dirt road like the red rim of a prairie grass bowl beneath the black-topped sky. We parked at the top of the holler and held hands as we crushed gravel beneath our boots to take in a country view of the Oklahoma City skyline, all lit up at night, twenty miles away as the crow flies.

He stepped aside to snap a blurry photo of me, said he wanted to remember this moment always before he pulled me close and asked, “Can I kiss you?” Through a quarter smile, I delivered a breathless “yes.”

With one finger to my chin, he pulled my wavering eyes up to meet his, which held an impossibly tender light. Those damned candy eyes which, despite my evasion, had not once let me out of sight.

He held my face in his grease-stained hands and leaned in for the first fireworks kiss since my fateful crossing over into the second half of this wild ride called life.

My whole body softened like blacktop in July.

But somewhere on the inside, another voice hollered, Now would be a good time to run.

—

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair…

Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

T.S. Eliot

Happy new moon in Pisces, I’m writing to you on an unseasonably warm day in late winter a world away from where I was when I last wrote to you.

Just one year after my father’s death I’ve packed up all the belongings from the home he built with my mother as well as the one I made with my daughters following my divorce.

My daddy’s greatest lament upon dying was twofold: leaving my mama and not getting to see the lives of his grandchildren play out earthside. Like having to leave the movie theater of your life before you get to see the ending.

In my short time on Earth, I’ve come to wonder whether the whole of life is really only ever about living through endings. And maybe beginnings, what with all their hope, only exist to get us through the required endings.

In the hope-fueled beginning of his illness, my father’s constant refrain was: “I can’t leave your mom.” Our eyes silently communicating a life-laden world of what only he and I and mama can know. Through pursed lips I always delivered the same reply: a resolute nod with four crooked fingers capable of speaking volumes gently tapping twice on my forehead to form the sign which translates in spoken English to “I know.”

The final days of his illness changed his tune the way winter’s end strains our spirit and freezes the faith we’ve placed in our fictions about life’s promises.

From a borrowed hospital bed in the living room of the home he’d built with me by his side—his baby girl, his ears, his voice—he made sure mama was out of sight when he raised his worried hands to make one final request of me: “I don’t your mom to be alone.”

My eyes, brimming with tears, met his, chock-full of unknowable fears. I gripped his two hands in mine, laid them down to rest, and reached up to reply, “I know.”

That was a year ago. And since, I’ve yet again packed up my life and said goodbye to the way things used to be. Outside my window as I write this, wild ducks are pairing up at water’s edge of the pond amongst bare willows on beds of last season’s scattered cypress leaves. And I’m home again, too, nesting in the wonder of it all. In the strange beauty of this new beginning with my beloved, our kids, mama, and me.

“The road to heaven feels like hell. The road to hell feels like heaven.” 
Unknown

“‘I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,’ said Alice a little timidly; ‘but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.’” 
Lewis Carroll

It was October, my daughter’s tenth birthday, and I was due for an oil change before picking her up from school for our annual birthday tradition. Every year I steal her away from her orderly, fluorescent-lit school day and we drive into town for a leisurely lunch at the place of her choosing. When we feel like we’ve had our fill of food and face-to-face time—and not a moment before—we mosey on back, lunch bell be damned.

Unlike her baby sister, she’s quiet, cerebral and lives life on an even keel. One of her dad’s mottos is “keep your highs low and your lows high.” It’s a phrase that confounds me because I am nothing if not expressive and wrought with full feeling. But aside from a nasty bout of colic at six weeks, this girl was born embodying this peculiar philosophy. She is an observer—but so am I—and on days like this there’s a glimmer in her green eyes and a shy smile that lets me know she’s pleased as punch to be partway playing hooky.

Have you ever noticed that certain dates seem to hold an extra air of importance? They carry a charge like a lightning bolt sent to remind you that bigger gods hold the cosmic clock. In the first half of my life on October 6th, it was the birth of the kid wonder who made me a mother. A decade later to the day, it was meeting him.

For too long I’d carried the wild tension between wanting to run like hell and nailing my boots to the ground as I watched every door of longing for living and loving in deeper ways close in my face. I dug deep, and deeper still, until I found myself standing in the open grave of what remained of my marriage.

The only door left to walk through was the one I never wanted to. Not to sound melodramatic, but I liken the felt experience to standing at the Gates of Hell. C.S. Lewis wrote, “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” So, which side was I on?

Divorce was the quandary that carried me over the threshold into the second half of life. I’d spent years dusting the doorstep. When I finally faced the truth, like Alice at rock bottom of the rabbit hole, I cried a river of tears that carried me through the keyhole into a strange wonderland. Not knowing where in the hell I was or which way was up, I birthed myself, my entire world, anew.

“Tears are a river that take a woman somewhere.” 
Clarissa Pinkola Estés Reyes

“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.” 
Carl Jung

Still in the bright morning hours of their lives, I’d carried my daughters with me into the stormy afternoon of mine. By the time they were ten and six, their entire world had split. Divorce was the dark cloud that rolled in over their new dawn.

They don’t tell you that divorce is like a cleaving, cells dividing en masse, tearing you apart completely. You are none the wiser; nonetheless, you’re growing, exponentially, in an embryonic frenzy. They don’t teach you in school that new life—as well as old scars—never stops chasing you.

“We are still a family. We always will be.” I told them. “There are lots of different ways of being a family.”

The law of increasing entropy states that the disorder of an isolated system will always increase over time. It’s a fact none of us escapes. It’s just that, sometimes, the vessel doesn’t hold. The tenuous ones crack. Faltering in their formation, somewhere down the line they spring a leak or break open completely. And you are flooded, left flailing to find the surface of your life again.

Once when I was droning on about my aching desire to be met in my depths, a wise, white-haired woman told me what a white-bearded man once told her: “It’s all surfaces.”

Whatever we can touch is everything that life is. What happens when you grow so much you lose touch with everything your life once was?

Life won’t let you live in suspended initiation. My fairytale maiden morning had become a lie nearly overnight. I spent the better part of a decade running from the truth. When we can’t face our bone truth, there’s no crossing over into life’s afternoon. There we remain frozen, undeveloped. Our existence is a mere idea. We are only half alive.

The ugly truth is the troll under the bridge barring our way through. Baring all is the toll. When we cross over, what we leave behind is the lie. A lie which, once upon a time, got us through.

“Life is a series of passages. In every passage there is a death of some sort, the death of naîeveté, the death of a dependency, the death of an understanding of self and world. And, after that death, there is often a terrible ‘in-between,’ sometimes lasting years.” 
James Hollis

During this particular October, somewhere between the searing heat of truth and the biting cold of grief, I found myself in an unseasonably warm autumn. I’d handed over my keys and sat outside on the curb in front of the blue steel automotive shop I’d come to depend upon. I was taking in the season’s waning light and the concrete heat when he rolled by and caught my eye. He stopped, one tattooed arm on the steering wheel and the other bent at the elbow, hanging out of the open window of a 1998 Chevy half-ton with a fuel pump problem. He was on his way for a test drive. It was the first time he ever really spoke to me. He asked if he could join me on the curb. When I said yes, he climbed out of the cab and said he owed me an apology.

Behold, I say to you, the Lord hath sent a man who could lead with an apology. Was I now standing before the Pearly Gates? In an instant, a thousand years of thirst slaked.

On a previous stop into the shop for a defunct visor that slapped me in the face every time I hit a bump in the road, I, against my better judgement, commented that he looked like a cross between two of my exes. Yes, you heard that right: I told this man as he handed me the keys to my car with a newly minted visor, that if my first love and another of my infamous exes had had a baby together, it would come out looking like him as a grown man. If the energy is there, I will overshare.

Understandably, he didn’t quite know what to say and he felt that he had fumbled his way through a reply. Clearly, it was I who was guilty of foul play yet I went on my merry way saying to myself in my spotless new vanity mirror, “Well played.” It seems the days of lying to my own face were not entirely in the rear view.

There on the curb, he shared with me that when we last spoke he was still reeling from the revelation of the bottom dropping out on his life and he’d spent the last few months piecing himself back together. His divorce was finalized and, although scarred like the ink stains covering his arms, he had just signed a new lease on life.

His story sounded like mine and strangely synced up, more or less, with my timeline. And although I had taken a personal—and entirely made-up—monastic oath solemnly swearing myself into spinsterhood, reborn spinster or not, a woman reserves the right to change her mind. We exchanged numbers on gold-edged paper torn from my scribble laden planner and I again went on my merry way to a most important lunch date with the squeals of my closest friends booming over my car speakers. Even the best mechanic this side of the Mississippi couldn’t fix that.

Love never goes quietly. Its inner seas rage, 
turn airborne, fill the lungs to gasping, 
grasping 
The body quakes with the ache of 
letting go 
In love’s final death throes, 
the violent departure of a dream 
of rescue 

The lovers of the world will tell you they are most alive during the fall. 

Are we not equally alive amidst loss? After the fulfillment of life’s promise that “everything you love, you will lose?”1

Such is the paradox of loss. Like falling in a dream, the threat of it jolts us awake, hurls a thunderbolt through our numbed complacency and leaves us clutching what remains within reach. We wake up. And not a moment too soon.

There is a reason they call it falling. Falling in love, falling out of it. Either way, you’re in free fall. Seized by the sudden spectacle of life in full spectrum. Stunned by a technicolor dream scene. A new lease, a Neptunian lens not unlike a trip through the chocolate river tunnel aboard the SS Wonkatania. Suddenly you’re swept into a kaleidoscopic storm of ecstatic anticipation transfused with terror.

“The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” 
Oscar Wilde

Similarly, we are utterly, involuntarily animate in grief.

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”
Francis Weller

“Great is he who is in love, since love is the present act of the great creator, the present moment of the becoming and lapsing of the world.” 
Carl Jung

Is love the becoming and lapsing of the world? 

The quote of the week at my third grader’s school is this well-known line by Dr. Seuss: “To the world you may be one person, but to one person, you may be the world.” 

My girl loves love, so this one got under her skin and took up residence in her Scorpio bones. She recites it unprompted from the back seat of the car, at the dinner table and during bedtime routine. For dramatic effect she likes to rehearse it approximately one inch from my face in deadpan fashion while resting her hands lovingly on my cheeks. Yes, dear, it’s time for bed now.

Is that what love is? Becoming world for someone? And isn’t it the peak of vulnerability to allow another to become your world? 

If love is the ultimate world-building, what happens when its loss levels your inner landscape like a category five hurricane?

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke writes, “Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate—?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”

Love through this lens is a catalyst to become who one is meant to be. Isn’t it true that we will often do for others first what we won’t do for ourselves? Despite our industrialized, individualistic indoctrination, we remain relational creatures to our core. There is no force like love to quicken us into our own ripening.

This take on love leaves me with a quizzical smile. I’m left pondering whether love may in fact be the ultimate trickster. A living entity in its own right, an eternal, elemental shapeshifter—like a storm, a literal force of nature, autonomous, with its own timeline—ensnaring our sensitivities and leaving us more alive in its wake.

Still, love never goes quietly. Does it ever really even go at all? Maybe the question becomes how do we rebuild amidst the rubble? What is a storm, really, but invisible, opposing forces—hot and cold, wet and dry, low and high—colliding in the formless expanse of sky. A momentary crescendo suddenly turned memory whose name, when uttered, sends a shiver down the spine of all those it left behind, forever changed. 

And when it’s over, the sky, once black and blue, turns to pink, orange and purple hues more brilliant than the proverbial calm of the before. A daylit mirror reflecting your badge of bruises, a testament to all you went through. And if you’re lucky, one day you’ll grow green again.

It didn’t behave
like anything you had
ever imagined. The wind
tore at the trees, the rain
fell for days slant and hard.
The back of the hand
to everything. I watched
the trees bow and their leaves fall
and crawl back into the earth.
As though, that was that.
This was one hurricane
I lived through, the other one
was of a different sort, and
lasted longer. Then
I felt my own leaves giving up and
falling. The back of the hand to
everything. But listen now to what happened
to the actual trees;
toward the end of that summer they
pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.
It was the wrong season, yes,
but they couldn’t stop. They
looked like telephone poles and didn’t
care. And after the leaves came
blossoms. For some things
there are no wrong seasons.
Which is what I dream of for me.

Hurricane by Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings.

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning.” 

Francis Weller

In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller names his second gate of grief: The places that have not known love. He writes:

“There is another entrance to grief, a second gateway, different from the gate connected to losing someone or something that we love. This grief occurs in the places often untouched by love. These are profoundly tender places precisely because they have lived outside of kindness, compassion, warmth, or welcome. These are the places within us that have been wrapped in shame and banished to the farthest shores of our lives. We often hate these parts of ourselves, hold them in contempt, and refuse to allow them the light of day. We do not show these outcast brothers and sisters to anyone, and we thereby deny these parts of ourselves the healing salve of community.”

“Gershon Kaufman, one of the most important writers on shame, has said that shame leaves us feeling ‘unspeakably and irreparably defective.’ It is unspeakable because we do not want anyone to know how we feel inside. We fear it is irreparable because we think it is not something we have done wrong—it is simply who we are. We cannot remove the stain from our core. We search and search for the defect, hoping that, once found, it can be exorcised like some grotesque demon. But it lingers, remaining there our entire lives, anxious that it will be seen and simultaneously longing to be seen and touched with compassion.”

“No one arrives on this earth encrusted with shame. Rather, shame settles in our bones over time, accumulating during times of neglect or violation. Every one of us has encountered times when the connection between us and the one we needed for attention and love was ruptured.”

Francis states further that grief will be the keynote for the foreseeable future, calling the days that lie ahead “the long dark.” 

How do we contain the amount of grief coming at and through us during these difficult times? Two things come to mind: titration and community. Without the container of community we are left with no spaces in which to hold and process our deep stores of sorrow. Inevitably our bodies become storehouses for pain simply for lack of a safe space to contain and process. 

We cannot move into the deep ground of our grief alone. Outside of the context of a living village—in which pain would be considered not personal but communal—there are ways we can begin to digest and compost this grief of our soul’s longing to be seen, heard and held in our fullness. 

One of the practices is titration, meaning, we move into the grief—by setting a timer to journal or process with a friend, for example—and then move back out of it. If you think back over your relationship to powerful emotions you carry, you might find that this is something you do naturally.

The old adage comes to mind: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. 

We can touch into our sorrow for a moment, and when the timer goes off, close the journal, turn off the sad playlist, and then continue on to have a day. Long gone are the days when the bereaved person would wear black or “live in the ashes,” as Francis Weller puts it, for a year, signaling to all those around them that their primary work is mourning. And further, that they now require more from the village than they can give. 

Another way to hold grief is by creating what Francis Weller calls a “sudden village.” In the absence of an intact village—for which our ancient nervous systems are deeply wired—we can come together with others around a shared intention within a safe, communal space to unpack our sorrow and sadness. 

Together we touch into the deeper ground of grief, hold and witness one another, and then close the circle, say our goodbyes and carry on once more with our modern lives. Our souls fed from the “primary satisfaction” of sharing and listening deeply from the heart. With every experience of a sudden village we emerge changed, somehow more ourselves. We meet the world with new eyes, hopefully a bit lighter and our soul fires burning brighter. 

I’ve done enough of my own work to know this is the work I am meant to do in the world. To be one who can hold and create a container for sorrow and soul.  

When we learn to belong to the stories that shaped us, we find belonging everywhere we go. Moreover, we become houses of belonging for other souls who have yet to find their way home. 

Skeleton Woman

The story of Skeleton Woman begins with her father throwing her from a cliff. She sinks to the bottom of the sea never to be seen again. Until, that is, a fisherman from another land comes along.

Though we are never told what it is she did to deserve such a fate, the implication is that there was something that her father deemed so unacceptable that she was discarded and left for dead. (Oh hello, patriarchy and your egregious degradation of the feminine principle—we see you!)

What woman does not know what it is to carve and whittle herself down, casting off vestiges of self and soul in order to find acceptance and belonging in the world today?  

This is the story of Skeleton Woman, which beautifully illustrates the process of soul retrieval and redemption for the places within us that have not known love.

Working with mythos is incredibly potent as all myths are prescriptive and proscriptive. When we think mythologically and locate ourselves in a timeless tale we can follow the clues and, overlaying our own life story, transpose the myth’s lysis, or resolution, in real time. In doing so, we gain profound clarity on what our next steps are out of dire straits or off the seabed floor. 

This work is divinatory. Like other esoteric practices we can use a timeless tale as a divining rod to tell us where it is we are meant to go. 

On Friday night, October 4th, we will gather around the fire of the beautiful, instructive tale of Skeleton Woman. We will begin with a meditation to connect into our bodies, then I will read the story and we will break it down piece by piece. 

Like the fisherman in the tale, we will utilize a writing prompt to summon a significant story from our our own lives out from the depths. We will spend the evening warming these personal tales with the fires of creativity and compassion, with plenty of time for discussion and sharing.

Together we will sing over the bones to make meaning, magic and medicine, not only for ourselves but for the world around us. 

You will leave our time together with a felt sense of connection to yourself and others, empowered with insight and clarity for taking aligned action along your journey to becoming a more authentic version of who you are.

It’s time to welcome all parts of you into the house of belonging. 

This is the singular intention I hold at every gathering of Wildish.

I hope you’ll join me in just two weeks for the next Wildish Weekend Workshop: A Carnival of Connection for a Collective of Creative Archivists and Ragtag Storytellers 

Snag the details and sign up here!

late
/lāt/
taking place after the expected, proper, or usual time.

Old English læt (adjective; also in the sense ‘slow, tardy’), late (adverb), of Germanic origin; related to German lass, from an Indo-European root shared by Latin lassus, ‘weary’ and ‘let.’ 
(Merriam-Webster)

Mornings have turned crisp and the light is bending again toward its eventual southernmost station at winter solstice. As the audacious bloom of summer fades into fall, I am still writing about love, its arrival late yet somehow right on time. If life were a lunar cycle, I would be well into my full moon days. But only, that is, if I find myself in the end among the lucky to whom Life lends her full allotment.

He told me just the other day he carries grief over our diminishing days, so many of them over before we began. Ours is a love without the privilege of meeting one another in our waxing phase, the blind, budding bliss of young love. We console one another with pocket platitudes late-in-life lovers carry like loose change. Not because they aren’t true, but because we have to. 

“I wasn’t ready for you.” 

“I had to go through what I went through to be able to truly appreciate you.” 

“Our meeting was right on time.” 

“We are aging together like fine wine.”

I tell him that way back when with his loud truck, window-rattling speakers, and stupid street stunts, “I would’ve been so into you.” Then comes the ache of looking into the eyes of a rhizomatic love which held so much loss before it ever took root. 

Doesn’t all love carry the seeds of loss? Aren’t they ripening with every passing moment? And isn’t this the first lesson we learn from Life and her seasons? And the first fact and final act we live our lives running from?

I’d have been his moon-eyed girl sitting middle on the bench seat of his Chevy pickup, my hand on his knee and his on the shifter I’m straddling in low rise jeans. I’d have worn his secondhand smoke like a first-prize ribbon on my clothes. We’d have stolen kisses at stoplights, even more under starlight parked in a ditch down some dusty, gravel drive. We’d have burned red hot for a summer like a meteor under that star-filled sky. Then like all the other boys, out like a rusty street lamp at dawn. I’d have broken his heart, because I only ever liked the ones who mishandled mine. 

It’s Friday the 13th and I have an announcement for you… 

Wildish Writing Workshop is back for another night!

If you know me then you know it’s no secret that it is my singular joy to fan the flames of your creativity. The last workshop was no exception. Thanks to all who attended. I was (and continue to be) blown away by the creativity and depth of emotion that came through our shared stories. I am rarin’ for another go ‘round! 

Fall is upon us, y’all. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, autumn is the season of grief. All that was going to fruit during this solar cycle has come to pass and what remains to be harvested is all that will grow until next spring. 

Autumn’s tool is the blade. Essential for harvesting life’s offerings. Critical for survival.

Just as the trees are producing cells at this very moment between their branches and leaves that will push them from their woody bases and send them into free fall, we too are asked to let go and turn our attention toward our inner lives.

This wisdom of the trees illustrates our present task, the work we must do in order to endure the harsh season of life. 

And the ancestral wisdom in our bones tells us, we cannot do this work alone.  

“This is solitary work we cannot do alone.”
Ira Progoff 

You’re invited to join me for Wildish: Spooky Season Edition!

A intimate night of storytelling and poetry writing where together we will create beauty from the stories of your lives.

We will gather on Friday, October 4th from 6:30-10:00pm at Bookish, the coolest, coziest, little used book store in OKC. 

We’ll begin with a reading of Skeleton Woman from Women Who Run With the Wolves, a story that illustrates so beautifully the way parts of ourselves and our souls get lost along the way.

It is an instructive tale about soul retrieval, giving us a road map for how we welcome our lost pieces of soul back into the fold of our full lives. It is how we come fully alive. Together we will court them back and warm them by the fire of compassionate community.  

Caboose Coffee will be open for sips. Pack your favorite snack, grab your bestie and your journal and join me for a night of singing over your soul bones.

We will laugh. We will cry. And you will leave feeling more connected to the real, real stories of your lives. 

Think of it as grown up story time. 

Cozy up and kick off spooky season with me! This will be a small, intimate gathering, so grab your ticket right meow. 🐈‍⬛

SIGN UP TODAY!

(Or I will have to send you another email with a pumpkin spice pun. Don’t think I won’t.)

“If you let yourself tell those smaller anecdotes or stories, the overarching capital-S stories will eventually rise into view.”
Mary Karr

Starting tomorrow we’ll gather in a small group around a singularly shaping story from your life to revisit, retell and perhaps even rewrite it, should the urge to do so strike. That part will be up to you.

We will write poetry, dabble in screenwriting, and swap stories and scars all within the sacred container of a momentary village made for holding what is currently seeking expression through you.

Full disclosure: I don’t know how to teach writing. But what I do know is how to create space for all that lies within you to come through. It’s what I do.

In the traditional practice of storytelling, it is deeply understood that creativity doesn’t come from us, it comes through us.

Everything is a gift and everything is relational.

The spirit of story originates from somewhere outside of us and comes to us through our connection to something greater. Our job is to cultivate this connection through deep listening and allowing our voice to carry its resonant truth.

This is as true as it is with the stories of our lives as it is for creative works of fiction. Because this living is an art. Deep down, our very lives are manifestations of a kaleidoscope of archetypes that dwell in the deep unconscious. Within them lies the profound wisdom and meaning of all that has come to pass.

Our work, again, is to listen.

"Spirit is a still, small voice and it sounds from afar."
Carl Jung

I’m going to say this again: We are not here to become better writers. (Although, that could happen. After all, it can only happen by writing.)

This weekend is about connection. To ourselves, our stories, one another and the wider world to which we have always belonged.

There are still a few spaces left in Wildish Weekend. We begin tomorrow at 6:00pm! I hope you will join me for this carnival of connection for creative archivists and ragtag storytellers. I promise it will be worth your while.

Click here to sign up.

Subscribe now

p.s. This is the last email you’ll receive from me about the workshop. I cannot wait to be back in your inbox with the next installment of Crossroads, my steamy summer miniseries about finding love in midlife.

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in.”
Anne Lamott

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes

“Most of all, you owe all the truth you can wheedle out of yourself… While it is a shaped experience, the best (memoirs) come from the soul of a human unit oddly compelled to root out the past truth for its own deeply felt reasons. In fact, every memoirist I know seems doomed to explore the past in an often agonized death march down the pages.”
Mary Karr

“Most of us are dragged toward wholeness.”
Marion Woodman

“A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free. A fierce urge to try re-experiencing your own mind and body and throbbing heart alive inside the most vivid stories from your past is step one. No doubt, if you weren’t haunted by those stories, you wouldn’t waste your time trying to write them.”
Mary Karr

There is still space available in my creative writing and therapeutic storytelling workshop happening this Friday.

I’d love for you to spend the weekend with me writing stories and swapping battle scars. You won’t be sorry.

Click here for more details and to sign up!

Subscribe now

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Hailey Soleil about creativity, the divine feminine and courting the inner life on her podcast Whatever Words Can Touch. Here’s a teaser:

In Jungian psychology, establishing connection to the inner opposites is paramount in the individuation process. It is critical in the aim of achieving wholeness.

We start out in the first half of life building our ego identity and becoming lopsided in the process as we build our selective musculature into who we think we ought to be. Usually it’s a curation of all we’ve been taught we should strive for. Girls do this, boys do that. Whatever doesn’t fit within sugar and spice and everything nice, gets stuffed down or traded off. Much of who we are born to be—as well as the gifts we came in carrying with us—gets pushed to the margins and the vital life force these parts of us carry goes into exile as well.

Creativity relies on the tension of opposites. In astrology the most dynamic aspects are known as hard aspects. They’re difficult because they create friction in our lives, but this friction builds heat, forces creativity and forges potency.

As the saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of all invention.” Call it what you will—invention, innovation, creativity, spontaneity—it’s all dynamic tension behind the wheel of wherever you’re going down the road of life or in the realm of imagination. The spontaneous combustion engines we drive everyday run purely on a series of controlled explosions. 

For Jungians, this inner opposite functions as gatekeeper and tour guide. For folks who embody femininity, the inner opposite is masculinity. Not to be confused with gender, masculinity and femininity are simply modes of being in the world. Although we each possess a measure of both, most of us embody one as our dominant modus operandi. 

For an individual embodying femininity, masculinity is a shadow presence. Meaning there exists within an inner other who possesses qualities or intrapsychic musculature opposite to our dominant nature, or that which comes most naturally. 

This inner masculine, or animus, is overseer of not only our personal unconscious, but functions as a ferryman to depths of psyche. He is our direct line to the collective unconscious, the realm of the archetypes, our own personal docent to the hall of muses. (For masculine beings, this inner feminine other is called the anima.)

Making contact with our inner “contrasexual opposite” is critical to igniting the dynamic tension that fuels creativity. It takes inner polarity. Opposites attract because Life seeks wholeness. Often outwardly we are attracted to those who embody an untapped quality we carry within. It is a powerful unconscious recognition. This is by design—and also why our shadow projections inevitably must fall away. The goal is that we become conscious of our own innate potentiality and thus grow within ourselves. It is the mechanism by which we become who we were born to be.

If you’ll humor me with oversimplification for the sake of illustration, the masculine principle is that of action and discernment, while the feminine principle is that of reflection and relationality. 

The masculine tool is the blade, the feminine holds the chalice. Singularity of focus and forward momentum versus containment and creative entanglement. But the two shouldn’t be pitted together. The end goal is that holy grail of sacred union. It’s where the magic happens. 

The feminine’s creative principle when paired with the focused action of the masculine becomes an unstoppable creative force moving Life forward. It’s the spontaneous combustion engine of Life itself.

Feminine fertility is ground, the rooted web within, and the surrender and beauty of the bloom, but masculinity is the force that pushes the new shoots up from the soil in spring and forces the tight bud into fullness. 

We are all creative. Because we are all, in the words of Kahlil Gibran, “sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”

When Mary Oliver was asked in an interview how it was that she was able to write such poignant, beautiful poetry so profoundly and prolifically, she answered: “I keep the appointment.” She kept the appointment daily: her listening, her walks along Blackwater Pond, her quality of attention and presence and the willingness to write her wonder down on the page. All the result of a profound commitment to practice penning her wild wonder down on the page. A lifetime of courage and the willingness to meet the material of her life in a way that allowed her to weave meaning and medicine for all the world to read. 

Let’s meet in the hall of muses and keep the appointment together.

In just one week I am hosting Wildish Weekend: A two-day, in-person creative writing and therapeutic storytelling workshop designed to help you meet with the material of your life and create poetry and prose from your personal history.  

Together we will drop into our bones through embodiment practices and explore the deep wells of our inner being, digging up stories for soul-making and sharing. We will utilize writing prompts throughout the weekend, with our journals as soil for the seeds of our shared stories to grow into fruits of wisdom. We will create poetry from our own life stories and engage in therapeutic storytelling utilizing Gestalt principles interwoven with teachings and group process.

We will bring our stories to light and to life alongside one another as we enact dramas and release stuck or stagnant storylines in our bodies, our lives and our lineages. This work is not ours alone and it is not only for us. When we heal ourselves we heal generations past and the future ones who have yet to come.

Everyone is creative. 

Cultivating connection to the inner life is key to creative, authentic living. It takes the courage to bring what’s inside of you out into the world and allow yourself to be shaped from the inside out rather than the outside in. 

Living authentically doesn’t happen by accident. It is the result of courting the opposites within, making connection with the inner other to carry your unlived life out into the world. 

A writing practice is the  kind of aligned, purposeful action—hello masculine—that has the power to coax the inner opposites from their hiding places in the shadow and carry them out into the world on full, brilliant display, bringing untold treasures with them. 

You don’t know, until you find out for yourself. 

“Beautiful people do not just happen.” 
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Next weekend I’ll lead you through embodiment practice to make contact with the muses within who are waiting to be expressed through you. We will write and share our stories in a small, intimate setting. A fierce, creative container where you will experience first hand the power of therapeutic storytelling. 

Click here for the nitty gritty details whether it’s the good, the bad, the ugly or something in between. 

I hope you’ll join me in just one week! Sign up here. 

Whether masculine, feminine or wild creature, we’re going to dig in whatever it is that lies within and bring it forward! This is only the beginning of a wild inner courtship that you will continue to carry with you. So long as you keep the appointment.

Here’s more from the podcast:

You can listen to it in full here.

Subscribe now

And then forget ourselves in our remembering that we have always belonged to the wider world. 

We entered this world with our belonging intact. We have only forgotten. 

Elder and Soul Activist Francis Weller teaches that a mature, ripened adult seeks to become a “house of belonging.” In modern western culture, a great deal of our striving is about seeking for belonging and proving our worth. We spend our days trying to convince people of our worthiness and our gifts so that we may find our place in the world. 

In order to belong we learn that we must cut off parts of ourselves so that we might fit in someplace, anyplace. The systems we are raised in define, in no uncertain terms, what is acceptable about us and what is not—whether these are familial, educational, religious or otherwise. And now we have cancel culture—let’s not even go there. 

We are meant to grow large into our soul’s longing, bringing with us our ancestral inheritance. What we are faced with instead are messages designed to keep us small and in our place. Consuming the latest trend rather than creating from within. And shaping who we are in the process.

“It is time to become immense.” 
Francis Weller

Immensity is our soul’s inheritance. Our original identity was cosmological. Our existence, our worth and our place in the world was a given, constantly mirrored back to us by the village.

We used to write our stories in the night sky before we closed our eyes. 

Now we have the 24/7 feed of screens that pull our gaze downward. (Ever wonder why it’s called a feed? And why we are called consumers rather than citizens?)

Our souls are not fit for living our lives passively behind screens.

Our souls are made for storying. 

The quest for belonging was never ours to take up. In living culture, belonging is a given. 

In his book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller writes:

“Deep in our bones lies an intuition that we arrive here carrying a bundle of gifts to offer to the community. Over time, these gifts are meant to be seen, developed, and called into the village at times of need. To feel valued for the gifts with which we are born affirms our worth and dignity. In a sense, it is a form of spiritual employment - simply being who we are confirms our place in the village. That is one of the fundamental understandings about gifts: we can only offer them by being ourselves fully. Gifts are a consequence of authenticity; when we are being true to our natures, the gifts can emerge.”

In the land of rugged individualism, we are each individually put to task to prove ourselves. The heroic journeys of today have become around-the-clock quests for approval. We perform life instead of living it.  And it leaves us distracted and burned out.

What you notice in the hero’s journey, however, is that once the dragon is slayed and the jewel or magical elixir is obtained, what follows is a return. The hero goes home, sharing the treasure and the triumph with the village.  

Eventually, we must return home. When there is no village to return to, the only thing left to do is find home within ourselves.

How do we do this in the absence of living culture?

There is no single way, but as I’ve heard Francis Weller say, we have to find the trail on the ground. We must re-member the ancestral movements that made us human: weaving, flintknapping, dancing, singing and storytelling.  

We show up and participate.

Modern, industrial culture encourages conformity. And is, in fact, fed by it. 

We grow up convinced that cutting away pieces of ourselves and omitting parts of our stories that don’t fit neatly into a shiny social feed will finally give us “what we expected and did not receive”*: a welcoming village nourishing our unique gifts and a felt sense of our place in the world, not to mention, in our own skin.

The thing is, it never does. 

That’s no hero’s journey, but a fool’s errand. 

Where I come from, we’d say you’d been sent out snipe hunting.

A shaming culture would have us keep behind closed doors what is most universally human: struggle.

What we keep hidden cannot be redeemed.

Any storyteller worth their salt will tell you that you start by telling the truth. If only at first, to yourself. 

In the absence of village, much of our energy is locked up in repressing our truth simply because there are no containers large enough to hold it. In childhood, psyche brilliantly encapsulates trauma (whether acute or the slow trauma of not being seen) through the mechanism of repression. This saves us from the shattering that can come from “too much too soon.”

But the body remembers and sooner or later this material begins to surface. It manifests in our lives, our bodies and our relationships; it infects our feeling states and stalks our dreams. Why? Because just like the body mends what is broken, psyche seeks to be whole.

 Learning to belong to the stories that made us who we are—the good, the bad and the ugly—means laying down the sword and lowering the sails.

It means no longer running from the storylines etched on your scarred heart. 

It takes courage—the root word of which means ‘heart’—and a container strong enough to hold all that has gone into the shaping of you.

In a word, community. 

And that is what I hope our Wildish Weekend together will be. A momentary village where your story is seen and heard, witnessed and validated, so that you are supported in your return home to yourself.

You only have to show up.

I’ll show you the rest.

I hope you’ll join me on August 9th & 10th for Wildish Weekend: A two-day Creative Writing and Therapeutic Storytelling Workshop.

Click here for more details and to sign up!

I cannot wait to hear your story.

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*Francis Weller’s Fourth Gate of Grief

Years passed and I still had the most well-maintained European import this side of the Mississippi. Maybe when men get together they talk shop, but when I’d gather with friends and they’d ask about the state of the station wagon, shop talk turned sexual innuendo in zero to sixty. You know the way women talk when we get together out of earshot of partners and children—you’d know it from the howling. Or maybe you don’t, and that’s probably for the best. Eventually I’d turn pink as a plum blossom and shut the conversation down quick like. There’s nothing like a gathering of girlfriends to return a grown woman into a reticent school girl.

The truth is, there was trouble in paradise. As it turns out, I was the last one to know despite everything I knew. I’d spent the last good amount of time trying to corral a clawing cat back into a bag she wasn’t fit for anymore. I don’t know how it happened, I just know that it did. If you read my debut Substack piece then you know I was heaved out of the garden of blind matrimonial bliss not long after I said “I do.” And like Psyche, I’d been tasked arduously with piecing myself back together time and again. Such is the way of feminine initiation.

Although I had experienced betrayal, I was never once unfaithful. And I wasn’t going to start now. This shop scene straight out of southern summer romance novel was information. And I know what to do with information: integrate.    

I brought my distress to Tess. I give her the rundown on the whole scene with Candy Eyes: the staring through smudged glass, the sweat—both his and mine—and my trailing through the shop leaving a slime trail like a lovesick snail. And lest we forget the rodeo scene in my Levi’s jeans. Here’s the thing about Tess, she’s a seasoned Jungian analyst who’s been doing this work longer than I’ve been alive. There’s nothing she hasn’t seen. She’s heard it all, done a little bit of it herself, and been around the block with all manner of material and then some. It takes a lot to get a rise out of her. So when I ended the recap of that scene with the following gem Instagram synchronistically gifted to me, the smirk on Tess’ face accompanied by a twinkle in her eye was enough therapeutic gold to last me a lifetime. Here’s that gem: 

If your vagina doesn’t have a heartbeat when you see him, he ain’t the one, sis. 

I conclude my synopsis, seal my lips and sit on the edge of my seat, waiting eagerly for her tried and true wisdom to befall me. I watch her smirk turn full smile heavy with satisfaction because I know that she knows we are square in trickster territory. We trade jewel for jewel when she says to me, “Well, my dear, you might be married, but you’re not dead.” 

She’s good at that, Tess is, checking me when I get too precious about life and the way I move through it. Or when she catches me in a moment when I am still, despite all my years in the wild, trying to be too good. 

“The healer is the far-seer… the one who knows what good can come from this.”  
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

Tess mothers me in a way I’ve never been mothered before—wholly real. She returns me to myself when I start spinning my wheels or get too far gone down a dead end road. 

We howl together, marvel momentarily at the drama conjured by Life in midlife. Then we go about making what medicine we can with the material we’ve been given.

It would be months, years even, before he uttered a single word to me but our white-hot wordless exchange remained embedded in my being. When pain is your most loyal teacher, you recognize salve when you see it. But some of us take an oath to do no harm if we can help it. And so, our shared silence became my secret solace. 

Seasons change and as luck would have it, eventually his whole world tilted on axis. It was only a matter of time before the wreckage of his collided with mine.  

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Enough about me. Let’s talk about you, shall we?

Everyone has a story to tell.

I told you mine, now you tell me yours.

In just two weeks I’m holding a workshop for the fine folks of Oklahoma City. It’s a creative mashup of my two favorite things: therapy and writing. 

It’s an in-person two-day creative writing & therapeutic storytelling intensive in Oklahoma City.

For as long as we’ve been alive, we have been a storytelling species. It is one of the rhythmic social practices that made us human.

I believe in story.  

And I have come to hold the ancestral tradition of storytelling among the greatest of our human legacies.

As my brilliant analyst, Tess Castleman, said to me years ago lighting a fire under my own stagnant creativity:

“We don’t create for money; we don’t create for fame. We don’t even create for fun—because it’s not always fun. We create because we are changed in the process.”

This very fire is the one that keeps the light on in my own house of belonging where creativity and connection form heart and hearth. 

This blaze is what I hope to ignite in you within the alchemical container of my next offering.

My father passed in February and while I am still navigating all the firsts of this fresh grief, I know it is time for me to return yet again to my roots—to our shared, ancient roots as communal storytellers gathered around the fires of conscious remembering.

I know I will be tender, but I am held and supported in a circle of care, and as the saying goes: “The trouble is, you think you have time.”

And so, without further ado, I would like to invite you to the next run of Wildish! I’m calling it:

Wildish Weekend Workshop: A Carnival of Connection for a Collective of Creative Archivists and Ragtag Storytellers 

The working title is a touch over-the-top, but that is precisely the kind of village I intend to dream into being in these end times. 

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Dylan Thomas

Erykah Badu says, “Spelling is a spell.” 

Let us lay down our stories and free up space within to write our wildest dreams into being. 

If not now, when?

An in-person two-day creative writing & therapeutic storytelling intensive in Oklahoma City

Friday, August 9th, 6:00-9:00pm & Saturday, August 10th, 10:00am-4:00pm

Together we will utilize embodiment practices and writing prompts to summon what stories wish to be told through us. Using our journals throughout the weekend as alchemical vessels for transforming our shared stories into medicine, we will create poetry from our own life stories and engage in therapeutic storytelling utilizing Gestalt principles both in dyads and as a group.

We will bring our stories to light and to life alongside one another as we enact dramas and release stuck or stagnant storylines in our bodies, our lives and our lineages. This work is not ours alone and it is not only for us. When we heal ourselves we heal generations past and the future ones who have yet to come.

“You have to resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to live that’s not within your body. Let it live in art. Let it live in writing, or music. Let it be devoured by building brighter connections. Your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.”
Ehime Ora

Consider it a weekend kickstarter to a mini memoir project. And there will be more where this one came from. 

The sun will be in showstopping Leo and Mercury the planet of writing and communication will be retrograde, supporting all manner of shenanigans in our revisiting, retelling and reshaping stories of times gone by into potent medicines of profound meaning and life-giving magic.

Come with your favorite pen and a journal in hand and be ready to write a new script. 

You can sign up here.

Since its conception, Wildish has always been about stories. This weekend workshop is the first of its kind, centered exclusively around the stories of your life, weaving meaning and making magic from the making and shaping of YOU.

As an Irish poet friend once told me, “Your story matters as much as the fabric that holds the entire universe together.”

Search yourself. Some part of you knows it’s true.

I cannot wait to share space with you again soon. I hope you’ll join me live and in-the-flesh in just two short weeks!

This will be a small, intimate setting in northwest Oklahoma City, so space is limited. The cost for the weekend is $288. 

I can’t wait to create with you.

p.s. If you’re not an Okie and you’re interested in a virtual offering of this workshop, hit reply (if you’re reading this in email) or send me a message here and let me know!

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I’m in a dream. I am trying to get to him and he is trying to get to me. For months it’s the same cryptic scene stalking my night dreams. Running through corridors and crowded streets, up and down winding stairwells in my sleep. Once I searched my childhood bedroom beneath my powder pink daybed draped with strawberry shortcake sheets. 

Each night the same thing, traversing timelines, spanning lifetimes. An untold number of missed connections but when we finally meet, there is only him and there is only me. 

Our hearts crash, one into the other—a sudden swell, crescendo, then the drop. Lifetimes of longing crest and release in this singular still point across a vast ocean of time. 

This must be what drowning feels like. I wake up, breathless.  

There is no time in psyche. No linearity, only timelessness. Every which way you look, it’s all ocean, endless, in every direction. 

It would take years after the first moment when his lingering gaze etched a tattoo on my soul for me to realize he was the man who’d been haunting my dreams. Me trying to get to him and him trying to get to me.  

You got wires, going in
You got wires, coming out of your skin
You got tears, making tracks
I got tears, that are scared of the facts
Running, down corridors through, automatic doors
Got to get to you, got to see this through

Wires
by Athlete