One. Charge before structure.

Nothing can be built out of depleted people, and almost everyone attempting this is depleted, which is usually why they are attempting it. The dream of community shows up most vividly in the people with the least left in the tank, because that dream is a correct read on what they’re missing. But a person running dry who joins a community does not get filled by it. They arrive with an empty barrel and a nervous system that has been scanning for danger for years, and the community becomes one more thing to monitor.

So the first work is not community work. It’s getting some charge back.

You’re not trying to restore yourself to some ideal state of thriving before you’re allowed to want people and community. You’re just putting out a rain barrel to do some good catching, doesn’t need to be huge, just real and yours, with nothing else drawing from it. One protected pocket of energy that reliably fills.

What fills the barrel is unglamorous: sleep you actually got, food that came from soil somebody could name, an hour outside where the phone is somewhere else, something that moves your body hard enough that your mind goes quiet, and the specific irreplaceable thing of being in contact with the living world without a screen mediating it. Rain in the barrel. Fill up with goodness.

Pro-tip: some of your exhaustion is parasitic: friction that takes from you and returns nothing, the grinding gear, the loop still running about a conversation from 2019, the phone that never lets your monitoring layer fully close. Cut parasitic friction ruthlessly. But some of your exhaustion is productive: the hard climb that built the giant glorious thick thighs, the awkward real encounter with a stranger that built the capacity to have another one. That kind of tired is deposit, not withdrawal. Learning to tell them apart is most of the work of getting your energy back, because the culture has trained us to remove all friction indiscriminately and then wonder why we feel so vague.

Fall IN LOVE with your good friction. It’s where your real life is trying to woo you home.

And one more thing, because it’s the piece people skip: there’s a difference between dirty energy and clean energy. You can run for years on cortisol and adrenaline and the deadline coming, and it produces motion, and it feels like capacity. It isn’t. A system running on stress hormones has no access to perspective, creativity, or generosity, which happen to be the exact three things community formation requires. You can be extremely busy and extremely productive and have nothing available for the thing you actually want to build.

The failure here looks like: a group of exhausted people trying to save each other, which produces mutual extraction rather than a village. Everyone arrives hoping the others will have something to give, everyone is running on fumes, and within a year the whole thing has the specific bitter flavor of people who wanted to be generous and found out they had nothing to be generous with.

Two. Repetition with nothing at stake.

The first thing that has to accumulate is not trust. It is familiarity, which is trust’s precursor and can be built by nothing more sophisticated than seeing the same faces on a schedule. Same day, same place, same rough shape. No commitment beyond showing up, no processing, no vision statement, nothing anyone has to believe. The nervous system needs repetitions before it will file a person as safe, and it files them somatically, below the level of decision, which means the only way to get there is by racking up hours in the same physical space.

The failure here looks like: intensity substituting for time.

Three. Play, because it’s loadbearing

In a building, load-bearing means the wall is holding weight that would otherwise bring the ceiling down. Take it out and the house comes with it. The other walls are for organizing the space, and they matter, and you can knock one out on a Saturday and nothing bad happens.

Play is load-bearing when it’s doing work that nothing else in the system can do. That’s a structural claim, not a mood claim. Play makes people permeable to each other, and it does this without anyone being in charge and without anyone having to trust anyone first, which is remarkable when you consider that almost nothing else works that way. Here is the mechanism: a real laugh, the kind that gets out before you can stop it, arrives before the part of you that assesses strangers has finished its work. Your body has already decided these people are safe while your mind is still running the numbers, and that decision gets filed somewhere deeper than opinion, which is why it holds.

Conversation cannot do this, because conversation runs straight through the part of you that is watching how you come across. Sharing circles cannot reliably do it either, because a circle that asks for vulnerability tends to receive a performance of it. But a ridiculous game in a field will do it in twenty minutes, with people who arrived as strangers, and the effect lasts. Pull play out and the things that were resting on it, the community forming, the nervous systems settling, the slow accumulation of evidence in the body that these people are real and will come, don’t get built some slower way instead. They don’t get built.

The failure here looks like: skipping straight to depth. Groups that start with heart circles before anyone has laughed together are building on nothing, and the disclosures made there create obligation rather than bond.

Four. A third thing that is real.

Two people facing each other is the least stable relational structure there is, and a group facing each other with no external object is the same instability multiplied. What holds is triangulation: people facing a shared third thing, together. Firewood. A meal that has to get cooked, a creek that needs clearing, a game with rules, making music. The third thing carries the weight that the relationships cannot yet carry, and it does this without anyone having to be emotionally available, which is why it works when people are still guarded.

This is not a nice metaphor about teamwork. Triangulation is the technical term in developmental psychology for how human sociality starts: That’s the founding gesture of our species. It’s how we became the kind of animal that can build anything together, and it never stopped working that way. So the question in any room full of people is never how much good will is present, it’s what everyone is facing.

Which is where village formation gets its hardest test, and it is a test almost every attempt fails. If what everyone is facing is the person who started it, you don’t have a village. You have an orbit, and an orbit will never become a village, because the thing it’s organized around cannot be handed to anyone else. The diagnostic is cheap and merciless: what do these people talk about when the founder isn’t in the room? If the answer is the founder, or the founder’s vision, or how to help the founder, the thing is not forming. It’s gathering. And the day the founder gets tired, which is every founder eventually, it goes quiet in a week.

Five. Density, allowed to climb.

Everything above generates the conditions for more bodies to show up more often, and this is the point where most people get impatient, because the density is climbing but nothing looks like a village yet. It looks like a bunch of people who hang out. That is exactly what it should look like. Agreements, standards, shared culture, and specialization do not get installed by decision. They emerge when the system gets dense enough to require them, and requiring is the operative word. In a system with sufficient density, conflict resolution practices develop because without them things become immediately chaotic and everyone can feel it. Below that density, you can write the most beautiful agreements ever drafted and nobody will remember they exist.

The quality of presence you bring to these shared experiences decides whether they tip into sharing more of your lives or just being distracted buddies who know each other, kinda.

Six. Small stakes, tested.

Before anyone shares walls or money or children, the system has to survive things going wrong at a scale where going wrong is survivable. Someone flakes. Someone is unkind. Someone’s unmetabolized history comes up sideways and lands on the wrong person. This is not a problem in the process, this is the process (of life). What you are finding out is whether the group can metabolize rupture, because a group that cannot metabolize rupture at low stakes will detonate at high ones, and the people in it will carry the shrapnel for years.

I often have my clients learn how to fight and enjoy it. It’s conflict enjoyment. It requires understanding that the people you are in conflict are currently revealing the edges of your known functionality and they may be the perfect comrades to expand those edges.

The failure here looks like: harmony mistaken for health. A group with no visible conflict after two years is usually a group where the conflict has gone underground, and the first real pressure will find it.

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Seven. Structure, last.

Only after all of the above does the question of shared land, shared money, shared households, shared legal structure become answerable, and by then it is often barely a decision. The structure formalizes something that already exists rather than attempting to summon it. This is the inverse of how almost every intentional community starts, which is why almost every intentional community fails, and the failures are not gentle. People leave those wreckages with community trauma and people trauma and just traumatrauma.

The failure here looks like: doing it first.

The whole runway, compressed

Get some charge in your system. Show up in the same place repeatedly with the same people. Play together before you talk deeply. Face a real object together in addition to facing each other. Let the numbers climb without forcing the shape and stay curious in the uncertainty. Break something small and repair it. Then look and see what might be happening right on the ground where you are already standing.

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What’s your current situation? How’s the rain barrel? What would one move look like that would bring you closer to living in a thermodynamically not-as-stupid way?

The universe runs on flow

Every living thing, a river, a forest, a kid on a bike figuring out a new trick, stays alive by moving energy through itself and releasing what it can’t use, and the moment that flow stops, the aliveness stops, immediately, the way a candle goes out.

We are not a thing that has energy, we are a process that IS energy moving through a particular shape and the shape only stays you as long as the flow keeps flowing. So while most people ask “am I doing this right” the lifeforce question is “is something actually moving through me right now, or am I stuck?” Like a lamp without oil, stuck is what desiccation feels like from the inside. Desiccation is what happens to a living system that has been severed from its sources of genuine input: real play, real contact, real food grown in real soil, real presence with people who are actually there.

The culture you were born into is very good at producing the appearance of flow while actually installing extraction. Look at the extraction machine you are reading this on that performs connection at you while robbing your precious heart blind. The processed food billed as comforting homey nourishment but actually is so structurally nuts it costs your body more to process it than it gives energy wise.

So let’s physics thru my personal journey of community with a thermodynamic lens.

I started a survival cooperative

that in my mind, was a community, but was, actually, a dog pile of single moms united around shared needs, omg SOMEONE watch my kid so I can work and we can eat and keep living kind of vibes. While we shared space, childcare, sometimes meals, we had no conscious frame for what was actually draining everyone. I lived in a trauma-fueled drama dome and worked nonstop. One night, in a depression-fueled desperation, I typed into an old school internet search engine “where are genuinely happy people?” and, pre-algorithm, it didn’t lie. I saw an image that changed my life forever, happy people jumping a motorcycle off a roof at Dancing Rabbit eco village in Missouri. In my own personal life, I had never experienced that level of shared authentic joy. Over the next six months I rebuilt my life to study and live at intentional communities everywhere, which very much included going to graduate school for poetry and buying a Westfalia Vanagon from a CIA agent.

To where I am now: in a nuclear household which is, well, thermodynamically idiotic, like almost all nuclear households are. There isn’t enough energy to run a system well, so it’s exhausting to even maintain, never mind make positive changes and can feel a little edgy getting needs met. I ache for intentional community and see a lot of runway that needs building before that becomes a logical next step #soulquest

But it takes energy to change: density and the cold-start problem

Ok, so you know how you can’t play hide and seek with two people? Or how sometimes having a bunch of kids is easier than one? The nuclear household isn’t a moral failure, there’s a minimum number of a thing that a living system needs before certain functions become possible at all. That’s why nuclear living is so thermodynamically poopy.

The nuclear household sits below the density threshold for most of what humans actually need, not because the people in it are failing but because the unit is too small to generate the gradient that makes certain things necessary, and necessity is what makes agreements, standards, shared culture, and genuine specialization emerge. In a community, you develop conflict resolution practices because without them things immediately become chaotic and everyone can feel it. In a nuclear household, the chaos stays manageable enough to avoid, which means the practices never develop, which means every hard thing stays harder than it needs to be forever.

Let’s put the cold-start problem and density together. When there’s not enough charge in the system to get something moving (that would sustain itself easily once it had momentum) it’s like trying to start a car in January with a battery that’s almost dead (not broken) just not enough charge to turn the engine over; if you do manage to get it running it’ll charge itself. The problem is the getting-it-running part: five kids will spontaneously generate a game, but one kid needs an adult to initiate and maintain the game, and that adult is already running a near constant massive thermodynamic deficit.

Which means a lot of what gets diagnosed as personal failure is actually a density problem: can’t maintain community, can’t develop good relational practices, can’t seem to build the life that felt possible. And a culture that needs you isolated and self-blaming will never tell you that. The shame is load-bearing for the system. A person who understands they’ve been attempting something structurally impossible stops being manageable and starts creating a ruckus and making changes that buck the control architectures, that keep you small and nuts and distracted. So the diagnosis stays personal, the shame collapses you consistently and the unit stays nuclear, the exhaustion stays your fault. You keep trying to fix yourself instead of building density, which is so much harder to monetize and so much harder to surveil.

But, what about we figure out how to fucking build it anyway?

But not all community is created equal

Eastwind Community, Missouri: everybody works forty hours a week, your housing and food and a little money appear like magic, the whole system hums. Beautiful in its way. But something slightly cool about it too, like a body with good circulation and no particular reason to get out of bed. Efficiency without viriditas. The gradient was too flat to create aliveness.

Castle House: most chaos, most joy, most genuine experiment, most mess, least psychological safety. The highest viriditas environment I’ve ever lived in. Also the place where unmetabolized trauma moved through the system like weather because nobody had built the infrastructure to catch it. Both things true simultaneously. Castle House taught me that viriditas and safety are not the same thing, and you need both, and building both at once is the actual hard problem.

The mechanism: what viriditas is and where it comes from

That Dancing Rabbit image, a founder on a motorcycle through a burning hoop off a roof, everyone’s face in full contact with actual experience. I know now what I was seeing. Viriditas. Hildegard of Bingen’s word, twelve centuries old, still more precise than anything wellness culture has produced: the animating moisture that flows through all living things. A wet leaf in spring has it. A dried up leaf doesn’t.

Poetry kept me alive in the trauma dome not because it was beautiful but because catching a true poem requires you to be present enough to catch it. The craft requirement and the aliveness requirement are the same requirement. Dickinson said poetry takes the top of your head off. Whyte says it’s language against which we have no defense. Both are describing the same thing: it bypasses the monitoring layer before the evaluative apparatus can intercept it. Exactly what genuine play does. Same technology, different form.

A poem is only as clear as the poet catching it. A community is only as coherent as the coherence of the people building it. Same law, different scale. The MFA wasn’t a detour from the community work. It was viriditas maintenance. The intuition that sent me toward it was thermodynamically correct before I had any of these words.

The container question: what actually makes the stuff

I left Castle House and I have not closed that gap since and it’s a hard thing to look at. I have been more supported and in flow than my current life allows. I have a huge network and have built fifteen years of community that shows up and feeds people and holds each other through actual disasters, and inside the four walls where I sleep there is not enough shared gradient to make a household agreement feel necessary. Not enough density for anything to self-organize. Every single thing has to be started by hand, every time. Lordy peet.

So I built the thing I could build, not a commune, not yet, there is much runway to be built for that to actually sing. What I built instead was community density without cohabitation: Sunday mornings outside, food on a table, games that make grown adults forget to perform, actual animal contact with actual humans in an actual field. And what I found out is that this moves things the nuclear household cannot touch, and not because anyone is being taught or healed or programmed, but because the gathering itself is a viriditas delivery system. The play is not the container for the inner work. The play is the water. The inner work is what grows once there is water. A leaf does not turn green by understanding photosynthesis. It turns green when the conditions are right.

With every filament that I am, I am working on the conditions, relearning the wisdom inside of viriditas.

Part Two is those conditions in sequence.

Glossary

Flow vs. stuck. Not a metaphor. A living system is either moving energy through itself or it isn’t, and the body knows the difference before the mind does. The question, is something actually moving through me right now, has a real answer available right now, in your chest, if you stop performing long enough to feel it.

Viriditas. Hildegard of Bingen’s word, coined in the twelfth century, for the animating moisture that flows through all living things. The wet leaf in spring has it. The dried stem doesn’t. The person in genuine play has it. The person performing okayness under fluorescent light probably doesn’t. You can feel its presence and its absence before you can name it, which means you already know what it is. You cannot fake its presence, which is the most important thing to know about it, and also why the convincing replicas the culture offers never quite land.

Real input vs. convincing replica. The culture you live in produces very convincing replicas of genuine nourishment: screens that feel like connection, processed food that fills without feeding, busyness that feels like aliveness, gathered people who never actually touch. The replicas activate something. They just don’t build anything. The difference between a screen-hour and an outdoor-hour isn’t a preference. It’s a tissue question.

Density threshold. The minimum number of bodies and recurring relationships a living system needs before certain functions become possible at all. Below it, things that would self-organize at community scale simply don’t happen, not because people aren’t trying, but because the structural conditions for them don’t exist yet. You can’t play hide and seek with two people. Some of what feels like personal failure is a density problem wearing a moral costume.

Cold-start problem. What the density threshold feels like from the inside on an ordinary morning. Not enough charge in the system to get something moving that would sustain itself easily once it had momentum. Five kids generate a game spontaneously. One kid needs an adult to initiate and hold it. The difference is not the children.

Desiccation. What happens to a living system cut off from genuine input long enough. Not a verdict. A process, and a reversible one. The question is always what conditions would let the flow resume, not what is wrong with the system for having run dry.

Gradient. The difference in charge between two points that makes flow possible. Water runs downhill because there’s a gradient. Heat moves from warm to cool because there’s a gradient. Conversation catches fire between two people because there’s a gradient. A system with no gradient has no flow, which means no aliveness, which is what Eastwind felt like with all its needs met and nothing particularly at stake. You need enough difference in the room for something to move. Too much sameness and the current stops. Too much distance and connection can’t bridge it. The sweet spot is enough difference to generate movement, enough shared ground to make the movement coherent.

The monitoring layer. The internal surveillance apparatus installed primarily between ages five and thirteen by a culture that needs you manageable more than it needs you alive: tracking how you look, whether you’re doing it right, whether you’re safe to be seen. Genuine play bypasses it. True poetry bypasses it. So does viriditas at sufficient intensity. The monitoring layer is not you. It is weather that moved in and stayed.

Exergy. Energy in a form that can actually do something. Not all energy is equal; a calorie of real food and a calorie of processed food are not the same input, and an hour of genuine connection and an hour of performed connection are not the same deposit. Exergy is the real thing, the charge that builds tissue and leaves something behind. Its opposite is anergy: energy spent that produces heat and nothing else, the tab you run trying to extract nourishment from something that was never going to give it.

Throughput. What moves through a living system and keeps it alive. Not a stock you accumulate but a flow you maintain. The question is never how much you have but whether it’s moving. A river isn’t made of water the way a rock is made of stone; it’s made of water moving, and the moment the moving stops, the river stops being a river. You are the same kind of thing.

The first time I saw Lulu I thought she was a toy. Not a stuffed animal, not a puppy, an animatronic, one of those absurdly expensive Japanese robots that blinks and tilts its head and makes you question your whole relationship with reality, because nothing alive could be that impossibly, unreasonably small, smaller than a hand, smaller than a balled-up sock, moving through the room like a cotton ball with opinions. I spent a solid ten minutes watching her before I accepted that she was a living creature with a heartbeat and a personality and a full commitment to being the most ridiculous thing in any room she entered.

Last night my friend sent me a one sentence message, “you should know that Lulu was attacked by a dog tonight and killed.” Enter cognitive dissonance. Wait.

How can such a being of relentless joy just, be gone? Then the details, of how her one teen daughter found the other teen daughter in the middle of the road, clutching Lulu’s body and screaming the way you scream when the scream is keeping you from going mad. Later, many hours later, learning that she still hadn’t let the body go, still hadn’t stopped wailing, I thot, here we are. At the center of it all and I fell heart first into my own grief, my husband found me weeping alone in the bath, and joined me in the weeping, and then later on the porch with my son. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that I was going to have to feel all of this, on my own end, and I couldn’t skip it. And if I didn’t my help to them later would be pressurized and compromised by all that unmetabolized stuff.

We wept because we knew this dog and we knew this family and we had been in rooms together where everybody’s guards were down, where we’d danced and cooked and played and argued and sat in circles where the real stuff comes out, where you know each other’s shadows through Gene Keys work and you know what someone looks like when they’re trying and what they look like when they’re hiding and what they look like when they’re just purely, stupidly delighted by a tiny dog walking across a table towards a forgotten pieces of bacon, thinking no one will notice her.

And because we knew all of that, the grief could travel. It could move through us. I could pick up a piece of this family’s suffering and hold it in my body. Grief as gizzard. This human body doing what bodies are designed to do when they are connected to other bodies through real tissue, which is to distribute the weight.

We’re going up to cook dinner for them and clean while they go into the forest. Other people are already there. Other people have already called. Not because anyone organized a Grief Response Team or sent a group text with a casserole sign-up sheet, but because when the relationships are real and digested and built on something thicker than proximity, suffering flows through the network the way water flows through a living system. It finds the low places. It gets held.

This is the thing I want to say as plainly as I can say it: this capacity is not a personality trait. It is not because we are especially kind people or especially spiritual people or especially anything. It is a developmental achievement. It is what happens on the other side of years of metabolizing your own life, your own undigested losses and terrors and the stuff you shoved in a closet because the morning was coming and someone needed a ride to school.

Most people I know are profoundly backed up. Not an insult, a noticing: something that should be moving through you has stopped moving. The grief you didn’t finish, the conversation you never had, the dream you swallowed whole without chewing because chewing it would mean admitting what you actually want, and wanting things has not gone well for you historically. That stuff doesn’t disappear. It compacts. And after enough years of compaction, your whole interior gets so dense and pressurized that you can’t take in anything new. You can’t metabolize someone else’s pain because you haven’t finished metabolizing your own. You can’t feel a little dog’s death all the way through because feeling things all the way through is a skill you haven’t been able to practice, because your system is full. Like when you can’t take new pictures because your phone is holding all the old ones.

So, let’s hold this within the context of wanting to belong, to be part of a meaningful community, someone says “you should join a community” or “we should build a village” and you try, or want to try. But are unclear about where to start, I want to say that this is where you start. This inquiry into how your gizzard is doing, what are the secret hidden things you’ve been avoiding, all the while weakening your capacity to keep showing up, step after step for the emergent reality, the true life before you in all of it’s glorious terrible hallelujahs? These inform your signal, they inform your aura, your level of being trustworthy, your own energetic truth. They are invisible and loud and super present in this conversation.

Think back to times you’ve tried to actually some kind of deliberate togetherness (village is just interconnected healthy relationships) and the longing to village up is absolutely real, and you show up and it lasts however long it takes for it to get hard, the way all living things get hard, and you can’t stay, not because you’re a bad person or a flake but because staying-with-hard-things is a digestive capacity. Your gizzard, the part of you that grinds the hard stuff down into something usable, hasn’t gotten the kind of regular use it needs to keep functioning.

The village isn’t just a structure you join, cohousing developments, and ecovillages in Portugal are containers. The thing is whether the people inside the container have digestive systems that work, whether they can eat what life serves, the terrible parts and the ridiculous parts and the parts where a cotton ball with opinions walks across a table toward a forgotten piece of bacon thinking no one will notice her. What happens on my porch, what’s happening right now as people show up with food and stay while a teenager holds a tiny body and wails, is a delicate kind of proof of a rehumaning capacity coming back online, gizzard moment by gizzard moment, every gathering, every circle and every awkward first dinner, slowly helping remember how to do this, together.

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This is the fourth piece in the Becoming Villageable series. We’ve been walking through what it actually costs to become a person a village can hold, from discernment that doesn’t crush you to the heart that stays open when everything in you wants to close. What comes next is the personal version, my own twenty-two years of learning to digest, and then the piece I’ve been building toward, what happens when the dream you couldn’t catch before starts flying toward you because you finally built the butterfly net to catch it.

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We’d had a weekly ritual of connection for a long time, so many shared projects, and then the rupture, and months of not really talking. There had been one attempt at repair in there, and it was performed at me rather than with me, which left me more horrified than the falling out had. So when the invitation came I felt no energy in the direction of it. I thought, maybe the friendship’s over. Maybe I should stay home. Then I thought, fine, I’ll do it fast and get it over with, which is its own kind of lie. And then a third thing rose up under both of those, which was: relationships really matter to me, and I am often really wrong when I’m stuck or mad at people, but in the self righteous heat, I have a hard time knowing that or working with it.

The drive to her place is long and you have to keep getting out to open gates, which gives a woman time to think. Somewhere between gates it arrived, and it didn’t come from my fear, it came from a higher floor: refresh the browser. I had been relating to a cached version of her, a stored page from months ago, and I had no idea what was actually loading now. Hey girl, where are we? We had all these dreams together and we just peached out on them and never said what they were.

Leave the beans snapping on her porch a minute and we’ll come back.

This series has spent a lot of time in what fractures us, the conditions that pulled village apart, and that work matters, but it’s not where I live. I live in an actual village life, one I built, and this piece is about what I had to become for it to exist. I can find four load-bearing pieces. None of it is a report from a finished mountain; the fourth piece is under construction in me right now, this month, in bean-snapping form, right on my growth edge.

Becoming safe to drink

There’s a line attributed to Hafez about pouring water through cheesecloth, again and again, until it becomes safe to drink. That’s this whole series in one household gesture, and it’s where the first piece takes its name.

Years ago I was coaching millionaires while my bank account held a couple hundred dollars total. I knew the formulas. I could say them beautifully. But I hadn’t metabolized them; my mind was secretarying, taking gorgeous dictation, and the seeds hadn’t cracked open in my own ground, they were someone else’s seeds and I was passing them off as harvest. True helping comes after the gizzard has done its work, when the fodder is known and processed into the body that’s speaking. There’s a feeling when material is truly yours: it pours, there’s an effortlessness, an oh yeah moving through you. And there’s a different feeling, a reaching, a performance of certainty. Becoming safe to drink began with learning to tell those two apart, and then, harder, learning to say out loud which one was happening.

Which mostly means learning to say “I don’t know. Let’s look at this together.”

It sounds small until you notice how rare it is, and how it isn’t about the big questions. My husband Scot, whom I adore, will hand me an answer with full gospel confidence, and I’ll say, I know that’s not true, and he’ll say, yeah, I don’t know, maybe it is, and then we check, and it is absolutely not. He just can’t say I don’t know, and almost nobody can, because the three words feel like a demotion. They’re the opposite. They’re the beginning of being drinkable, and they cost nothing except the little throne.

The test came at an earth skills gathering where a painful conflict broke open around some of the Native folks there and the people getting hurt. I was charged, triggered, protective, and folks kept coming to me: what would you do, what should we do? And what was true was that I was frozen and crazy in there. White guilt and trauma sat on top of the whole thing like a lid. So I said the unglamorous sentence: I don’t know. This is a growth edge for me. I can’t lead from here. I have to just live this one.

That’s half of safe to drink. The other half is what you do next, because “I don’t know” is only clean water if you don’t camp there. I went at my guilt. I felt it, excavated it, and I keep metabolizing it, because I doubt I will ever be white-guilt-free entirely. But there’s a distinction between carrying a charge and carrying a destabilizing charge, and I know which side of it I live on now: not crippled, not triggered blind, not unaware, actively dancing with what it evokes when it evokes. So that if I stood at that same festival today and someone asked, I could say: I’ve got some helpfulness now. Let’s think about this together. The move is simple to name and slow to live: when you find a place in you that needs growth, go get the fucking growth, sugar bear. No one else can do that for you and it will just compound the more you avoid. And if you don’t have the tools, say that too. I don’t know how to grieve, who can help?

Notice what dissolved in there: hierarchy. The helper on the hill, dispensing downward, is exactly the shape I had to stop making, because a lot of my helpfulness, I found out, was quietly unempowering people. And the deeper cut of the same lesson: safe to drink means enduring other people’s hard times without stealing them. When I was a professional helper I was always trying to clean every mess up, which was insane, because people’s challenge times belong to them, the crazy stretch, the grief that takes whatever shape it takes, the process that doesn’t look like anything you would have designed for them. Valuing someone includes letting them have their own weather. The help, when it comes, has no height in it.

Friction, approached sideways, with play

Back to the beans. We sat down on her mountain and started snapping and were fighting almost immediately. A misunderstanding about our kids surfaced, she was crying, and I felt the fork open in me, the old voice: see, fuck this, friendship isn’t safe. There’s a hurt part of me that is still growing, still coming alive, and that was its vote.

And then I saw the beauty of her face. In the middle of saying hard things she reached out for my hand.

I softened. I asked, can we check in? This feels really charged and I’m confused about what’s happening, can we name it? And we started using our good skills, and the friction of two humans not understanding each other began unpacking things that had been stuck in me for months. Here’s the one that mattered: I carry the shadow of vanity in my chart, the protective, lonely, crazy-making conviction of being better than other people. Snapped open, that same energy is its gift, discrimination, the ability to discern who is worth your deepest time, who you can build with, who has, as Brené Brown puts it, earned the right to hear your story. Shadow to gift, right there in a bowl of beans. We used the friction to deepen the collaboration instead of ending it, and I drove back down the mountain with a big heartfulness in my chest.

I still see my tendency to avoid friction and to build stories out of it that keep me stuck and insane. What has changed is the approach. On the drive up I had framed the visit as a chance to play into a new frequency, to let two nervous systems regulate near each other and find out who we each are underneath the stored stories. Play is the door friction opens through. And the cost is real: play is not comfortable or predictable, and the lazy part of me will always struggle with making space for it, though it’s getting easier. What play buys you in a conflict is the difference between launch energy and detonation, between this friction is clarifying me bigger and this friction is flattening me smaller.

The discernment cuts both ways. Sometimes people disappoint you, and it doesn’t make them a bad person, it makes them a person, and holding that without going Grinch-hearted is the practice. And sometimes people do things that are absolutely intolerable and they need to be walked out of your life. Both are true. A villageable person can tell which one is in front of her.

Handing out only what’s alive

There was a season in my coaching years I won’t be telling in detail. I think of it as my dead bird season: I was a cat proudly laying things on doorsteps that had no life in them, secondhand things, unmetabolized things, formulas that had never been through my own gizzard. What came out of it was a vow:

So I stopped coaching. I got a CPTSD therapist and went at the traumatic experiences I had never metabolized, whose echoes were beginning to rear their heads in my children’s lives, which is the alarm that finally cannot be slept through. I went through every one of Richard Rudd’s Gene Keys courses. I spent a year inside Byron Katie’s work and became one of her helpers. I worked with Dr. Joe Dispenza and Wim Hoff. Not a shopping spree of certificates, a debt being paid down, line by line, until what I handed people was mine, cracked open, grown in my own ground.

The practice that grew out of that vow is the one I run now, and it’s the strangest and best instrument I own: I press on my own fault lines on purpose. Show me where I’m not whole, I ask it. Show me where I haven’t grown yet. And when a challenge arrives, some part of me that used to brace now says oh, good. That’s what’s happening. That’s the fault line answering. The bean-snapping fight was exactly this: my fault line around trusting people, around collaborating with looseness and acceptance instead of expecting everyone to be fucking perfect all the time, got pressed, and instead of confirming the old story it grew me. This is what I mean by tending my vibration as consciously as I can. Not maintaining a mood. Auditing the inventory, so that all I hand out is what is truly alive.

What it built

Here is the plumbing of the village those four pieces buy. A lot of kids call me Nani, the name my grandkids gave me that spread, because children and their parents take refuge in my home and my heart. Most weeks somebody has me over for dinner or games and we end up talking late into the night, a free, out-of-the-box, no-height-in-it version of what I used to charge for, and I leave as nourished as anyone; I get to be something like the village pastor, and it satisfies in a way the paid version never did. I have one of the clearest marriages I’ve ever seen, where we talk about everything, enjoy devotion, and build projects side by side. I’m polyamorous in my bestie world: a priest bestie, a gene keys-ambassador bestie, and a soulful thug I’ve loved since I was fifteen, who held my hair while I puked and sat with me through my first pregnancy test, and who I still go dance and smoke cigarettes in the forest and howl with. My parents, who were, let’s say it with love, butts, are people I have a beautiful relationship with now, because I worked for years to heal what was between us rather than waiting for them to become different people. There’s a sangha growing here, communities where I have a standing home, adult field trips arising spontaneously, the Play Network humming underneath everything, people who come over and call to ask me to run them a bath so it’ll be warm when they arrive. All of this relational infrastructure building the beautiful soil for whatever version of intentional community is the next true step.

None of this arrived because I wanted it hard enough. It accumulated around a person who was becoming safe to drink, who stopped fleeing friction, who made space for play against her own laziness, and who kept auditing what she handed out until the dead birds stopped. That’s the path. The rest of this series walks its pieces one at a time, and I’ll be walking too, still pouring water through the cloth.

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Thanks for reading. It deeply nourishes my own process to hear how your own journey is going and what did or didn’t land.

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If you want a place to get working on some of these pieces I’ve got a free course up called Volunteer for your Life and it’s so fun and juicy to go thru.

I’m taking my time with this for so many reasons: I need it. My life asks me to understand and deepen my capacity to love and cocreate and live together and it’s so nuanced and intense, so, I’m giving my best quality of attention to because I think the world really really needs to know how to honestly share their lives, to learn to cocreate new awesome things together. So, onward to villaging!

So many relationships exist at a level where Real Life can’t get in. And when life tries to, those relationships either crumble or go stale instead of being deepened by the challenge. I think ONLY relationships that are deepened by shared challenge are genuine relationships. I don’t have language for what the other ones are. Hobbies? Distractions?

The cost of living inside a Distracting Hobby that we’ve agreed to call a relationship, but can’t take the weight of a real challenge, is that it draws down your net balance of Pure-Energy-You-Have-To-Give-To-Life instead of adding to it. The costs stack:

• You dull your innate relational machinery, like running your car on cheap gas too long, until you forget what it feels like to be fluid and trusting and whole inside a relationship.

• You develop all manner of wonky hacks to survive a connection that has no room for truth to naturally arise. You hide, you hedge, fawn and run, compensate, explain away, tolerate, and get overall mushy and far from your natural state.

• You have way less energy for whatever real relationships you do have. Maintaining a Distracting Hobby always empties you. Truthful relating always nourishes.

• You lose your ease and your skill at honest sharing. Instead of being like a kid in a playground saying “I’m tired, I don’t want to play anymore,” you spool out weird untrue excuses until you start to believe them, and then life gets really weird.

• Your nervous system goes nuts. It’s been signaling you for years that these patterns aren’t good for you, and you’ve been managing those signals away, wonkily classifying and reclassifying people all over the place, friend! foe! lover! good! bad! all rigidified into a forever classification but were actually a temporary emotional moment you likely formed an opinion around because just feeling or being with it was frankly too hard, or, too energetically taxing.

Recently I had the unexpected experience of feeling unusually happy about having a very mundane conversation in a field someone, actually it was closer to full delight because I realized I’d successfully reclassified her in my nervous system: being able to have an easy, no-charge conversation we both medium enjoyed signaled I’d acquired a new village skill.

The village skill is reclassification. It matters more than most skills I’ve learned in the past decade. I think it’s the key to cancel culture and the failure of families and communities everywhere. Track it: after her meltdown at a kids’ event revealed that her stability was performative, and that there’s a real gap between what she says and who she actually is, I had put her in “danger” category. In my twenties, when someone went into that category they usually just stayed there. But I was able to make distinctions and just back up the relationship to a more neutral, less close connection, remove her from danger, avoid at all cost and put her into some neutral, part of the village, don’t be too close right now, check in a little later category.

And then I learned another village skill, I owned my own pattern that allowed this relationship to get in so deep into my life. I’d been relating to that hopeful layer of her, the one she presented, and I chose to ignore the little orange flags because I wanted to believe she was where she said she was. I wanted her to be capable so much so that I lost my willingness to trust my own signals about where her actual capacity is.

I ignored the whole pile-up of signals telling me I was too close to someone who didn’t yet have an established relationship to truth.

The sweetness of the field moment was finding that I could hold all of that, and her, in her journey, with genuine tenderness. I’d backed us up out of an inappropriate closeness. Not hate or punish or even try to have a truthy conversation, I just moved a little away from the fire. We both felt the ease of the new distance.

This is a skill, and from the outside it looks like nothing happened, just two people chatting in a field, but from the inside it is evidence of something difficult the body learned to do: hold someone accurately, without the charge of the old story, without the performance of warmth that isn’t there, without the careful management of distance. Just a person. In a field. Glad to see her. File updated, culture not cancelled, the village has ground, unscorched, to build on.

For most of my life I repaired nothing with no one. I hit the road, Jack, built enemies and seethed while avoiding people who had done me wrong. The world gets real small real quick when you run from everyone you have beef with. Then, I swung real wide when I discovered repair and tried to repair everything with everyone. Also, weird. What I discovered in the middle is that there are three distinct layers of genuine repair. Most people do none of these, at all, ever, if you do even a smidge you’re rocking it.

Stage one is the pyramid base, and it’s all on you. Here you resolve the destabilizing charge in yourself via mirror and shadow and therapeutic, contemplative practices until you find and resolve the stuck pattern. That makes stage two genuinely possible because you won’t have them classified as a threat when you go to have a repair experience with them.

Most people don’t get a stage two because most people aren’t willing to do stage one, so they either avoid stage two or show up and do fake repair. Which is THE WORST.

And if the other person can’t meet you there, that’s information about where their capacity is right now, not forever and not a verdict on who they are and never a measure of their worth. Imagine if someone held you to your worst patterns from 10 years ago. We are innately expansive creatures, keep playing honestly and they might show up as a different, more capable version of themselves a little down the road.

Stage three follows either way. Sometimes you go one, two, three, the whole road, both people changed. Sometimes you only get one and three, and the repair stays yours alone. You take the gifts you found in your process and bring them, deliberately, into the world and replenish the substrate where we are all becoming villagable together. Either way, the dojo of that relationship brought something new and beautiful into the world.

When you get to stage two, you are actually both in the same room. I discovered the importance of both people’s nervous systems actually being in the same room during a argument with my kid, and I realized I was trying to have a logistical conversation and they were trying to have an emotional one.

The emotional one needed to happen first. That names something most repair attempts miss entirely. Not because the logistics weren’t real, they were, but because you cannot resolve the logistical floor while the emotional floor is unaddressed. The conversation keeps sliding. Both people feel unheard. The right words don’t land because they are landing in the wrong room. What actually happened is that the conversation took place two floors up from where the growth-inducing, village-strengthening challenge actually lives.

But let’s talk about what’s on the other side of this profound and systemic inability to connect heartfully.

You know that moment in the movies where someone starts reading or quoting some deep poetic passage and another person, usually a romantic interest, seamlessly chimes in and they say it together and make eyes at each other, cut to lotus blooming over a sunset.

That moment. That is what it feels like when two people are in the same room, the same frequency, the same floor at once. Resonance. Regulation. The fractal hum of actually being met.

WE ARE FUCKING STARVING FOR THIS. And it can’t be manufactured, especially not two floors up.

No one who knows me or reads me will be surprised by this next bit but let’s just all celebrate the shit out of it even if it’s not novel, because it’s so affirming. Want to know what actually, most effectively gets us there?

Play. Dude, playyyyyyyy

I’m not saying I told you so. Okay, I am absolutely saying I told you so. And by play I don’t mean the false awkward trying-to-play play, though those can be helpful and move people into possible chances for genuine play. I mean the mysterious and kind of involuntary kind, the laugh that lands in the body before the mind can vote on it, the absurdity that hits two people at the same instant and files each of them safe before anyone has decided to trust anyone. It works because it reaches the floor the conversation couldn’t.

This is why relationships right themselves in moments of shared play without conscious effort. Nobody decided to repair anything. The body just updated the file.

The play. The involuntary laugh. The moment someone chimes in on the poem you’re reciting and says it with you. That’s a really important door to villaging.

Douglas Adams figured out flying in a similar way: The knack, he said, is to throw yourself at the ground and, somehow miss. There are some pieces of connection that are held behind the Great Mystery wall, like karma, ancestral patterns, blind spots, so much and we can work all the repair strategies in the world and still end up surprised, disregulated, confused, or, blissfully dancing side by side with someone you thought you never would.

None of this is new. Johan Huizinga wrote the book on it in 1938, Homo Ludens

his claim was not that humans invented play but that play invented us, that it is older than culture itself

that the animals were already at it long before there was anybody around to give it a name, and that law and ritual and poetry and even war begin their lives as forms of play before they harden into the serious things we mistake for the foundation. Play is the foundation. And Peter Gray, reading across the whole ethnographic record of the hunter-gatherer bands, found the thing that makes this essay's argument hold: those fiercely equal societies stayed equal on purpose, and the tool they used to keep anyone from ruling anyone was play.

Playfulness ran straight through their governing and their sharing and their gods and their work, not as a break from the real thing but as the real thing, because the math underneath is simple and merciless.

Hierarchy needs you compelled. Play needs you willing. The two cannot run in the same body at the same time, which means a playing people is a nearly un-dominatable people, and every system since that has needed obedient, scheduled, non-playing adults has known this in its bones and gone after play first.

We filed the most powerful anti-domination technology our species ever found under a luxury or something slightly pervy. I’m not entirely sure how play helps the village reunite but we’re sure experimenting our hooties off, with it as a loadbearing technology for building islands of coherence that have strong enough relational infrastructure to grow from the challenges together. We just launched season two of The Play Network! We’ve got three months of free programming, gatherings, irl and online to help build the substrate, come join us where you need more joy or insights or funnnn.

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These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included. If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating. Follow it where it wants to go

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Sources

• Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything (1982) — the flying passage, the knack of throwing yourself at the ground and missing.

• Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938) — play as older than culture, the foundation the serious things harden out of.

• Peter Gray, “Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence,” American Journal of Play 1, no. 4 (2009): 476–522 — play as the mechanism that kept hunter-gatherer bands egalitarian and un-dominated

A confession at the top: lately I have a little bit wanted to murder.

There is a character called Murderbot, a security unit that quietly hacked the part of itself that let other people run it, it’s governor module, and now mostly wants to be left the hell alone with its shows, and is bone-tired of humans and their feelings, and keeps, in direct violation of its own stated preferences, saving them. Diving back into the goo. Having, inside the very rescues it claims to resent, the realest hours of its whole strange life.

Twenty-five years of building villages, living in them, starting them, mopping their floors and holding their heart circles and dumpster-diving their dinners, and somewhere in there I hacked my own governor module, did the long unglamorous inner work, got sovereign enough to actually see what is in a room. And what I see, a lot of days, is people performing closeness with the lights off behind their eyes. Beautiful, super overloaded, super traumatized, super worthy humans who simply cannot hold the complexity of another’s real-time truth when it interrupts a shite pattern they’re running on.

The other day I told a friend: I think there’s complexity here, the way you handled this villainized and separated us, can we talk about it? And ten hours later I am hiding with a migraine while three, fake-smiling people tell me they like my hair and aren’t mad at me, and I shouldn’t be so insecure and now I have to pretend that performed repair is something more than junkfood.

I sag back into a migraine nap, vigorously regretting telling truth into a system that has no idea what to do with truth, or as Brene Brown says, telling my truth to people who haven’t yet earned the right to hear it yet. Sometimes being a human is hard.

So yes. Murderbot.

And on the other side, earlier this week I danced for hours in a fluorescent frenzy with fifteen humans inside the Gift of the fifteenth gene key, the one that runs from the Shadow of dullness up to a kind of magnetism that pulls the whole spectrum of life toward you, and I was so far from murdering anyone that I forgot I had a body separate from theirs.

Both of those are true in the same week, in the same woman, and I am not going to make you pick which one is the real me, because the actual keel of what follows is that I am not picking either. Diversity and complexity are the stuff of life, the mad primordial bubbling and brewing, and our conditioning has stripped us of the capacity to enjoy that steamy mess. We’re taking back the streets, the messy messy streets where being human actually happens.

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So let’s be precise, because the lazy version of this betrays life itself. I am not fried on humans. My grandchildren do not exhaust me. My kids, my husband, the handful of friends who arrive at the line already knowing it, the ones with whom contact completes the circuit instead of hitting a wall, those people are oxygen. What I am fried on is a specific labor: the work of reaching toward people whose capacity to be here, to receive, to hold complexity, is being systematically crushed by the world they are drowning in, and who, in the crush, file me under threat for handing them something true.

The tiredness is aimed at the machine that does the crushing

It is not aimed at the crushed. And I am still here, fully, for the work of building a bridge out of that particular psychosis and back into wholeness, because that bridge is the thing I cannot not build. And I cannot build it alone. I need all us tired bratty slightly squished but still kicking humans to build this together.

The refusal to let the fatigue harden into a verdict is the first capacity. Let’s call it vibe one.

Today’s new word is reclassification

I learned it building the heart of the Play Network, when I went looking at where people had filed the load-bearing parts of a life and found almost all of it in the wrong baskets.

Self-care, shoved in the drawer marked waste-of-time, or weakness, or the thing you get to once everything important is done, when self-care is closer to what oil and gas and the key are to a car. Therapy, filed under something-is-broken-in-you, locked inside a story of private individual repair, separated from the system that made the wound, so a person does the work alone and walks back into the unchanged room and the work slides right off.

So I re-filed them. Self-care out of the leftover-time drawer and under keel. Inner work out of the broken-person drawer and into the drawer marked this is how we green together, in rhythm with the actual heartbeat of life. And play, which got filed under leisure, children and recess, and god help us somewhere down near the perv drawer, as though the most ferocious technology we have for rebuilding a wrecked nervous system were a frivolity to outgrow. Those drawers have had enough time with play. We are refiling it under infrastructure, under medicine, under load-bearing soul nutrition, under the magical and mysterious Thing that might actually carry us through the narrows ahead.

Reclassification babes. Your nervous system is gonna gobble this one up.

We get to take what got filed incorrectly, by fear or haste or by a culture that turns a profit on your confusion, and put it back where it belongs.

The gears, because I owe you a few words

I used some words up there I have not paid for. Capacity. Threat basket. I tossed them at you in the middle of a migraine story as though you and I had been in the same room for twenty-five years, and we have not, and I would rather earn them than have you nod along to a vocabulary you did not get to build with me.

This is intimacy, sharing a reality, caring enough to slow down and understand what we mean when we use a word, words open doors to worlds.

This particular thread, this unraveling of why humans have struggled so hard to know and love and find and be good to each other, is so close to my heart and so comprehensively load-bearing in my life that I do not really have adequate words for the catharsis these understandings have brought me. I am hoping they become love windows for you too. So here is the staircase.

The first stair is a spoon

Christine Miserandino built spoon theory at a diner, explaining to a friend what it is to live with lupus, by counting out actual spoons, a finite number for the day, each task costing you one, and when they are gone they are gone. The chronically ill and the autistic have carried it ever since, because it does what most of our talk about being tired refuses to do: it makes the count momentary, and it strips the verdict out entirely. You do not have low capacity as some fixed fact about your soul. You have three spoons left this afternoon, that is all, and it is a felt thing, not a thought, and it moves hour to hour, and the spoons get spent holding grief and biting your tongue and bracing through a hard conversation exactly as much as by hauling boxes. Emotional weight is real weight. Most people have never once been told that, and have spent their whole lives ashamed of running out.

The next stair is capacity

and it has two heights: your count in the moment, which is your spoons today, and underneath it there is your baseline, the level your bad days bottom out at. In my twenties I knew nothing about trauma patterns stacking up, about conditioning, about shadow, nothing, so I just let it all fester until my baseline bottomed out and I became something like a car with its alarm cranked to max sensitivity, every little thing setting me off, the addictions just a way to manage a chronically low capacity for life itself. The slow climb back up was not a mood. Every faultline I finally turned and faced instead of managing around, every old terror I let myself feel all the way through to the other side, raised the baseline a notch, until the bad days started bottoming out higher than they used to. That is what the inner work is actually for. Not to feel good on a Sunday but to raise high the roofbeams carpenter.

What follows are the patterns that break community

And they all have to do with spoons and capacity. None of these are people. These patterns are weather, and it moves through all of us. The reason to learn the names is plain and a little bit holy: when you can see the gears turning, the cold stops being a verdict on you and becomes a thing happening in the room, and that one move, taking it less personally without taking it one ounce less seriously, is most of what growing the hell up even is.

One last lens: These are not fixed personalities, they are patterns we drift into, that have, at various times in our lives, kept us company and been helpful. That you’re reading this now might mean you’re ready to exist clearer and less armored. At the very least they might provide a new kind of thinking for your journey to becoming village-able.

At the bottom of each pattern is a nod towards its healthy expression (across the river..) and that full post comes at the end of this series. I’m still writing it and would love suggestions for patterns you’ve experienced that help people cohere and bloom together well and sustainably.

THE CLOSED HAND PATTERN

Somewhere back in the day, receiving, itself, got filed under dangerous, because enough of the offers came with a hook in the lining, an agenda stitched in, a cost hidden in the wrapping, or the help was three year old helping you to make cake clumsy that it cost more than the lack would have, until a young nervous system drew the only conclusion on the menu and welded the intake valve shut. She went give-only and called it independence, and the culture pinned a medal on it, called her selfless, called her strong, and never once noticed she had stopped breathing in.

A body that only exhales does not get more free. It suffocates, slowly.

What it does to a village is quiet, because nothing dramatic ever happens, there is just no way to give to her, and a road that runs only one way is not a relationship but a service, and people can run a charity for a long while before they drift off tired and obscurely guilty, unable to even name what was wrong, because she was so good to them the whole time. Underneath the competence she stays bitter about being uncared for, in a sterility she keeps spotless.

Here is the part I will not let collapse into a verdict, because that collapse is the very engine of cancel culture: none of this makes her unlovable, and none of it makes real relationship impossible. It makes one particular relationship unavailable, the full-bestie wide-open peer kind, the one that needs the other person to tend their own interior and stay honest about their actual count so they are not entering false data into the court record.

Everything softer than that is still here, the love and the respect and the delight, as long as you narrow the permissions and keep them live, re-reading them often. To stay tender and in relationship with someone who has NEVER ONCE felt non-agenda’d giving is the work of building village, because maybe you get to be the first person from whom they actually let themselves learn to breathe in with and receive something, maybe not, but you figuring out how not to cancel them because they are frightened out of their wits, is a difficult joy, the same one you would know from loving a hungry exhausted toddler straight through the snot-screaming demand for a baby cheetah and cake.

Across the river, joyful receiving in rhythm with being a willing piece of life, reclassifying breathing in a safe

THE SURVIVAL NARCISSIST PATTERN

This is the load-bearing one, the central one, the pattern most of the others turn out to be a flavor of, and it has almost nothing to do with the calculated cruelty the clinical word implies. Picture instead a system running so permanently hot, so far past forty tabs open on the laptop, that there are no spoons left over to hold anyone as fully real. Everyone who walks up gets sorted, fast, into the only three baskets a nervous system in pure survival can still process: resource, mirror, or threat. Not chosen. Triaged.

You feel it most when you reach for them. You go in for actual contact and your hand closes on the management layer instead, the smooth hollow place where a person should be, the warmth that is real and also somehow not for you, and the reaching-and-hitting, over and over, is the whole grief of loving someone in this state. The shark eyes are not performed. The warmth was real a breath before they appeared. The system simply ran out of room to keep you complicated, and flattened you down to something it could survive.

What it costs the room is everyone slowly learning to bring the manageable version of themselves, because the full version keeps not fitting in the basket. What it costs the one running it is lonelier still, a whole world emptied of actual others and restocked with resources and mirrors and threats, which is to say no company at all. This is not a villain. This is a person at the thermal edge with nothing left in the tank, and the cruelty everyone feels is the cruelty of a machine, not a heart. Underneath it, more often than not, you will find the Closed Hand.

Across the river: the capacity to keep a person whole even when your own count is running low.

THE TENDER WARDEN

Being needed is not optional. This pattern snuck up on me slowly. I would watch a woman in my women’s circle bored and checked out until someone fell apart and she’d zoom in and hold them, coming fully alive. When the crisis passed, so did the connection and she went back to her busyness.

This particular flavor of unavailability comes through the front door of devotion, which is exactly what makes it so hard to name, because the care is completely real and the care is also a leash. To be loved in her orbit you have to stay a little bit helped, a little bit needing, since your need is the thing that proves the love is landing, and further gives her proof of her own value. If you get well, get whole, and stop needing, you’ll likely watch the warmth lose its organizing principle and she’ll go looking, almost against her own will, for someone else to rescue.

The helped-slot is the price of admission to the warmth, and most people pay it without ever clocking that they have, performing a little more helplessness than they feel because that is the shape the love arrives in. A village built around a Tender Warden fills, quietly, with people kept a size smaller than they actually are, and everyone agrees to call the smallness family.

What it costs is two-sided, and neither side can quite see it. The helped stay helped, their own capacity never built because it was never once allowed to be, their floor never rising because someone was always already there with the fix. And the Warden never gets met as an equal, only ever as the needed one, which is its own starvation in the costume of fullness, a person flattened down to her usefulness by her own hand. She would be horrified to hear the love called control, it’s just love that needs a chance to grow up a little bit to where she can stand beside a person while they grow and support that growth.

Across the river: the capacity to love someone all the way into not needing you.

THE WEATHERVANE

Ally at noon, threat by three, and no transition you could point to afterward if your life depended on it.

This one makes me pause and take many breaths. I have been likely more experimental than most people in the world with relationships and friendships. I have had many besties and lovers, lived in and out of various communities and learned so much from that play. The one piece that’s finally coming home for me now is what it feels like to say a truth the other person cannot physically, biologically capacitate hearing, and so instead of taking it in they polarize and put yuo in threat basket. Shark eyes, cold formality or even worsed, performed warmth and the horor show of having to pretend there’s any fire.

Here is the mechanism underneath the whiplash: under enough load the complicated, contradictory, many-sided story of you gets too heavy for the system to carry, so it collapses, fast, into one legible shape, and the shape is almost always villain, because villain is the most manageable shape there is, the one that asks for no further holding. We are prone to dualistic thinking. Right and wrong, black and white.

The cruel part, the part that makes it so disorienting from the receiving end, is that she meant the prior, pre-triggered warmth, as well . Nothing was faked. There was no long con. The floor simply dropped and took all her current capacity for nuance and complexity down with it, and the warm true thing from this morning is now unreachable to her, filed somewhere she cannot get to from inside the freeze.

Then the story travels, because a collapsed story needs company to feel solid, and others get recruited into a narrative that makes no sense at all from outside the weather that made it. What it costs the village is trust in the ground itself. To stand near a Weathervane is to never quite know who you will be in her eyes when you walk through the door, and that not-knowing is its own slow weather, the kind that teaches everyone around her to brace before they enter a room.

Across the river: the capacity to keep someone whole through your own bad weather.

ZERO-SUM PATTERN

Frank’s dog, Basil will only allow so much fun and that’s it, you get a barking-to. There’s only so much fun she’ll abide. Too much is too much.

This pattern works on displacement: your win lands as my loss, your brightness as a dimming of mine, your flourishing as a subtraction from whatever was left for me. The fixed pie, and the body does the math before the mind can dress it up: So the system cannot afford to let the people around it get too lit, and it will dim them, gently, with a qualifier, a comparison, a small cool silence dropped exactly where the celebration should have been. I have known a lot of these people and it’s never all that fun. It reminds me of the movie Cooler, where the dude had such drag energy people would hire him to sit at a table in a casino to cool down the human magic when people would get on a winning streak.

This one is quieter than the others, more motor than presence, the thing humming underneath the Tender Warden who cannot bear to be outgrown and the system that cannot let another person shine. It runs on the oldest scarcity there is, the bone-deep conviction that there is not enough, of love, of room, of light, to go around.

And it is the exact place a village lives or dies, because the whole wager of shared joy is that it compounds, that one person’s flourishing lands in the next as fuel rather than as threat, building instead of subtracting. Zero-sum is where the compounding stops dead. A village full of it competes itself to death, slowly, while smiling, everyone quietly rooting against the very people they came together to be held by.

Across the river: Compersion.

THE GHOST PATTERN

You know the person everyone pity-invites to things but quietly dreads actually talking to because the same complaint pattern arrives before they open the car door. Their whole way o of being alive revolves around a primary wound pattern, a wound arrived long before the village did and will not be healed by anything the village has to offer (grief as gizzard, we can learn tools and be supported but we’re the only ones who can turn in and meet the thing where it is needing to be met), but the village keeps being asked to try, and so the care economy starts running one direction only, a current that flows toward the wound and never once circles back, toward a complaint that circles and circles and never resolves. Because resolving it would dissolve the only self there is left to stand on.

And the actual tell this pattern is afoot, is the loop. Real pain moves, works itself through, changes shape across a season and becomes something more. This does not move. It returns, intact, to the same place, again and again, because the returning is the point, and the wound has quietly become the whole house.

If you challenge the story, even gently, even with love, you become the next villain in it, because the story cannot survive a witness who does not believe it. What it costs the village is the slow exhaustion of everyone doing the feeding, a hunger that was never going to be fed at this particular table no matter how much gets set down on it. And this is not laziness, and it is not cruelty. This is someone for whom the wound became the only known route to being loved, which is its own kind of grief, a whole person collapsed into a single ache and learning to call the ache identity.

Across the river: the capacity to bring your wound to the table without making it the table.

THE GROUP THINK PATTERN

One of the real hot bummers of being raised in dominator culture is having one’s capacity to hold complexity, paradox and change itself, bleached to sterile cartoon husk versions of themselves. This pattern shows up in how we approach everything, trying to sand off the real edges, trying to over simplify, cutting off people who are meandering in their talking, get to the point.

The vast majority of life in an ocean is found in its edges, not the big middle. The edges are where we are becoming. You don’t become in a straight line. We’ve got to play our way to the new, experiment, throw some spaghetti at the wall. This pattern is terrified of edges. You’ll see it begin as a kind of relief of not having to explain yourself from scratch, of walking into a room where the basics were already agreed and you could finally set the weight down of always having to explain everything. Finally! they get me! But life keeps becoming (it’s literally it’s whole thing.

And then, somewhere nobody can quite locate afterward, the relief door of shared values became a wall. The question stopped being what do we think about this and quietly became are you still one of us, and drift got filed as betrayal, and the range of allowable positions narrowed a notch each season until the room was very pure and very small and very lonely.

This is reclassification at the scale of belonging. It is not malice, and it almost never feels like control from the inside. It is a nervous system that found its one reliable source of safety in agreement and cannot bear the load of genuine difference, so it keeps trimming the difference away, branch by branch, and calls the trimming integrity. What it costs is everything that only grows in the unpruned places, the surprise, the correction, the strange new thing nobody had agreed to yet. A village trimmed all the way to purity is safe the way a museum is safe. Nothing alive is happening in it.

Across the river: the capacity to stay in the room with someone who has drifted.

THE VISIONARY PATTERN

This one is hardest for me to name and I wince as I type. This pattern is beautiful because it lives in gifted people who are taking a real swing at making something better. I know it from the inside, which is the only reason I get to write it at all. The vision is real. That is not the problem. The problem is that the vision and the person were never once separated, so the whole enterprise runs on a single nervous system’s weather, lit and electric when she is lit, gone quiet and strange and stalled when she hits a hard season, and never, not once, actually handed over to anyone else.

Everyone orbits. The gravity is real and mostly kind and people love being inside it. But nobody around her quite grows their own agency, because the Visionary was always already there with the answer before the question had finished forming, and a person who never has to find the answer never builds the muscle that finds it.

So the thing she builds has a single point of failure, and the point is her. When she leaves, or burns out, or grieves, or simply changes her mind about who she wants to be, the whole structure discovers it does not know how to stand without her at the center, and it goes down with her, taking everyone’s orbiting years down with it. The bottleneck was never a logistics problem to be solved with a better system. It was a personality. Which is the humbling thing to write, because the fix is not a cleaner org chart. The fix is the founder doing the slow inner work of becoming able to not be needed, which is the very same work, exactly, that the Tender Warden is busy avoiding.

Across the river: the capacity to build a thing that can run without you.

This is a good pausing place, because its the real ground beneath my particular feet, developing the real world model of The Play Network and learning to unbottleneck myself, learning to open my own closed hands, learning to watch for the flashes of survival narcissism when the news scares the bejesus out of me.

Where do these patterns land for you?

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One day I’m packing a little backpack to fly to Puerto Rico and buy land on an island with someone I’d decided was going to go the long haul with me. The next day the deal crumples (no WATER) and I’m trying to figure out what the actual fuckery just happened.

Backpack still on the floor, legal contract still (barely) unsigned. And me, standing in the specific bewilderment of someone who had wanted the village so badly that she’d skipped right over the part where you find out if the other person is actually village-capable.

Oh that this were the first time I’d done this! In relationships, in community attempts, in the gap between the life I could feel was possible and the actual humans available to build it with.

After a while I just started taking the failures personally — bad judgment, too much hope, some broken discernment mechanism that kept recruiting the wrong people. It took thirty years of living in and starting intentional communities to understand that it isn’t personal. It’s ecological and systemic and once you see it, the doors start to open to real possibility.

Here is what I mean.

When a nervous system is running on chronic stress and scarcity — which is most nervous systems right now, for reasons that are structural not individual — the capacity to hold another person as genuinely complex, trustworthy, and worth the full cost of real closeness just, goes offline. Not because the person is selfish or broken. Because that capacity is contingent on having enough internal safety to spare. The result is what Gregory Bateson called schismogenesis — the pattern that breaks relationship. The word itself feels like something that breaks something.

In its most common form: I’m not giving fully because I don’t know if you’ll give fully, and you’re not giving fully because you don’t know if I will, and pretty soon there’s nothing there. This is a design innate to being alive, an ecological pattern. And it runs through every community attempt I have ever watched fall apart, including the ones I built.

Of all the ones I’ve built, Castlehouse was magic, sometimes almost otherworldly so. With a swing over the stairs someone pumped away, grinning while others danced, some cooked or cleaned, all in the same field. We had supper club schedules and dumpster diving rotations and we helped with each other’s kids and took in people who had nowhere else to go. We built like master builders in the Lego Movie — joyful, resourceful, genuinely alive together.

The felt sense of what it was to live and wake each day inside that much communal beauty still haunts me and drives me to figure out how it ended with a power dynamic move that left children homeless in winter, not because the dream was wrong.

Because the container couldn’t hold the weight of real stress without an inner layer to process it through. Bonded by shared longing, poverty and ideology — which are real bonds, warm and genuine, right up until something hard enough arrives to show you what’s underneath. What was underneath was codependence. And codependence fractures under stress rather than cohering.

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The wanting is real. The longing for genuine village life, for people who actually know you, for the kind of belonging that doesn’t require you to perform or manage or shrink — that longing is accurate. It is pointing at something real that human beings are genuinely designed for and are genuinely being starved of in the current configuration of the world.

But the longing is not the same as the capacity. And a community built on shared longing, without building the actual capacity for village life alongside it, is a gorgeous thing that shatters under pressure.

The question the rest of this series tries to answer is: what actually builds the capacity? Not as inspiration. As architecture.

The next three pieces arrive in quick succession because the time for villaging is now!

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y’all did such a VERY EXCELLENT JOB COMMENTING last time. Where are you your own journey to village? What does the vision mean for you?

I wrote the holy shit out of this piece. It’s REALLY good and it ties a lot of stuff together and it has a FREE and astonishingly deep and effective lab I built for recovering friendship as a flowway so will you you comment something at the end? It’s so nice to hear from y’all and I’m curious how Phoenix energy is landing in your world. What are you noticing? Enjoy!

In birth there’s this funny, whackadoodle thing that happens if you think about what you’re doing really at all, you freak your body out with your interpretation and it tries to clamp down and it makes the thing you’re doing, getting a babe out of you, super so much harder.

That thigh clench is going on everywhere. None of us have been inside a civilizational transition, one not coming as a single event, but a texture, a low hum, something that used to be so stinking cohesive, isn’t holding. Playbook long gone in the mirror, and only dinosaurs chasing you to replace it.

Fun fact, on February 15, 2027, a background frequency that has organized collective life for roughly four hundred years finishes its cycle … ciao Cross of Planning!

It’s not collapsing so much as composting, loudly, across every institution at once (open literally any news source) you can feel that Everything Planned out for Baby humans energy draining out of the scene. The incarnation cross that follows carries an entirely different signature, and having a larger energetic overview on this shift is incredibly helpful, like hearing shrieks in a house and someone telling you, they’re having a tickle party v. whom is murdering whom?

An incarnation cross names the energy imprinted on you at birth by the neutrino field, the ceaseless rain of near-massless particles that streams from the sun and the stars and passes through your body by the trillions every second, each one carrying information about where it came from, planets n’ stars n’ stuff. What Human Design lays on top of what physics offers is the reading that the sky you were born under leaves its signature in you; the one quality of light you grew under, pressed now into the frequency you are here to transmit. It has four gates and those gates together determine your core mission this lifetime.

The same precession that imprints a single chart at birth moves far more slowly across the collective, so that one configuration sits in the background sky for roughly four centuries before the wheel turns to the next, which is why a cross can set the weather of an entire civilization and not just a life.

The incoming frequency (on 2/15/27) belongs to my incarnation cross! Happy birthday world. So my life has been a long preview of a weather the world is only now arriving at - hello Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix! These next four stories track that incoming weather, via the four gates of this specific cross.

Bringing this all together I feel like a giddy witch gathering rituals for my/our/the world’s coming out ball.

The P’interest board vibe is: heart-centered precision cracks true liberation witha pinch of: unclench your thighs y’all - this birth train has already left the station.

I. Panama, 2023 / Gate 20: Presence

My husband and I decided to honeymoon in Panama. Blame it on the adventurous chemistry, it just felt right. Despite the fact that the country was in the middle of one of its largest popular uprisings in decades, a nationwide strike and riot over a copper mining contract, roads blocked, supply chains severed, the whole social fabric pulled taut in a way that had been entirely invisible in the booking window.

We land, we sweat, we pay a small house’s worth of money for a car. We finally get onto a massive highway and come to a dead stop, cars shut off. People getting out to walk or eat. It’s giving parking lot in zombie apocalypse. My husband, not a fearful man, was beginning to come apart at the seams as the lanes around us filled in the way water fills a container, steady, no room for negotiation.

Something came over me, like a switch thrown, from somewhere I do not have conscious or continuous access to. I said to Q:

I am going to take my shirt off and drive. Get out.

He got out. I got in. Calmly, with Complete clarity, I hauled ass backwards down the emergency lane at eighty miles an hour, and flew, wrong way down an exit ramp and out. As I passed the bottom of that ramp I watched in the rear view mirror several cars drive across it and begin piling over one another to seal the last way off the highway. We had come through a closing door, and I had been entirely elsewhere while it happened. I was not brave and I was not in charge. I was simply there, with no self in the way to slow anything down.

That’s vibe one.

This gate moves from Superficiality (distracted and lost watching the Matrix/fake show, tuned to the false frequency, no real power) to Gift of Self Assurance (being connected to the real emerging quality of life and instantly lit and powered by it, not confidence, something simpler) to the highest expression, Presence.

II. The Yurt / Gate 34: Power

Once, someone I love, urgently needed a home. I gathered up that urgency and held the possibility of something unexpected coming in, the next day: a large yurt appeared in my inbox, free, ONLY if we could get it off the mountain it sat on within twenty-four hours. Heated floors, complex electrical, very far up a very rural road. While a discussion of impossibilities grew more intellectual and more hopeless, the way conversations do when intellect is trying to do something it never can, something very ancient and primal woke up in my body. I literally leapt up (did not think about doing so, it just ... happened) and said: let’s grab the tools and just do it.

And so we did.

Four women who had never touched a yurt, or the electrical system inside one, or half the other systems we would have to take apart and carry down then reassemble on the other side. We figured it out as we went. We sang the whole time.

I am writing this to you from that yurt. The power in Gate 34 is not force, and it is not willpower grinding against resistance. Karen Curry Parker calls this gate the Sovereign, and the word is exact, because the sovereign does not hoard power, the sovereign harnesses it for the good of the whole, and the power is only ever great when its use serves the common good. Nothing in that yurt moved for me. It moved through me, for the kid who needed a home, for the four women singing, for the ceremonies the space did not yet know it would one day hold. That is the whole signature of the gate: power arriving the moment you stop:

1. being imprisoned by your individualism so densely you cannot hear the call of Good For All,

2. deliberating via mind and let the body wisdom make the wormhole connections the mind cannot and never will see. Because, as my son used to say, they’re “inzizzable.”

That’s Vibe two.

34 moves from shadow of force (the outer is proving to you that you’re not aligned and you double down and use power against the grain of Flow of Divine Flow) to Gift of Strength (having the tensility and power to allow the river to flood the beds of you and you hold) to Siddhi of Majesty (think olympian, human form filled up with unstoppable power lit by divine good for all yumminess. Talk about glow up!)

III. The Choir / Gate 55: Freedom

I had volunteered to take tickets for a radical and inclusive local choir concert. Standing at the folding table, I learned a triggering fact regarding power structure of choir - something in me went hot and certain. The wrongness of it seemed plain to me and plain to no one else in the building, and I felt the particular loneliness of seeing a thing the whole room is not seeing, the old reflex rising to either blame the arrangement out loud or stew in silent complaint about it, the urge to take my coat and go, the sense of having been made a fool of and a victim of by something I had walked into in good faith.

The love I had for my kid in choir gave me a pause from that victim perspective. I did not leave, and getting free of the grip was not a single clean motion. It was a struggle. I stood there and worked at it, not to talk myself out of what I was seeing and not to pretend the objection away, but to set the whole thing down inside a larger frame, to recognize the heat as one more small piece of the old empire composting, the extractive bargain playing out its endgame at a folding table, and to refuse to let my own judgment, accurate or not, be the thing that made a victim of me in a room I had chosen to stand in. The heat did not vanish. It stopped being a sentence I was required to serve, and in the gap that opened where the verdict had been, I went quiet enough to be permeable to whatever came next.

After I’d admitted everyone to the giant cathedral I found myself alone in the lobby, waiting for stragglers, enjoying a moment of quiet. A pause. A nothingingness, when suddenly, the ENTIRE choir poured into the room, seemingly all at once, a teleportated cacophony of color: salmon and ochre, a pale ocean blue like the light just before a storm, and a soft meandering autumnal green.

Jabbery, high-vibrating and joy-quaking the way people are when they are about to make something beautiful together and are already entering the space of that beauty like the first touch of a toe on an ocean wave.

Then they opened their collective mouths and out poured a pure human thunder-rainbow.

The kind of complete immersion that has no room for a me or a them, like at a physics level, what maintaining individual consciousness takes was too bulky for this now. Only the unfettered splendor of being could fit. And us dissolved into something happening through us rather than by us.

Then, two by two, still singing at full volume, they passed out of the lobby taking their voices with them into the cathedral. The sound decreasing, Noah’s arkingly, in pairs, until there were only two singers, and then none. Just a suddenly reappearing me.

Gate 55 is the mutation gate, and it lives deep in the emotional body, in the solar plexus, which is why it runs so hot. Its Shadow is Victimisation, the conviction that your emotional state is caused from outside you, that the feeling has been done to you, and it speaks in two voices, the reactive one that blames and the repressive one that complains, both of them certain the cause is out there. Its Gift is Freedom and its Siddhi is Freedom again, the same word twice, because this gate is mid-mutation and what opens here does not become some other thing as it deepens, it becomes more thoroughly itself. Rudd says: “True freedom is not an effect.”

Freedom doesn’t rise out of circumstances rearranging to suit you, or the outer changing at all. It’s also not the satisfaction of being proven right, it’s the spaciousness that arrives when you stop being ruled by outer conditions or verdicts.

That spaciousness that I had to find for myself, fighting thru the demons of Making-Myself-A-Lonely-Victim, and having to reacquaint myself with the freedom to exist, clearly and unfetteredly while shit ain’t great, while stuff is wrong and hard, and to hold it without being collapsed by it, actually created the energetic availability to be undone, love-zapped-gone via thunder-rainbow.

I was not crushed by what came through. I was clarified by it.

That’s vibe three.

IV. The Garden / Gate 59: Transparency

One early morning, my husband was asking me about the details of a day we had planned, and I couldn’t hear him. I saw his mouth moving, but there was a static around the words, a low roar I have learned to recognize the way you learn the smell that means something is burning in another room. It is the sound of not being anchored in anything current. It is the sound of an old narrative running underneath me, some kool-aid I drank somewhere back down the road because I believed a good person would, a good wife would, and I did not stop to taste it before I swallowed it. And out of that static came the old reflex, fast and almost reasonable: could I attack him, could I cut through this roar by making it his, his question, his timing, his fault that I have gone deaf to my own life.

I did not do that. What I said was, I’m going to go to the garden for a minute.

I went and pulled weeds and did not think. There is a particular relief in handing the hands something true to do while the mind is too loud to be trusted. After a few minutes, dirt under my nails and sun on the back of my neck, the thing underneath finally surfaced: the day was not my day. I had agreed to it months ago, in a busy checked-out state, the way you sign something in a hurry without reading it, and now that it had actually arrived it made no sense to me at all, and I had been struggling to admit even that much to myself. I felt stupid for not catching it sooner. Underneath the stupid was something steadier, a clean certainty that walking through those hours would not be right or good for me, and that I had to stay honest with myself about it before I could find any way to be honest out loud.

The agreement I had made months ago was a card laid into a structure that looked perfectly solid right up until the day someone leaned on it. In a looser love I could have powered through, or picked the fight in the kitchen and called it honesty, or done the thing resentfully and filed it under one more small surrender. The devotion is what made all of those impossible. A devoted container does not manufacture the pressure; it holds the love still long enough that whatever has gone unspoken can no longer slip quietly out the back, and so the static rises until you turn and face it. The marriage did not make the dishonesty. It lit up exactly where the dishonesty already lived.

He came out and found me in the garden, and we sat in the sun without speaking for a while. When I finally told him the truth it was a small and enormous thing at once: the day before us, as previously planned, no longer had any resonance for me, and I was sorry, and I wished I had checked in earlier, and I was working on learning to know my own truth in time to say it before it curdled into a roar. He nodded. It was much the same for him.

So we sat there and started turning it over together, how we might still meet what we had committed to but creatively, as a challenge rather than a sentence, and it turned out there were a dozen ways through that felt truer than pounding unconsciously down the original list. The day came alive. What moved between us by evening was the bestie-high-fiving energy that goes flat the instant either of us begins performing instead of telling the truth, and its return set a new bar in our marriage for how fast we can find our way back to each other and to the joy of being intimate with our own evolving truths that this marriage helps hold as a priority.

Gate 59 moves from Shadow of Dishonesty, to Gift of Intimacy to Siddhi of Transparency. The shadow does express as lies to other people but only after you’ve lied long enough to yourself to make that necessary. It’s a subtle personal sabotage: strategic self-presentation, the good-wife script, the fluency at managing how you appear that keeps you a courteous distance from your own current truth and therefore from everyone else’s. The gift of Intimacy blooms when you are brave about what’s real for you when it’s real, intimacy with your own precious becoming, which is precisely what the static was blocking. Its siddhi is Transparency, a porousness not only to him but to existence itself, and the clutch I felt in the kitchen was never really about him at all. It was the unfamiliarity of being that permeable to life.

The static didn’t lie. On the far side of it, in the dirt and the sun, what I found was not that I had failed to be a good wife but that the two of us had quietly become slightly more than we had been that morning. As we become more, our truths do too. Being intimate with your actual life means you have to fucking keep up.

That’s vibe four.

What the Four Have in Common

(Obviously) none of these moments were planned. None happened because I had cultivated the right skill or prepared the right way or understood in advance what they would ask. They happened because something in me is constitutionally oriented toward a particular quality of response: a switching-on, a forward movement without deliberation, an emotional permeability that receives rather than manages, a refusal to let performed closeness stand in for actual contact.

These four together form a frequency I was born carrying, and there’s a bittersweetness to carrying a frequency the world has not yet calibrated to, like being tuned to a radio station that barely exists yet, where you can hear it clearly while the signal reaches everyone around you as noise, including the people who love you most. You build things that feel ahead of their time because they are. You offer water and people do not recognize it as water, because the hose has been kinked for so long they have forgotten what flow feels like in the hand. The Play Network has been met, again and again, with something I can only call a confused hunger, people arriving wanting exactly what it offers and then, with it actually in front of them, performing it instead of doing it, outsourcing their authority to me instead of locating their own, wanting to belong to something safe rather than discover something true.

This is not a failure of the people. It is the accurate result of four hundred years of a specific civilizational frequency.

The new energy coming in

The Cross of Sleeping Phoenix carries its entire instruction inside its name. The Phoenix does not survive the fire by escaping it, it survives by carrying the seed-frequency of what comes after, straight through the burning, and it can do this because it has always been native to a heat the fire cannot exceed.

I want to describe what that frequency feels like from the inside, not as a list of my virtues but because what has lived in me as constitution is the same energy now coming available to everyone, and naming it is how you learn to recognize it arriving in yourself, in those around you, knocking on the world’s inner doors.

Change has almost never frightened me; where the old world taught people to brace, something in me leans toward the door, curious, ready, a kind of perpetual ride-or-die to life itself. Intimacy I have wanted my whole life with a directness that unsettled people, dug for like water, reached for even across the long stretch when the only tools I had were shadow ones, the performing and the managing of how I appeared, but true intimacy with myself, with love and with life itself is one of the central lighthouses perpetually calling me across choppy waters. Stuck is the one state I have never been able to keep; as a young woman with almost no money I spent it on the trainings that promised a way through, and I went, and I moved, freedom wasn’t optional. The minute I know I’m in some kind of prison I start rattling the bars. And I am strong, weirdly strong. I don’t work out and can lift a fridge, or, on the inner realms, I have spent my life using my strength to make the thing happen for everyone that the room had already given up on.

For most of that life these qualities made me feel rare in a way that was lonely rather than flattering, too intense, too unafraid, too much, a person operating at a pitch the room could not quite meet. I understand it differently now. I was built early, incubating in one body the frequency the whole field is only now warming into, which is the least lonely and most hopeful thing I have ever come to understand about myself. None of it is a résumé. It is a weather report from a little further along the same front you are now feeling at your back.

So February 2027 does not read to me as a threat, and it does not read as my moment either. It is not the year I change, and it is not the year anyone catches up to me, because this was never a race and being early is not the same as being ahead. It is the year the frequency I was born carrying comes available to everyone, the year early stops meaning alone, and the only reason I can tell you what it feels like is that it has already been living here.

The Play Network was not designed for the world that was (compelled is a better word than designed!) TPN is the kind of structure that arrives because it cannot not arrive, built to usher in the world that is on its way.

What the Play Network Actually Is

The Play Network is easy to misunderstand if you hear the word play and reach for entertainment, or leisure, or an alternative to serious work. What Yunkaporta calls yarning, the kind of thinking that is relational, storied, rooted in actual place and actual relationship rather than extracted from them, comes closer. What he documents about Aboriginal knowledge systems, about the quality of cognition available to people who have never been severed from their embeddedness in the living world, is the nearest analogue I know to what happens in a Play Network circle when it is working.

The extractive mode of cognition, the one that built the Cross of Planning world, cannot think its way out of the collapse it created. This is not a political statement; it is a structural one. A mode of knowing cannot perceive its way out of a problem it is itself partly made of, and there is nothing mystical in this. The problem includes everything that mode of knowing cannot see, which is exactly why it stays invisible to the people most fluent in it.

Authentic play is one of the few reliable technologies for reaching a different quality of consciousness, not as therapy and not as recreation but as an actual retraining of how cognition happens. When people are truly playing, something in the social architecture of hierarchy and performance briefly suspends. The body moves differently. The nervous system does something different with incoming information. People begin making contact with their own real responses rather than their conditioned ones, which is precisely why real play feels so threatening to systems organized around compliance, and why the people who arrive at the Play Network so often perform play rather than play it, waiting to be told the correct response before they will risk their own.

What the Play Network holds is a practice space for recovering the inner authority that the Cross of Planning world systematically extracted from people, not as ideology, not as workshop content, but as the lived experience of what happens in your body the moment you stop outsourcing your responses and start trusting them. The community that grows from people doing this work is real and deep and durable, but it is the byproduct of self-recovery, not the product itself.

People come to the Play Network now having already noticed that the thing they handed their sovereignty to is visibly failing to hold up its end of the bargain, and that is a different and more powerful entry point than come discover joy. The honest offer is not joy. The honest offer is this:

the world you organized your life around is reorganizing itself, and here is a place to discover who you are when the structures you relied on are no longer reliable, not as therapy, not as community, but as practice in staying alive to your own life in a world that has stopped pretending to be certain.

Recovering our Captaincy, or the era we are leaving

The poet David Whyte tells a story from his years as a naturalist on a boat in the Galápagos. For seasons he had sailed under an exceptional captain, so reliably on it that the whole crew had quietly fallen out of the habit of watching the water themselves, because there was no need, the captain had it. Then came a new captain, less sure, who one night anchored the boat in a place the seasoned crew could feel was wrong, and not one of them said a word. They had been lulled, by years of being well captained, out of their own authority, and so they went to bed. Whyte woke in the dark to the ship heaving, already slipped its mooring and driving toward the cliffs, and he reached the wheel and barely steered them all out of death’s way.

What he took from it was not that the captain had failed. It was that he and the whole crew had given their captaincy away, had slept so deeply under good authority that they could no longer feel the rhythm of the sea, and that a captain, which is to say any of us, must never again sleep that deeply.

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This is the Cross of Planning, the frequency Ra Uru Hu named, which has organized collective life for roughly four hundred years and finishes its cycle, by the reckoning of the precession and several frameworks that arrive there independently, on February 15, 2027. It was the exceptional captain. It held us, captained the ship of our shared survival so well, the food on the shelf, the answered emergency call, the trains running on time, that we forgot we were ever meant to feel the water ourselves, even while, the whole time, we were growing the very capacity the holding would one day have to hand back. Now the competence that lulled us is thinning, the cheap energy that ran it running low, and the boat is slipping its mooring in the dark. The grief is real, and no one asked whether we were ready. But the waking is the gift hidden inside the danger, because what the moment is actually asking is that we take back the wheel, which is the word the Play Network keeps arriving at from every direction. Sovereignty.

Underneath the fear of it is the thing the Phoenix has always known, that you were made for a heat the fire cannot exceed, and that a captain stepping back from steering you is not the end of being carried. It is the beginning of being able to steer. The question was never whether the old ship stays afloat. It is which seeds you carry onto whatever shore comes next.

Start Here: A Free Lab, and One on the Way

If anything here landed as recognition rather than information, the work has a doorway, and it is open now. I’m creating bridges towards people being able to dance with the coming energy, I see these bridges as lovers bridge in Paris with all the hopeful locks on it, marking a prayer, an intention.

The Friendship Lab is live and free. It works with your own Gene Keys chart, specifically the gates that govern how you relate and what you are here to transmit, though you do not need to know your chart to use it. It is built to be worked daily, ten to thirty minutes across 2 weeks, made especially for the single pringle, the person doing this without an existing circle to hold them. It is not a course and it is not self-help. It is a practice container, the closest thing I know to what the Play Network offers in a portable, solitary form.

The Devoted Partnership Lab is coming soon, the same lens turned toward committed love, toward the relational patterns and the specific edges where real intimacy either opens or closes. If you want to know the day it opens, subscribe and it will find you.

The rest of the work happens in community, but community asks that you have already begun the private work of knowing what you actually feel, what you actually want, and what you are actually willing to give. The Friendship Lab is that starting place, and it is ready for you now.

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literally ANY COMMENT. poop emojis are perfectly valid.

Natalie Marie is a Gene Keys Guide, founder of the Play Network, and carrier of the Cross of Sleeping Phoenix. She lives and works in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where she is building a sanga, a school, and a laboratory for what comes after.

Your human nervous system may want to print this and read it outside with some green. Mine does.

Otherwise: The Greening is a living network seeding itself in the composting body of the old world. The Play Network is how it replicates — real communities, built around authentic play, doing the actual work of becoming coherent humans in an incoherent time. The brownies are warm. Let’s get on the trail.

When did siddhi, thermodynamic and metacrisis enter my every day lexicon? I’m not sure. A week ago the last oil tanker from the Strait of Hormuz arrived in America and that’s got me feeling all kinds of historic, all kinds of wanting to carve clear lines in the sand maybe. The precision of these words feel like lines in the sand. Also like jeans. Like when I’m picking out an outfit, there’s this sifting process where only this pair of jeans fits great, honors the buns, are practical, like garden dirt and tiny microplastics tucked in every pocket. They do the work I need them to do.

These words are those jeans.

But I only know those jeans because I’ve worn them, danced in them, spilled paint on them, lost them, accidentally bleached them etc. And a lot of these words are newly emerging, naming something that didn’t exist and now does. So, let’s all squeeze into some jeans so we can share the reality we are co-building. So. In the spirit of the living trail — not a finished map, not a polished brochure, just a human being writing back from the road — here is my decoder ring.

Because the wrong word is a funhouse mirror — it shows you a shape that isn’t quite the thing, and then you spend all your time arguing with the reflection. Please raise your hand if you’re tired of misinformation and words used to hide instead of illume.

Rehumaning. The Schumann resonance is the electromagnetic heartbeat of the Earth, 7.83 hertz, the frequency human nervous systems evolved inside of and are calibrated to. We are meant to be in rhythm with the living world, with our own bodies, with each other, with something larger than the next quarterly report. Dominator culture systematically broke that attunement, stripped out the body, the belonging, the play, the inner life, the vertical axis, because it needed compliant, extractable humans. And got them. Rehumaning is the recovery of the full instrument. Not therapy. Not self-improvement. The genuine return to what we actually are, so that what gets built next is built by whole people, not by traumatized fragments doing their traumatized best.

Rootedness. Not stillness. Not withdrawal. Not the person who has achieved some elevated state and is no longer available for the mess of actual life. Rootedness is the quality of being deep enough in yourself that you can be fully out in the world, present, useful, unswept. The taproot is the technology: it goes down, not out, finds water nobody else is drilling for, and makes the tree unmovable in a storm while the branches are fully alive in the wind. Not hiding on a meditation pillow while the world needs you. Not throwing yourself at the world with no inner ground to draw from. Both axes. Full depth, full presence, fully functional.

Attraversiamo. In Italian it means literally “to cross over.” I’m experimenting with it to hold what I used to call both collapse and the greening, because civilizational transition doesn’t feel like history. It feels like Tuesday, like exhaustion and weird news and the low hum of something that used to hold you no longer quite holding, an eerie omnipresent dread. That’s not a single dramatic collapse but the long composting of a world built on the wrong things. And the greening is happening in the same moment, in the same soil. Not after. During. The new thing doesn’t wait for the old thing to finish dying. It roots directly into the body of what’s falling. You may already be part of it and not have a name for what you’re doing. We will have a thousand names for this passage, the turning, the great simplification. What’s your current one? Put it in the comments.

Systems blind. The inability to see that you are inside a system at all, that the water you swim in has a temperature, a chemistry, a current, and that it has been shaping you all along. Systems blindness isn’t stupidity. It’s the natural condition of anyone who has only ever known one operating system. You cannot see the walls of the container from inside the container, not without being shown, not without some pressure that makes the walls suddenly visible. Most of our dominant cultural assumptions about how work should feel, what family looks like, what success means, what the future is for, are not facts. They are the inherited furniture of a particular civilization at a particular moment. Systems blind is not seeing the furniture as furniture.

Energy blind. A term I use in two directions simultaneously. The first is thermodynamic: blind to how physical resources actually work, how finite they are, what it costs to move them, what happens when the supply chain that delivers cheap everything quietly stops being cheap. The second is energetic in the broader sense: blind to how frequency, coherence, resonance, and the invisible physics of human interaction shape what’s possible in a room, a relationship, a community. Energy blindness in both directions produces the same result, people building on assumptions that the infrastructure underneath them will hold, and being genuinely shocked when it doesn’t.

Pre-tragic, tragic, post-tragic. A framework from philosophers Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid for the three stances a human being can occupy toward the fact that life is hard and often makes no sense. These terms become particularly potent in the context of attraversiamo, because they help distinguish between people who are still waiting for normal to return, people who are in active grief, and people ready to build something genuinely new.

Pre-tragic is innocence, not stupidity, just unlaundered, systems-blind. Life feels basically ordered. Pain happens but there’s always an explanation: God’s plan, bad luck, something fixable. The system basically works. This is a fine place to be until it isn’t, and at some point, for everyone paying attention, it isn’t. In the context of our particular moment: this is the normalcy of looking away, the period before the 2008 crash in the years of easy money, the geopolitical tensions explained as temporary, the supply chains assumed unbreakable.

Tragic is where the explanation stops working. The rules break. The thing you were promised doesn’t come. The loss doesn’t make sense and nobody can make it make sense. The danger is getting stuck here. I certainly have and sometimes do. The month after the Epstein files came out in a big way had me down on my knees. Sometimes we become sophisticated, articulate, fluent in everything that’s wrong, and remain unable to move. Mistaking despair for depth. The doomer stance. Collapse-aware and collapse-defeated, a particular and seductive flavor of stuck.

Post-tragic is what’s on the other side, and it is not a return to pre-tragic innocence. It’s a second clarity, harder-won and roomier. It can hold uncertainty, paradox, ambiguity without collapsing. The life force comes back, not despite knowing what you know, but through having fully faced it. You can love again. Act with courage again. Build something again. Joy with grief in it. Hope that has looked at the evidence. This is the phase where survivors decide whether to rebuild the old structures in new clothes or build something genuinely different. This is where transmission matters. Where living documents matter.

Grief as Gizzard. Birds don’t have teeth. They have gizzards, a muscular chamber that grinds what can’t otherwise be digested, using small stones they’ve swallowed, grit they collected intentionally, to do the work of breaking down what the beak alone couldn’t handle. Grief is our gizzard. Not the wound. Not the thing to get through so you can get back to functioning. The actual mechanism by which the hard and undigestible things get metabolized into something the body can use. The grief that has been moved through becomes the grit in the gizzard. It’s what makes post-tragic possible, not as an intellectual position but as a felt, embodied reality. The people who have actually grieved something real are different in the room. They can hold more. Not because they’re tougher but because they’ve digested something that the pre-tragic and tragic still have sitting whole and unprocessed in their system. You cannot skip the gizzard. You can only delay it, and delay has a cost.

The Greening. The living network that is seeding itself in the composting body of the old world. Not a metaphor, an actual process, happening right now, in communities, in kitchens, in conversations between people who don’t yet have language for what they’re building together but feel the direction of it. The Greening is what happens when people who have made the attraversiamo crossing, who are post-tragic and rooted and genuinely alive, start organizing around something rather than away from something. It is the new thing growing in the nurse log of the old world. Not after the collapse. During. The Greening names both the movement and the process of coming alive to your own true nature, which turn out to be the same thing at different scales.

And then there’s the personal greening, which is where it actually starts. We live many lifetimes, each one a specific becomingness mission, and over the long arc of all of them we become something like a massive gorgeous oak tree, all limbs and canopy and accumulated wisdom. This particular lifetime is one pale green leaf in spring. Singular, tender, exactly right. Your Human Design chart, your Gene Keys profile, your astrological blueprint, these are not prescriptions. They are the greenhouse holding the precise conditions your specific leaf needs to unfurl. The world is greening and so are you, and these two processes are not separate. When you come more fully alive to your own nature, you become, almost automatically, part of what the world is trying to grow.

The pale green leaf in full integrity, actually green, not performing greenness, not bypassing the gizzard work, not skipping the fault lines, is the unit of the new world. Multiplied across millions of people doing their actual becoming, that’s what shifts the field. As above so below means you cannot build a green world from an ungreened self. The correspondence runs both directions and neither can be faked.

As above, so below. One of the oldest principles in the Hermetic tradition, attributed to the Emerald Tablet, a text so ancient its origins are genuinely disputed. The idea is precise and radical: the macrocosm and the microcosm are in perfect correspondence. What is true at the scale of the cosmos is true at the scale of the cell. What is true in the inner life is true in the outer world. They mirror each other not metaphorically but structurally, because they are the same pattern at different scales of magnitude.

This is why the inner work is not optional preparation for the real work. It is the real work. Every revolution that skipped it, that said we’ll sort out the inner stuff after we’ve changed the structures, became the thing it was fighting within a generation. The correspondence runs both directions. You cannot extract from yourself, run on cortisol and suppressed grief and unexamined shadow, and build something that doesn’t extract. You cannot bypass your own gizzard work and produce genuine nourishment for anyone else. The quality of what we’re building is determined by the quality of what we’re building it from. As above so below is not a spiritual comfort. It’s a warning and an invitation, simultaneously, which is exactly where we are.

Nurse log. Walk into any old-growth forest and you’ll find them, massive fallen trees with whole new ecosystems growing directly out of their bodies. Ferns, saplings, fungi, the whole party. That’s what the old world is doing right now. It is the nurse log. New life does not grow despite the collapse. It roots into it.

Fault lines. The cracks in your structure that don’t show until pressure hits. Not your flaws, your edges. Intimate devoted relationships reveal these faster than anything else. The places where, under the right conditions, things slip. Every structure has them. The ones who don’t know theirs are the ones who wreck things without meaning to. The fault lines quiz, coming soon, is just a way to find yours before the earthquake does.

Islands of coherence. This comes from the physicist Ilya Prigogine, who discovered that when a complex system is far from equilibrium, meaning in chaos, small pockets of coherence don’t just survive, they have the capacity to shift the entire system toward a higher order. Joe Dispenza, working in neuroscience and the physics of consciousness, adds something important here: coherence is a measurable state in which the body’s systems, heart, brain, nervous system, are operating in synchronized harmony, and that state is both biological and contagious. When someone in genuine coherence enters a disordered room, the room shifts. The field between people changes. What was fragmented begins, almost involuntarily, to organize. This is the science underneath why building small, real, alive communities matters so urgently right now. We’re not trying to fix everything. We’re building islands. Not because small is modest, but because Prigogine’s physics tells us that coherent pockets in a far-from-equilibrium system are the actual mechanism of system-level change. The islands are how the whole thing tips.

Temple on the Wave. I coined this in a conversation with a rabbi friend who was in the middle of a conservation project, beavers, wetlands, local recovery work, while his personal life was in complete upheaval. He was doing it anyway. Showing up for the beavers while everything else was in motion. You’re not waiting for the water to go still. You’re building now, on what’s moving. The capacity: not stillness but rootedness in motion. Rooted in something that doesn’t depend on the outer situation being resolved. You can be completely destabilized and completely intact at the same time, if you know where your roots go.

Dominator culture. The civilization built on the logic of power-over. Over people, over land, over the future. Riane Eisler named it. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a 400-year operating system. Hierarchy, extraction, control, the myth that someone has to lose for someone to win. The Gene Keys tradition, and the broader wave of consciousness research, points to 2027 as a significant inflection point: the Cross of the Sleeping Phoenix rising, a shift in the morphogenetic field of the species itself, from individual survival logic toward something that can hold the whole. Dominator culture cannot survive that frequency shift, not because it will be defeated, but because it is thermodynamically incompatible with what’s trying to emerge. What replaces it must be Good for All, not good for some, not good for most, genuinely good for all life it touches, participants, hosts, communities, the living world. That’s the bar. Everything we’re building is held against it.

Thermodynamic frame. Physics doesn’t care about your good intentions. You cannot create order, in yourself, in a community, in a culture, without energy. And the quality of the energy matters. High cortisol, no sleep, chronic dread, running on the fumes of a story that stopped being true years ago, that’s dirty fuel. It will not grow what you’re trying to grow. The thermodynamic frame is the physics of why you have to take care of yourself first. Not as self-indulgence. As structural necessity.

The metacrisis. The thing underneath the things. Climate, loneliness, institutional collapse, meaning collapse, these aren’t a list of separate problems with separate solutions. They have one root: a civilization that optimized for the wrong things for a very long time. Nate Hagens’ word for the root. I use it because “everything is connected and also on fire simultaneously” is too many words. And underneath metacrisis, quietly, there is an arc worth tracking: as the old systems lose coherence, they reveal the micro-opportunities that the old order was too rigid to see. The community that forms when the grid fails. The skill-sharing that emerges when supply chains break. The trust built across a fence when the institutions meant to provide it stop working. Metacrisis is also, if you hold it long enough, meta-opportunity, the accumulated weight of small real things built in the composting of the old, each one a stitch in something that doesn’t have a name yet but is clearly being sewn.

Hosted emergence. The middle layer between someone doing everything and everyone spontaneously self-organizing, which in practice means nobody does anything and then feels vaguely guilty about it. In hosted emergence, someone holds the container: the design, the safety standards, the coherence framework. Inside that container, other people bring what wants to happen. The content is theirs. The vision is collective. The structure is held. This is how conscious community scales without requiring a single person to be everywhere, which is not sustainable and, for everyone’s sake, not desirable. The host’s gift is the container. What grows inside it belongs to everyone.

Shadow, gift, siddhi. Gene Keys language. Richard Rudd’s framework. The premise is that every archetypal energy operates at three frequencies. The lowest is the shadow: the wound, the defense, the pattern running on fear or contraction. The middle is the gift: the same energy transmuted through awareness into genuine contribution. The highest is the siddhi, a Sanskrit word meaning perfection, the full flowering of that energy in its most luminous form. These words are more precise than good/bad, healthy/unhealthy, evolved/unevolved. The shadow isn’t wrong, it’s the seed form of the gift. You don’t excise it; you compost it. The siddhi isn’t a destination you achieve and plant a flag on; it’s a frequency you occasionally touch and that orients everything else.

Coherence. A felt state, the specific experience of inner alignment when the parts of you that are usually arguing are temporarily singing the same note. You know it when it happens. The room changes. You change. Something is possible that wasn’t possible a moment before. It’s biological, and it can take real recovery of your various parts, physical, mental, emotional, before it becomes reliably available. A pocket of coherence is a place where that state is reliably possible, a container, a gathering, a relationship, a practice, that creates conditions for alignment instead of fragmentation.

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Appreciative Inquiry. Built on one deceptively simple discovery: the questions you start with determine the reality you can access. If you start with what’s broken, you get a room full of people defending their piece of the broken thing. If you start with what’s working, what gave you life this week, what moment felt most like the thing we’re trying to build, you get a completely different room. It’s not magic. It’s just asking better first questions and using that higher, more fueled state to do better, more fueled good work in the world.

Play Church. Sunday morning. Warm, irreverent, occasionally ridiculous. No pews, no doctrine, no one performing their enlightenment at you. Play Church is a living community ritual, the place where the Greening gets embodied in actual humans in real time, built on one stubborn fact: people cannot fake play. You can fake enthusiasm, fake connection, fake having it together. You cannot fake play. When it happens, something real is happening, in your body, between people, in the field a room generates when nobody’s performing anymore. Stuart Brown’s research shows play is as biologically necessary as sleep, and play deprivation does measurable damage to the nervous system, the prefrontal cortex, the capacity to stay optimistic under pressure. Play Church is where you remember what conscious joy feels like in your body, in community, on purpose.

One last thing before we go.

I will keep adding to this. When I use a word that stops you, tell me. The comment section exists. This is a living document, not a finished one, which, now that you’ve read this far, you know is a core part of this waymaking.

in tremendous cahoots,

Miss Natalie Marie

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This is the decoder ring for the Volunteer for Your Life series. If you want to start from the beginning, Module 1 is here. If you want to understand what The Greening actually is before you read another word, that’s here.

Sources

Prigogine, Ilya. Order Out of Chaos. 1984.

Dispenza, Joe. Becoming Supernatural. 2017.

Gafni, Marc and Kincaid, Kristina. Pre-tragic, tragic, post-tragic framework. Center for World Philosophy and Religion.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade. 1987.

Rudd, Richard. Gene Keys. 2009.

Brown, Stuart. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. 2009.

Hagens, Nate. “The Great Simplification.” Podcast and public lectures, ongoing. The Emerald Tablet.

Hermetic tradition. Origins disputed, estimated 6th-8th century CE.

Benner, Joseph. The Impersonal Life. (Schumann resonance context.)

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

If something in this glossary cracked a door open and you want to walk through it, here are the places I’d send you first. Not a curriculum. Just the books and thinkers that live on my actual nightstand, in the actual dirt of how I think.

Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade is where dominator culture gets its fullest naming, and it will reorganize how you see basically everything. Richard Rudd’s Gene Keys is not a book you read so much as one you live with for years, returning to it as you change. Stuart Brown’s Play is the science underneath why joy is not optional, and it’s a fast read that will make you want to go outside immediately. Nate Hagens’ podcast The Great Simplification is where thermodynamic reality gets spoken plainly and without panic, which is rare and worth protecting. Joe Dispenza’s Becoming Supernatural is where the coherence science lives in accessible form. Marc Gafni’s work is vast and complex and worth finding your own entry point into. And the Emerald Tablet is two pages long and will keep you busy for a lifetime.

For the Schumann resonance, start anywhere and fall down that particular hole at your own pace. It’s a good one.

One day I found myself pinging back and forth between events that I would never have any kind of obvious personal benefit from — someone else’s prom, a singing lesson, an acrobatics class, a friend who needed a truck. By midmorning I realized I wasn’t even going to leave the car very much. I would just spend a whole day in a car. Like an old cheese.

To soothe myself, I spent most of that entire-day-in-a-fucking-car composing a narrative for Supreme Victimhood. I brought the emotional passion-force of the founding fathers composing the Declaration of Independence.

Except independence is super far from victimhood.

Later, looking at an intense stack of life crisis hitting us like a meteor field, my partner echoed my own crap-perspective when he said, when will this be over? I realized we’d both gone to war on our own lives. War is in vogue, — the idea of hating and crushing what you don’t prefer is a temporary reprieve from the deeper work life is always inviting us to.

That temporary reprieve, all the time we spend shadow boxing arises out of systems blindness. No access to a larger perspective on life, the collective inability to see the larger structural, ecological, and energetic realities that shape our lives because we’re too focused on narrow, short-term indicators.

Without a larger perspective we can’t see, when we find ourselves far from our conditioned preferences, that this hard moment might be rich with something — patience, insight, compassion, a meditation, a real conversation, a small expansion of who we are. Without that larger view, we just flip our immature lids and blame everyone like a toddler who needs a thousand naps.

Therefore, we all, slowly, become victims of our own lives. Addicted to the psycho fantasy that if we just got rid of all the hard stuff, we’d be super happy.

As a person who is often super happy, it would make me super happy to blow the fucking doors out on some bullshit assumptions about what super happy actually entails — and why, especially now, in a time when complexity is arriving faster than our nervous systems were designed to handle, learning to volunteer for your own actual life might be the most radical and sanity-preserving thing you do this year.

Not the life you imagined.

This one. The one with the car and the acrobatics lesson and the thing that isn’t going the way you planned.

I’ve learned, slowly, and with considerable resistance that when I stop fighting the ordinary texture of my days and actually show up for them, something shifts. The same activity becomes alive because I’m alive in it. I stop waiting for my real life to start and discover it’s already here, happening in the small unremarkable moments I was trying to escape.

That shift, from victim to volunteer, is what this series is about.

It’s not about toxic positivity or pretending things aren’t hard. It’s about discovering that you have more agency than you think, that there are people doing exactly this work alongside you, and that the ordinary texture of your life is actually the only ground anything real ever gets built on.

See you next week, beloved turdlets

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...” Teddy Roosevelt

Transcript:

Good morning. I was going to write a blog post about this concept of chaorder, which I am thoroughly in love with right now, but it seemed more fun to make a video, partly because I am wearing my husband’s glasses, which are not even close to my prescription, because I have lost every single pair of my own. And there’s a real metaphor in that, because chaorder is a way of crossing from who you’ve been and no longer are to who you’re becoming, bridging that liminal gap, and I have been healing my eyes and recovering my vision, so none of my glasses work anymore and I keep losing them, and I’m not yet at the place where I can see everything clearly. So I have to borrow someone else’s giant white glasses.

Which felt right. Sometimes, when we’re talking about big concepts, it’s good to have a fool in front of you wearing glasses that are the wrong prescription. So, welcome. If you get lost in the video, just enjoy gazing at the big white cartoon glasses. They look like I AI’d them onto my face. They almost look like they could leap off and hover.

I’m beginning this whole new emergence, bringing the Play Network into the world, and it’s so fun and so exciting. And one of the things I keep discovering is that all of us are insanely overwhelmed, our lives already so full. Bringing something new in, even something good, even something great, is hard when the cup is already full. Sadhguru talks about how, when you’re trying to clear yourself and move toward a higher and clearer way of being, it’s hard to help someone who’s all packed in. They’ve already figured it out. They know everything. I got it, I got it, buddy, you just go on over there. And I’ve been exactly that way. Really packed in.

So I want to talk about chaorder.

It’s an idea I’ll be honest is a little bit derived from Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park. The premise is that you have to accept that the way life changes, the way becomingness actually happens and functions on this physical plane, is chaotic. There will be disruption. Change is innately chaotic. And it is so comfortable to keep being what you’ve been, there’s an inertia to it, an object in motion stays in motion until something interrupts it, so it’s easy to keep running the patterns we’re running. Change interrupts. Change is disruptive by nature.

I had a day recently where I was locked in. I’ve been getting up and dancing at dawn since January first without a single break. Not to flex. I do it to be able to handle chaotic life. And my rule is that I don’t just get up and move my limbs, I have to dance until some part of me that is not this personality comes alive and takes over my body. Until that surrendered, good-feeling, oh-god-here-it-comes dance arrives, where it’s just got me. Imagine much better moves than you’re picturing.

I dance because I know that if I don’t make conscious choices about how my energy runs, the world will make them for me. The world will say, hey, everything is super horrible, you should be freaked out about that all the time, nervous system, go ahead and set yourself on fire. And I am very familiar with that.

So on this particular day I danced, then I did a little meditation, and I got rock-solid anchored, that unshakable place where you feel like you understand the whole dynamic universe and you’re a piece of life moving with the flow of all of it. It felt awesome. And then a bunch of crazy shit happened, and I couldn’t get shaken. Something genuinely hard happened, and I caught myself thinking, what an opportunity, what a blessing, and really feeling it. For a second I thought, uh oh, am I ascending? No. I wasn’t. It was just a clear day of me using my energy well, able to hold a higher perspective so that the chaos didn’t register as danger. My body didn’t translate change as a survival threat. Change wasn’t a tiger in the room. Because I was anchored to that yes-life energy. Yeah. Life. Let’s do this. Come on.

That natural surrender into being a co-creator with life, rather than a lonely little dictator superimposing my will onto the universe. I’m dancing with life. So I have to dance with a yes-life-let’s-go kind of energy, and from there the chaos felt interesting, adventurous, fun. Oh, it’s going to go this way, cool. I thought it might go that way, but now I’m seeing this is even better, even more beautiful.

A lot of the time that’s hard, because we have no space. We struggle to find room to be contemplative about how intensely attached we are to our notions, this is my life, this is who I should be, and all the packaging around that, the conditioning, the other people’s dreams, the agenda that isn’t ours and isn’t fun and isn’t good for the world, all wrapped up in there. So for me it’s about making a lot of time for contemplation. Little habits. When I drive alone now, I used to rock out and listen to podcasts, but mostly now I drive in quiet, and the contemplation just happens, and whatever needs to be felt or thought or given a different quality of attention rises up and gets heard. Just in the quiet. Oh. It’s making space. And when I have spaciousness, it’s like the straw and the camel’s back in reverse, spaciousness removes the straws, so that when another one lands it’s okay, that didn’t break me, I’ve got this, I can carry it.

My partner recently was heading out to pick up the grandkids and go to a community event called Lucky Candle, up in a beautiful little village to the north. And he said, I’m definitely not sleeping over, I’m coming right back. So absolute, so assured. The energy of it was I’m controlling my life, no flexibility, no curiosity. And I asked him, well, what if life invites you to an adventure? What if sleeping over turned out to be bright or beautiful, a way your deeper self could emerge? Because in my early days, an adventurous attitude toward life is what kept landing me in the moments that defined my heart’s emergence. The poetic, ecstatic, deep-questioning, awakening moments came not because I planned them but because I was available to say yes. Suddenly I’d be in a breakthrough conversation, a deep insight, oh shit, this is the actual direction, and it came not from my lonely little mind but from life coming to get me.

And as the Play Network opens this week, I’m watching a lot of people packed in butt to butt with I have to do this, I have to do this. And a lot of what’s on our plates, we don’t actually examine. Oh, I have to do this. Do you? Is there no dream room? Could you not invite a creative response? What if it were someone else’s joy to take this kid? What if, one night, I didn’t cook dinner, and someone just quietly delivered a bowl to me? Wouldn’t that be, what would that even feel like? Oh. That’s fun. That’s yummy. I’d like to be cared for like that. You start to get into these dreamy, creative, imaginal spaces where you keep saying yes to life and you get nourished on the path.

A lot of times people say, no, I have to. And there’s an almost victimy, undreamy quality to it, I couldn’t change it, there’s no room, I can’t, I don’t. An addiction to being locked into an obligatory way of being. (Obligatory. It’s a really fun word to say. It sounded like it slipped into another language there for a second.)

This pattern of no, this uncurious, uncreative posture, these are hallmarks of living out of unmet trauma states. I’m in a stretch of my life where I’m examining my own relationship to time, and it’s immature, fairly traumatized. I didn’t get much choice growing up. Had to, had to, had to. Nobody was curious whether you wanted to, or whether you could. So I built a checked-out way of scheduling my life, leaning on intense deadlines to motivate myself, because I never learned rhythm, or divine intrinsic motivation, or any of those pieces.

So here’s what I’m positing. An invitation to take on something generative, a new meditation practice, the Play Network, whatever it is, can be received by your tiger-scanning mind as just another too-much, another stupid thing. Or it can be received by the part of you that’s deeply in love with the chaordic way, where chaos and order sit in right proportion, and you can feel, by subtly sensing your own body, when you’ve drifted too far in one direction, too much order or too much chaos, and you can’t dance anymore.

I call that temple on the wave. You’ve got your dojo, your ashram, your sacred structure, but it can’t be so rigid that when a wave rises and crashes it cracks apart. It has to be made of leaves and sweetness and song. It has to be flexible. It has to be porous. Because we are in a time of vast, escalated change. This is the epoch change. This is what we’re here for. There is nothing wrong with it.

And here’s the last piece I want to put in. The most stressful thought pattern, the one that keeps me from dancing with the chaordic, is the mental habit of rejecting life itself. The micro-rejections. This shouldn’t be happening, this is wrong, this is bad, this is wrong, this is bad. That dualistic way of being is the fastest route I know to stressing myself out, triggering my nervous system, making me feel overwhelmed and dysregulated and like I can’t handle this. That chronic little no. They shouldn’t have said that. That’s wrong. This shouldn’t be happening.

David Whyte, the poet, says the only part of your life that can exist and continue to exist in wellness is the part that knows how to dance. How hot is that.

At the macro level, we’re in a moment of great transition, where the pattern of other people making all our decisions from a purely logical plane is leading to destruction, because the logical plane doesn’t account for the divine perspective, and emergence is iterative, it keeps coming up. If we just decide logically, this is how life should be, this is how humans are, this is the way, without ever checking what’s emerging through the source channel, through the divine, through that constant wisdom chitter-chattering in the great field, whatever your language is for that energy, then we stay stuck. We’re in a time where it’s so easy to judge the change-state, to say no, we can’t go from being a civilization that just thinks its way along to one that actually sources wisdom from a deeper place and lives out of it. But that’s the liminal space. That’s the arc from who we’re not to who we’re becoming. And there’s no way to prescribe that change. It would be lovely if it happened gracefully and lovingly. But tearing up a garden to put in a new field is destructive. You tear it all up. It’s destructive.

So we judge. Civilization shouldn’t change this way. We shouldn’t have all these secrets surfacing. But we’ve been wildly dis-addicted to truth. Truth hasn’t been a value. Remember Trump’s first run, when people said, oh wow, he lied so many times, and then no one cared? Oh. Truth isn’t a value. Not something we’re even interested in. But truth-telling is one of the primary gestures of moving into a new reality and co-creating it. So wouldn’t the ugliest, most horrific, most heart-and-soul-shattering story of deception and horror be exactly the way this change gets ushered in, bringing the clarity, and surfacing all the trauma we haven’t dealt with that correlates to this very difficult thing happening in the world? No, this should never have happened. And, through a larger lens, this is how we grow. We don’t grow without challenge. We don’t become.

So there’s a part of us that has to be able to hold the paradox: this is wrong and this is terrible, and we don’t bypass that, and this is also the way life is happening, the way the unraveling is happening, the way clarity and the birthing of new honesty-addicted realities are coming.

I can’t recommend Byron Katie’s work enough, so I’ll just put it right here. This shouldn’t be happening. Is that true? Yeah. I don’t know. Yeah, okay. Are you certain, within a grand cosmic scheme of where we’re going and who we’re becoming and all the things we cannot possibly know, the whole grand mystery, that this shouldn’t be happening? Are you sure? I don’t know. Maybe. No. No. How do you feel when you think that thought? Insane, derailed, dysregulated, scared as shit, lost, heartbroken. Who would you be without that thought? Well, I’d probably be paying attention. I’d be there with it. Oh, I need to feel something. I’d be with life, and with whatever it needed to tell me, whatever I needed to open in myself, whatever I needed to birth to change things. Because a lot of people get so paralyzed in this-shouldn’t-be-happening that the insights and solutions and clarities trying to come through them can’t get through. So they go into addiction. Into hiding. The biggest addiction of all, hiding in a narrative about yourself that isn’t true, that you know isn’t true, and you’re clutching it, and life is trying to happen, and you’re not there, you’re in an idea of yourself.

So I want to offer the concept of buoys. I love a buoy. I have this metaphor of a raft with buoys underneath it. (Oh, this is going really long. Great. Let’s enjoy it.)

Some of the ways I’m exploring how to embrace the chaordic nature of our becomingness, the fact that we’re going to move from one whole way of being to another, come down to understanding my buoys. Bookended rituals. I meditate in a very specific way before bed, and it helps me integrate, helps me re-enter that quiet, deep, abiding space that exists without condition in all states and is accessible at all times. And I dance in the morning. And I make time for quiet pauses to contemplate. And I lean into play. Shocking, right. Shocking, what, you’re playing? What?

So I’m curious about your buoys. What keeps your temple on the wave afloat, permeable and porous and flexible? How are you holding the shift in yourself?

These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included.

If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating.

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In my life I’ve longed for rituals, longed to have been raised within container of healthy rituals, and have a giant crush on indigenous cultures that thrive within the mechanism of meaningful rituals, so it’s odd that one of the only rituals that have stayed with me through my adult life is watching the Bill Murray movie Groundhog’s Day on Ground Hog’s Day.

At first swipe, that’s embarrassing, shallow, inadequate.

But then I get curious: why has this one endured? I zoned in on the way the movie makes me feel: cringe in the beginning and a dread of seeing the horrible beginning with Bill Murray an absolute asshat. And how uncomfortable the ratty beginnings are.

Then the easy to love thing: a growing sense of relief and ease as Bill starts to evolve, starts to stop being so narcissist and lost, starts to connect with community and help others, starts to have room in his own psyche to actually love another. We love the rising action. But the thing is, you can't rise from nowhere. He has to begin where he begins. To get to that end where it all comes together, his hard work of Becoming is rewarded by one giant night of celebration and recognition of who he actually is deep down, that he couldn’t glimpse in the beginning of the film because he was controlled and blinded by his shadow patterns, covered by layers of conditioning not true to him, but that he’d been raised in or developed as a defense. And the movie explores the way life (or, many lifetimes) gifts us the opportunity to clean that up, or as the poet Hafiz says to pour the water through the cheesecloth over and over again until it becomes safe to drink.

Richard Rudd, founder of the Gene Keys, says this film is a perfect example of the process of reincarnation. The film gives us a chance to kind of peer beneath a life, beneath its challenges, beneath the energy we bring and the things we do or don’t do with our lives, and I find a core distinction that helps us navigate a whole true day.

One day, my kid Frank and I were trying to muddle through a complicated tiramisu of different emotional dynamics going on in our lives and we came up with a distinction that cut through them all. In any given situation what was the core intention of the person of the situation, aiming upward, better for all, not aiming anywhere, just trying to maintain, or something just clearly negative, clearly taking from the whole pie? It became a shortcut for cutting through emotional and mental noise: which way are the arrows pointing?

As I experience the changes in the world, both awakening, as well as a civilization nosediving in an arrows down spiral, I want to breathe this distinction to those fighting on the frontlines, those holding the line, those putting themselves in the way of danger or death to protect innocent lives (gah, can’t type this without weeping). This distinction is so alive in the world, those organizing communities, bringing support, stopping harm, bringing nutrients and safety, clearly arrows up. But there’s a danger of tipping into the early part of Groundhog’s Day where the rage and hatred and dehumanization of those in power is looping us into a war mentality, prepping for a slide into a new dark ages.

One of the most arrow’s up understandings I have is that the challenge before us is perfect for our evolution towards love, unity, truth and goodness for all. You can feel that humming beneath the hard edges of the challenge. Sometimes when I’m in a tough spot I ask, “how can I respond to this in a way that moves the True Story of Love forward?”

And the answers that come to that question aren’t always soft, sometimes they are holding hard lines, pushing back, speaking truth to power but when they are anchored in the intention and energy of being good for all, for being part of a future that is crafted on mutual respect and the honoring of human existence no matter what, the actions that come from them have an energy of wholeness and bring different things alive n the world. Maga folk are in the early part of their Groundhog Day, lost to the shadow pattern, unconscious and utterly consumed. The crypto stuff, the ballroom is all shoving as much cake down the gullet as possible.

That disconnected pleasure seeking is a part of a natural development, just not a place to get lost. When we can pan back a bit and CONTINUE TO SEE AND HONOR the humanity of EVERYONE involved, we can at least stay arrows sideways while we continue to develop the capacity to act in ways that are arrows up.

How do we hospice modernity, and allow the corrupt civilization to crumble while growing a new, true one? I don’t know. But I think we need to make sure we don’t go backwards or to meet hate at the level of hate. There’s also a peacefulness that comes from the mathematics of this.

I did an “arrows inventory” recently and checked my own participation in things, where are my arrows down, where am I unconscious and causing harm? How do I pour more energy into the parts of my life that are arrows up, clearly good for all, clearly glowing and growing a new beautiful future? I did this on the day Alex Pretti was executed because I wanted to fly to Minnesota and rage out. But when I scanned deeper, that urge would have actually been arrows down, for me. Wherever we are, we have to figure out how to contribute, arrows-uppedly, to this now. This is how we become regenerative farmers of our own reality. What does this challenge wake up in us and how can we contribute something to the world in an arrows up way?

Sometimes getting hyper focused on trying to fix a specific problem, that’s geographically far away, can paralyze us into inaction, check out and dysregulation, but we can understand that this is a global shake down, break down and wake up call on all levels, and we can become more effective with our energy and spend less time in dysregulated shamey paralysis.

What if we saw/experienced all arrows-up actions, thots and beliefs as part of the solution, valuable, important and doable right here right now, and started to develop a way of celebrating them as stones of the path of freedom and love for all that we’re building, and all this dark night of the soul stuff is showing us exactly where there is no path yet. We get to be the ones to build it.

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These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included.

If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating.

Outside these triangles are things I cannot control - a late autumn wind, full of snow and tearing apart the baby willow tree I planted this year, or the spirals of cherry and lemon yellow leaves peekabooing in and out of view, and that one old chicken, Dino, the trail we are building, on pause now that the snows have come early.

Me too on pause. Did I ever suspect that Stopping Being a Person Who is Willing to Have a Cell Phone would result in such a giant uptick in the soulful staring out of triangles?

I did not anticipate such an outcome. Still correlating the data, but I wonder if the energy I used to try and have a healthy relationship with a smart robot was the exact kind of energy that I need to dream, to make, to live with an adequately sturdy and steadfast presence. Like a late appearing and unlikely hero in a movie, attention blooms, nearly unspeakably precious and rare. I grieve how much of it I wasted spectating the lives of others whose opinions I neither value nor enjoy.

I spend a lot of time curled up like a dog in front of the woodstove. There is a soft recovery going, or, not all of me jumps out of the cage all at once. Maya says

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom.

What if the triangles are portals - little geometric resting harbors for my eyes while all the things I have avoided come for me, like dementors tsk tskings how I could ever think I could outrun myself, my depths, the really really important shit that I just can’t handle when I stay to shallow too long. In the quiet, in between the cascading leaves, these worries, fears, half chased dreams all come and demand some kind of tribute.

2

This caged bird is slowly experimenting with life outside the cage. I drop my son off at rehearsal and tell him if his plans change he just has to come find me. I’m not all that sure where I’m going to be either. I guess at a few options that he might call to see if I’m there. He mocks me, “Oh, hi Plant bar full of a million people, is there a curly haired person there, talking loudly with a stranger about something deeply personal and they’re probably both crying by now, and she’s covered in markers and a thousand notebooks? Yeah could you go ask her if she’s my mom?”

Despite feeling like a lost puppet with freshly cut strings, some of the payoffs sparkle right and bright in my face : (having to) pay a new kind of attention as I move through the world - an inner and forgotten cartography lighting up and coming back online, the growing sense of having time returning, like I have more of it somehow, the refilling of long depleted attention wells. I can just sit in a long long conversation and not feel an urge to do anything other than keep following the thread. No false staccato rhythm of do something, check phone, do something else, check again. The attention capacity well refills slowly.

I feel a little like I did when I hit an artery while biking and almost bled out and had to lay down for a month to regrow my plasma. Again, triangles help. The soft misty world outside fading to winter. Yesterday I started a fire and felt the habit-urge to Go Do Shit and Accomplish something but the fire was so beguiling. I curled up on the little cushion in front of it and had a strange sense as I slipped off to sleep that the fire was watching me.

The free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

Am I too dramatic? I most certainly am. Do I place too much power and emphasis on what is only a simple tool? Likely. Tho, equally likely you’re reading this on your phone.

Quick Q: when is the last time you chased fat worms at dawn? Or named the sky your own?

3

But I digress. I promised myself (and lied) that this essay wasn’t going to be about stupid smart phones and I have no idea where the birds came from. But I suppose I had to.

Every habit, action, attitude or pattern of thinking, that keeps my life from functioning as a refuge from the outer Burning-down-life, is a gap in my sanity, a shattering of my ability to function, to live a genuine life, to dance and to serve from a coherent, stable place. Because the thought of becoming a refuge for my true self, and safe harbor for other’s homecoming is one of the sweetest and truest hopes I’ve ever dared hope.

4

Meg Wheatley:

“An island of sanity is a place of possibility and refuge, a cohesive community of people who know they cannot survive these violent tsunamis alone, who know that staying together in healthy relationships is the only way to accomplish their good work. … Ideally, these refugia endure, expand and connect so that new life emerges when conditions allow.”

I once had an old poet friend once pause before she read/performed someone else’s poem, she closed her eyes, and then she licked the spine of the book. A kind of homage. The poet she was about to read had torn open a part of her and given her language and access to that formerly unknown part of herself. Thank you poets. Thank you activist poet elders (Meg). For the access. For the bridges in. And the lantern words that light our way back home to each other.

Realizing that islands of coherence is what I have been doing/being/working towards these last five years pointedly, and in a preparatory way, all my life, gave me access and a sudden whoosh of coherence, things started flying together, activating, making new sense, allies coming out of the woodwork, all with heart for coherence, hearts for goodness for all.

And o what tenderness has come! Tenderness for how tricky and difficult it is to become safe harbors for ourselves and each other in this time of Great Change. And, tender fierceness that no matter how difficult or seemingly impossible it is, this is the work before us. And holding all those tender threads, there is an assurance that we came for this, this time, this chaos, this dance. And that we are certainly more suited for the work than we are for the hiding from it.

5.

Lauren Burke talks about starting small and finding islands of coherence amidst your current life. While I work on big projects building islands of coherence, the wisdom to keep viscerally connected to where I experience coherence is like a compass.

“These islands are little pockets where you can thrive and touch a sense of wholeness and deeper purpose, remembering that we need other people and beings, literally to survive and also to show and reflect back to us our wholeness. What if these islands are created precisely because we are willing to gather together in vulnerability and care, and show each other our rough edges? In terms of creating change, the more pockets of coherence there are within a system, the more profound the effects are on the greater whole.

Find your islands of coherence. What spaces allow you to gather coherently together, in the mystery, the mess and magic of your humanness?”

6.

I want to speak to a madness in all of us, this grand rush to fix, to patch to help, to try and prop up or correct. It’s largely why I have been quiet this long while. The haste to fix often ended up paralyzing me, also, coming down off of something not quite screen addiction, but how I’d unwittingly become a kind of mealy bratty person who is constantly needing some kind of stimulation from the outer and can’t just sit and be and do the good work I came to do/be.

All that to say, the new vision for this writing will hopefully feel like falling asleep in front of fires together and staring out of triangles and watching the seasons become and unbecome. And will, over time, grow to serve as a refugia for the new worlds that the future is calling through us.

All my love

Natalie

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An angel, as defined by the American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition, is “a typically benevolent celestial being that acts as an intermediary between heaven and earth.”

The first angel baby I consciously remember being near was a feisty “communard” when I was living at an intentional community in Rutledge Missouri called Sandhill Farm. Angel baby Lindsey was visiting and in the two days she’d been there she’d incited the women to a frenzy about the injustice of not being able to also be topless when it was hot and we wanted to. She also joke-scoffed at my washing a ziplock bag for ten minutes to get it grease free. She spoke often of how our hearts knew how to become simple and in tune with the earth and each other, but our minds would always mess things up worse because it just organize recreate patterns from the past. In the week she was there we voted to try out the topless project. It had mixed results. I ended up burning a titty while frying bacon and also got to make a whole field of Mennonite men wildy uncomfortable while I and my fiercesome maidens harvested sorghum in a field beside them, tits OUT.

I often think of that week, a kind of stolen pleasure, a pattern of freedom and embodied playfulness and equality I have rarely had a chance to experiment with in real time in this life. I still have a little bacon splatter scar on my boob.

Then there was old jazzer Teddy, on an all night bus ride to Georgia. How did we fall into feeling so comfortable with each other? I was a young white woman going to get my kiddo, he was an old and accomplished black musician and producer and we stayed up all night telling each other our deepest secrets, and singing and working on harmonies together. When I arrived at my destination in the morning I felt as tho I’d had the deepest and most restorative night of sleep in my life when in fact we didn’t even attempt to sleep. When we said goodbye we somehow knew not to try to stay in touch. There was a heightened awareness in the air around us. Something precious and irreplicable had happened. Some force greater than ourselves had orchestrated our rendezvous, an entirely platonic but LOVE SATURATED time of human togetherness that filled and renewed both our coffers.

My angel baby lady son met me when she was eight years old, and her mama had joined our community in Cumberland Maine. One night Lila was studying me rolling on the floor with the kids, doing acroyoga and decided that she had found a parent but didn’t need a mom, and since her father was awol, she later asked if I would be her dad. I said yes in an almost joking way (a dad? What?) but then we lived into it, over time, unpacking what that decision would or could mean for us. She began spending summers and holidays. We found a particular groove of her being able to explore her authentic self with our family because that’s one of our central values and not of her family of origin. I began to understand the power of consciously choosing family and bringing devotion and my best self to those choices. The presence of a lady son in our family has expanded and pushed the boundaries of what we know to be true about ourselves, family and love. Being her dad is one of the greatest joys of this life.

I met my angel baby priest friend recently in a comment section about collapse. I watched her shine lights on people’s struggles, to reframe the hopelessness to be born with inquiry and intentionality. I fell in love with the quality of light within her that cannot be diminished. As our friendship has deepened (she is far away in Canada and there is enough political and border instability that the friendship has started to feel like a wartime friendship where we hold each other thru the insanity and unbearable suffering, but can’t yet meet in person.). Each day we send each other “our moment” in a voice memo, the one experience from our day where we felt fully alive or deeply true in some way. I didn’t know that I needed a friendship as big as Life itself. I didn’t know that a friendship could function as a spiritual dojo, like the way the giant pine outside my window houses hundreds of birds and their beautiful birdy lives. I find myself leaning into the friendship, the more I share, the truer I am, the bigger it becomes as she rises in kind. It’s a refuge, an island of sanity, a place to unravel a bit in order to discover where a new coherence is emerging.

Lastly I recently met two angel baby lovers in a glorious plant bar in West Asheville where I was out walking well for the first time since I broke a lot of bones in my encounter with a Mack truck. I hadn’t worked out in the world in a long time (hurricane Helene put our world on pause in so many ways) and I found myself drawn to the counter filled with plants and a view of the sunny sunny world. After some time a gentleman in a handsome sweater and a birdlike fairy woman in robes sat beside me and I felt the energy of my work suddenly bloom, an energetic infusion. Whiffs of their connection and conversation would drift over me like lilacs in bloom in a neighbor’s yard. I noticed how unguarded and playful, while being deeply revering of each other. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen a couple interact with less codependence. She was so full of poetry and insights, him quiet and grounded and so fully receiving her. It was a dance of balance and harmony in action. I was delighted to be in the frequency of their loving play. Before I left I shared a tiny bit of my respect and deeply felt joy in being able to witness their stable and devoted love and found out they’re substackers and were working on their articles together. Later that day when I shared my moment of the day it was this tiny second where her sharing of a moment with a spring ephemeral coincided with a man on the street coming upon a dog tied up outside and the absolute joy bonanza reunion those two had in front of me (tho they had just met.)

I’m collecting nutrients. After we meet and heal our shadow places there is often a barren bleached out crater where we couldn’t grow or receive Life’s gifts safely. So the sweetest nutrient receiving often comes in those thirsty crater spaces. These angel babies are also bringing their authentic bloom as a gift to the world and to me. That bloom often has tendrils of future patterns we are growing towards being able to capacitate and embody.

I’m fully on Angel Baby Watch now. My soul is weary of tracking the way people are dirty shits and scoundrels. My innate negativity bias will track the Going Wrong without me having to do anything. But if I’m not careful, my core relationship to humanity itself and her wild beating heart can become crudded and hideful by such relentless unbalanced noticing.

Most of you reading have been/are an angel baby to me. Freaking sexy Hannah with her lush poetry unfurling, petal by petal and inviting us to unfurl with her. The former infantry man who posted about meditation and which gun to get for the apocalypse whose sense of care and balance of the masculine and feminine was truly inspiring and shook up some examined places in me. Which I mean to say, all y’all, let’s keep being angel babies to and with each other.

As always, you honor me, and our shared culture building, with your comments and stories. Who are your angel babies now? Who’s deeply affected your life and wants an angel baby shout out?

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These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included.

If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating. Follow it where it wants to go

Note:

I’m publishing this while we are on red alert for wild fires in WNC, with go bags packed and the town next to us is currently evacuating. I offer this bit of context because this post is a deep AF conversation about safety.

Bread #1

When I was 16 I was attacked by a bear while doing my first solo backpacking trip. No phones. It was dusk and I’d set up a tent and was eating lots of greasy delicious food when I saw a shadow the size of a small car come towards me. I backed into the tent as I saw a giant paw rake the tent side open. I frantically unzipped the other side and raced into the now dark woods. My feet eventually found a trail that I followed to a hiker’s tiny toilet hut. I curled up around the shitter and tried to sleep. At dawn I made my way back to find everything shredded.

Later, curled over my own despair on a curb outside a cheapo kind of store a man appeared out of the woods (for the record, I don’t believe he actually existed on this plane). He had a long silver braid and old timey clothes. He walked with a walking stick that felt more like a companion than object. He asked why I was crying and my mouth remembered how to work as I gasped out the whole sordid tale. He waited patiently as I sobbed the especially hard parts. When I was all done I looked up expectantly, and couldn’t have been more surprised if he had turned into a spaceship. He was doubled over laughing. I waited.

He was shaking as if a great comedian had just dropped the boom. I waited some more. Eventually he looked up, wiped his eyes, and gave me a wink. Casually, he threw a package of spearmint green floss onto my backpack with all the pockets hanging off, torn wide open and said over his shoulder, “you’re not the kind of girl to let a little ol’ bear attack stop you, are you?”

I believe that my relationship to safety was forged in the fires of me going back into those fucking woods.

I spent my last tiny amount of dollars to get what junk food I could afford, sewed my pack back up and did the three day hike, alone. I’ve never been scared of the woods or bears since. I think if I’d run from that and let it set the tone of my sense of safety I would have lived a very very small life. Not to get too heavy with the metaphors, but what if the challenges are here to launch-bless our biggest truest selves into existence?

Here’s the printable link to do this a (different kind of) fun way. Absorb it, be whimsical, be embodied. Get scissors, slow down, glue macaroni to things. Be the thing you glue the macaroni to. If you can’t get it printed, send me a message with your address and I’m happy to mail you it. We long to be deliciously engaged by life, and so, we have to start engaging ourselves this way (yo, take the time to print!!) Else, here’s the read!

There’s a joke in our tribe’s world that’s not really a joke

and it goes something like, safety third, or, often, safety 29, as a response to the “safety first” notion. I’ve always felt that considering safety first often put me in the wrong mindset, a fearful, cautious, slightly suspicious cast to my gaze, like a bitter policeman who’s been on the force too long, forced to always look for what’s wrong in life until his heart breaks. I didn’t want to bring that bitter cop energy to my own life, so, as a mom, I just bumped it down the list, with other things vying for first and second positions, fun or authenticity, or a deeply held knowingness that this choice was correct at some profound level even if it results in some kind of challenge or drama.

Maybe one and two have always been something like “on pathness” like, this is right for me to engage. Connected to this choice was an innate idea that when I engaged in experience with life from feeling really called to do it and be in it, that my manner and fullness of participation with the moment would allow me to meet the challenges at the highest level. In this musing, I realized that half hearted and fearful participation leads to situations that feel out of control or scary to me. Having not really chosen a thing, I’m baffled about. This feels unsafe.

Contemplation

what’s in your number one and two spot? What are you doing in your life that feels half-hearted? How safe do you feel in those places?

I used to work with people who were in emergency situations

and I’d often find that doing this one Great Trick almost always allowed the person to calm down, let the challenge to turn over into something they are aware of, and to shift into an open, soft, receiving gear. I’d help them develop a bare bones strategy for what they could do now, given their current run, to allow the most basic essence of what they were wanting change on. This forced them to get out of learned helplessness, out of the avoidant, distracted paralysis so many of us live our modern lives in a state of. In the shift, the person envisions themselves crawling out of their berth they’ve been hiding in, and finding the bravery to walk back up onto the deck and put their hands on the steering wheel of the great ship of their life they are sailing on. In that position, in that willingness to develop a strategy they bring back their sovereignty and sense of empowered presence. In the doing of this they will surely have to notice and accept all the places where they’ve become a victim of their own thinking, their own unfelt emotions, their own avoidant patterns. The strategy always included an inner layer and an outer layer.

Most people don’t have a current or adequate strategy to feel sovereign and safe in this time of great change, increasing uncertainty as our civilization collapses. How nerve SHATTERING is that? (this from a person who spent the day spraying down her house with a hose? And moving gas cans, to um, that tree over there so they explode, um, differently?)

Contemplation

do you have a strategy for staying in the center of the storm during this time of extreme change? Does it have an inner and outer component? Do you have a support crew who share your strategy? Have you ever had a time when you felt really lined up with yourself and your way of being? How did that feel? How did things go for you?

Someone once told me the story of the Chinese farmer

who gets a horse, which soon runs away. A neighbor says, "That's bad news." The farmer replies, "Good news, bad news, who can say?" The horse comes back and brings another horse with him. The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it, then is thrown and badly breaks his leg. “So sorry for your bad news," says the concerned neighbor. "Good news, bad news, who can say?" the farmer replies. In a week or so, the emperor's men come and take every able-bodied young man to fight in a war. The farmer's son is spared.

I like to hold this story as a way of reestablishing some ground in my heart/body when I’m feeling scared, hyper-focused on something yucky and the mind is spinning out that For Sure things are The Worse and Will Be Forever The Worst. My mind doesn’t know how life really works. I have a deep sense that our outer reality is in response to the inner one. And there are a thousands of oceans of mystery around all that. So I work to feel for a sense of Big Perspective cosmic safety, the safety of being held in the Mystery, of being on a larger soul journey that our minds will never understand.

Contemplation

What’s your current relationship to challenge? When things go wrong what does your mind do? Next time a challenge comes, pause and watch what your mind does. Does it catastrophize? Avoid? Blame? Complain and set fires of drama? Have you ever had a time when you responded “in gear” to a challenge and it felt graceful and didn’t unseat your sense of safety?

A lack of gratitude

is like a garden with no compost or adequate sun. Gratitude accuratizes and restores balance. I literally could not list the number of times that I have felt eerily thin, achingly alone, freaked out and somehow cosmically Impossible and then I do a small list on things that are going well or okay, and suddenly my Life Force returns and I feel possible again. I have fuel for the dance. Deliberate gladness is a self renewing fuel resource. Especially when shit is hard and nuts. Then it is a revolutionary act of bringing resources into the collective Field.

Contemplation

A lot of folks connect deliberate gratitude with spiritual bypass or toxic positivity. What’s your current relationship with gratitude? Do you have any wounds around feeling empowered to focus on the good as a radical act of self care? How do gratitude and a sense of abiding safety connect with each other?

I recently had a revelation

about my emotional life. Having any revelation that recognizes and values my emotional life is, in and of itself, a revelation. It came via my work with the gene keys where I realized how I often think my emotions instead of really actually feeling them. I think them so I can protect myself from the pain, vulnerability and inevitable change that comes when I do actually feel them. I saw my mind like a bug zapper just zinging these unfelt emotions away from me and none of the raw energy of the emotions was going into the cauldron of my body and my life, to be burned up in the alchemy that happens when we fully feel our stuff. It’s a kind of mindless, miraculous magic. It’s like Fantasia with magical creatures and brooms flying around to a symphony of harmony when we let our emotions move and groove and breathe and be. Also! When I feel something, FULLY feel it and let it just be what it is, not only does the emotion move, and become a different state but I move too. Feeling my shit puts me on the boat of my true life. I see a lot of people walking around thinking their feels, and the innate anxiety creates a kind of hiss in their daily life. Also, the feeling of not being on the Right Beautiful Green Boat. A constant yearning to move with the groove.

Contemplation

if you truly feel an emotion, it moves and you with it. If you’ve been angry for 2 years, you are thinking your emotions, not feeling them. How do you feel? What space do you have to feel your stuff? Is it okay to feel your feels? What comes up when you think about feeling more and thinking less?

Feeling your stuff implies

one, you know HOW to feel your things, safely, honestly, effectively, and two you have the space, time and resources to do so. Raw life needs emulsification, digestion, integration. Our emotional cauldron is where a lot of that happens. You kind of have to be in your own lane to know your emotions and tend them. A lot of us are out of our lanes, via various addictions that float us over so we don’t have to engage or grow or hurt well. We keep our loops full with constant media consumption, or worrying so there’s not an ounce of space for divine insight to burble up into. A lot of us hang out in what I call non-Listening states. These insights are here to inform us about many things, including how to stay safe. We are animals, we know how to go to ground when a storm is coming. When we give our attention to so many random things we scatter that animal clear knowingness until it’s so diffuse we get frightened without it. The challenges of our life get a tiny bit of our attention or none at all and so they build as festering pressures, instead of being the joyful launch pads they are designed to be.

Contemplation

ever being in a clear listening state? How did it feel? Did you feel safe? Did that feeling of safety teach you anything about innate safety? What’s the quality of your listening now? What’s your relationship with spaciousness and open loops?

Another fun angle on safety is lying.

Trying to be what you ain’t. No one is more nervous or unseated than a con running a con, hyper vigilant that someone is going to cotton on to their real game. Only, most of us aren’t doing this masked, inauthentic thing in a fun heisty way, we have just gotten very far from our essential expression, have mostly forgotten it exists and is worth heading towards and even if we remembered we have no real idea how to make that journey. I have found that using some wisdom framework to kind of echo-locate my way out of conditioned, false self and back into the green green glowing joy of my essential self helps with a very difficult emergence. I use gene keys (here’s a free mini course to begin) or human design, but even not choosing those, it’s been helpful to understand that most scary people are not being who they really are. Their conditioned patterns are running the show and their cosmic humanity is under siege of those patterns. The safest and most beautiful people I know are the ones who have deeply met and accepted themselves and their shadow patterns. For a long time I was trying to be something I’m not and I hurt people, lied, manipulated and caused harm. The gene keys was a way to run all those crazy patterns thru many filters until they became essential.

Contemplation

do you feel like yourself? When do you most feel like your true self? What parts of your life are still in shadow? What parts of those around you are true, or in shadow? What kind of journey do your shadow bits want from you? How might you make a little more room to give a more generous and friendly attention to those parts?

The poet Mary Oliver famously asked:

“What is it you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?” And I think that when we get buried under mountains of unprocessed trauma, emotions we don’t really feel safe enough to feel, and the paralysis that is an appropriate response to Rome burning down around our ears, we lose track of the raw imperative inside her question - there is something precious about this flame that demands us participating with our hearts healed and honest and in the game of life. Your child self remembers your wildness, how you come alive when you’re alone in a forest for a few moments and that part of you comes online again, that wild and precious steward of life, fierce, warrior song maven, proud to be in this life, on mission, and ready to show up. There are so many pieces of this game of life that we miss when we never feel safe. Safety is kind of like building a mandala out of deeply contemplated colors. Something to with acceptance of the wild west time of life we are in, and even to remember that you deliberately came here for this ride.

Contemplation

Beyond all the fear you’re a big wave rider! Something to do with how former traumas keep us from experiencing now and just keep us repeating the harm pattern which is so frightening to be inside of. Something to do with acknowledging the dance between the inner and outer realities. Something to do with owning your essential nature and gently releasing the false patterns. Something about tuning into the cosmic gps that’s blipping deep inside of you and daring to listen to what you hear. Let these knowings swirl inside of you. Write to me to share what turns up for you!

Time for the bread

Here’s the last story that gave me an important molecule as I built my mandala of safety.

When my daughter had her first child, she did a home birth and the labor when long. Three days in with a pile of midwives, all of powerfully underslept and disheartened by the fact that her labor had stopped progressing I fell asleep on the bathroom floor (weird thread in this post) and dreamt quickly and intensely. The room I was in was filling with blood and my daughter was drowning in it. I woke with a start and told my daughter we needed to go to the hospital.

Here’s the safety part: in a moment of temporary relaxation my inner cosmic gps could talk to me. There was a very strong mental allegiance to holding course with the home birth plan, but my inner fire was lit by this clarity and I fought with my animal body. I had heard “go to ground” and I raged until we were in a car with a very passionate driver who got pulled over (nearest hospital was over an hour away) but the cop heard my daughter screaming and told us to go as fast as we possibly could and gave us an escort thru four counties.

When we arrived, she was rushed into a room, examined and an emergency c- section was immediately set in motion because the cord was infected and both she and the child were in serious danger. In the operating room I swayed on my feet as they pulled Monte out, and put him in my arms. I was mad with a kind of insane gratitude, that I fucking listened, that something deep in me spoke and I listened.

Now, look around you, notice the world, notice the patterns. Who is listening deeply and well? Who is acting lovingly from essence? Not many?

Let it start with you.

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These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included.

If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating. Follow it where it wants to go

It’s hard to describe the animal body’s response to an impossible-shouldn’t-be-happening-crisis so soon after another, impossible-shouldn’t-be-happening-crisis.

A few nights ago my primal nature came alive as we smelled smoke and started getting alerts on our phones. The things I used to know about where I live are so rapidly changing I have whiplash; climate safe haven, high humidity jungle, mountain protection against hurricanes and tornadoes. So when hurricanes happen that are so intense they’re called a geological event, or uncontrollable wildfires crop up 10 miles from my daughter’s house my response time is slow, lagging in the cognitive dissonance - this is impossible, this shouldn’t be happening. When I walk thru an airport and everyone is on their phones and no one sees anyone and we are in full blown Wall E dystopia my mind reels, this is sci fi, this can’t be happening.

The night of the wildfires followed one of the most humanly difficult days of my entire life, with a domino of personal tragedies. That night I manically sobbed to a friend “I thot the apocalypse would be more fun! Zombies are just so straight forward.”

But even in my very disregulated stress state, I began to hear a little inner voice nudging me to break away from the news alerts and to go be quiet with myself. Like a mother putting a child in, a tantrum, in a quiet room to recenter. I knew clearly that if I did this I would hear something different.

I absolutely did not do that. The adrenaline panic momentum was solidly established and I had nothing left to shift gears, so I very humanly flailed. But I heard a window try to open in me. And my family is becoming well versed in those kinds of windows opening.

The day before Hurricane Helene hit, my daughter Persephone called me in a tizzy because no one would listen to her about how she had a sense that a really bad storm was coming on. Because this had never happened here, and because it was supposedly impossible for it to happen here, no one listened to her and told her that her anxiety was getting the best of her. (I believe that chronic anxiety is not actually anxiety but an obsessive avoidance of your deeper life but real anxiety is our animal bodies giving us information: something in the now needs a different quality of attention.)

Persephone had to work thru her chronic anxiety to be able to discern the animal body stuff. I was far away from her so I did what I could, which was to tell jokes. And accept and validate. Pretty soon she slipped into a Listening state and I asked her what she heard from there. She rattled off a list of things to do. Move cars to high ground, water and candle up, create a burm with community to protect house from river, put together a package of fun and snacks for kids if it got rough. Then she went and boss bitched all these things into existence, which turned out to be the exact things, one day later, that saved her family, their home and their cars. The wisdom was inside her, that cosmic GPS that’s connected to All and has the birds eye view, way above the tree line of our daily lives.

I see many people waking up to the tiramisu of difficulties, that is necessary to living thru an epoch change, and the resulting collapse. If you look around at how people are dealing with it, most are somewhere in the five stages of grief.

Most are still in the pretend it’s not happening phase because they’re already taxed as fuck in their daily lives, their innate human capacities whittled by trying to live in an artificial environment.

Some are in the anger, hulk smash, men (fill in your villain of the day) are to blame phase. There’s a lot of life force to be reclaimed in embracing this phase. When I see people stabilize out here for a long time, they’ve come home in their anger instead of allowing it to be a bridge, a clarifying fire, a cleansing storm.

Some are in the desperate bargaining phase, which is “…a defense against the feelings of helplessness experienced after a loss. It happens when people struggle to accept the reality of the loss and the limits of their control over the situation.” — Some of the key characteristics of the bargaining phase are: Trying to predict the future and assuming the worst, wishing or praying for a different outcome or thinking or saying "What if…" or "If only I/we had…" or "If I do this then…"1

Many, many people are in the depression part of their process, and because they’re largely experiencing that depression in both isolation and misinformation overload it is harder for them to move thru it by feeling it and working with it, instead, it’s just paralyzing them and addiction and depression are the best of friends, like two wheels on a bike stand, you pedal forever and go nowhere.

I believe the final phase of the grief model, acceptance, holds the key to accessing all the practical solutions locked deep inside our cosmic vessels. When we are not accepting something it’s because we fundamentally consider it to be wrong and bad. When we catastrophize life that way, we scare the shit out of ourselves and trigger our primal defenses and go into fight or flight (very very far away from the Hall of Deep Listening.)

I, personally, have found tremendous relief in accepting that we are the simultaneous systems collapse of a great change. I don’t love it, I accept it. I don’t love when my children have to go thru an experimental phase that feels edgy to me but I accept them in their totality. And acceptance gives me traction on true ground. It’s a yes to now.

By accepting any challenge we kind of put our arms around it, like a child we love and we can listen to it and hear what it’s been trying to tell us. Acceptance is the first step in being able to calm the Eff down enough to access your deeper listening place, the quiet grove in you where you cosmic GPS is regularly broadcasting.

People are actively looking for practical ways to move with grace thru the Great Change. Learning to access and cultivate this ability to truly Listen, and to calm yourself and others down enough to Listen, is at the tippy top of any advice I’d give. I think it’s actually the only thing on my advice list.

It’s the whole advice. In any situation, be one of the pillars that allows safe passage into the temple of true Listening.

Because the wisdom that comes thru is so different for each of us! It is unique, mission information-bytes on our pilgrim’s progress, the next lesson in our earth school curriculum. Sometimes the wisdom we hear is temporary, like, get out of the way and you miss some physical catastrophe. Sometimes it is a bigger change, taking this drug would bring a necessary relief and relaxation of pressure. What if we got so good at this kind of Listening that it became a habit, we kept Listening and kept adjusting, ever fine tuning, like the Waymakers of ancient Polynesia, charting their way across thousands of miles of open sea without any modern methods for navigation, instead paying exquisite attention to the curl of a wave, the particular trajectory of a bird.

In a larger, world-renewing kind of way, the wisdom we hear from that deep Listening is future food. Wisdom molecules we will all use to build a new way of being human. We are codiscovering the molecules of that way in our moments of deep Listening. And harvesting them one loving interaction at a time. Where one of us is soft enough to be a pillar to afford safe passage to the temple of Listening.

There are so many practical tips for how to get soft and helpful like this, for yourself, for others, with others. Accept what’s happening and feel all the feels that keep you from that acceptance, keep feeling until peace lets you know you’ve felt enough. Hold the symptoms of collapse in a larger context and try not to pathologize the dying of a system whose time has come. Lean outside of your vanity prison where it’s you against everyone else and instead of batting away another’s suffering try to find where it correlates in you. Ever been lost? Hauntingly lonely and ashamed of feeling so? Jealous and petty and super left out of the party? Anguished and collapsing under the weight of grief you can find the courage to neither name nor feel? Good, me too. Me too a lot. Connecting these dots softens, invites patience, returns the peace that allows a return to a true perspective.

But who actually listens to practical advice? Abraham says words don’t teach and goshdagnabit if that ain’t just all the way true. They might create space for true wisdom to emerge, they might even relieve something but only lived experience actually teaches. So here’s some recent living.

There’s this single flamingo on an island in northern Florida right now. He was blown off course by a climate fueled hurricane, and tho he’s an innately communal bird who does “…not do well on their own in the wild. These vibrant birds need a company in almost every single task that they do.” 2He’s there alone. And it’s not his nature or preference but he has to figure himself out while waiting for his zugunruhe to kick in, that migratory restlessness, the cosmic gps in birds. Ever since my partner told me about this bird I can’t stop wondering about him (we are actually going to that island in a week my obsession has grown so vast.)

When he finally gets the zugunruhe urge to go, how does he actually navigate? Birds can get compass information from the sun, the stars, and by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. Can we?

You need to know that I just learned that flamingos are born white and get pink by eating shrimp. And EVERYONE ELSE is like, duh, I was born knowing that.

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And nextly, at the center of a hurricane is a quiet, calm center.

While the destruction happens, the eye of the storm moves. What if we became eyes of the storm for and with each other? What if we carved out a little space to nurture the skills needed to do this? I don’t love calls out for people to be better without acknowledging it’s VERY DIFFICULT TO CHANGE and only tenderness creates an ecosystem where changes is possible.

I think we have to create a little distance from the outer chaos to establish inner stability. This is how my grandson does it: when Monte received and loved his first watch, being a largely watchless and often timeless family we all marveled at this news. A watch wearer! A time lover! In our very own family as if someone had just been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. But when Persephone leaned down to synchronize his watch and set it to the “right time” he pulled his hand away, “I don’t want to be on the world’s time Mom. I want to be on my time.

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These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included.

If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating. Follow it where it wants to go

I’d just dropped off my son at school and was about to head to cowork in a little bungalow on the West side, but found myself instead, doing something very very difficult to do. I paused.

To be fair, it was accidental. I accidentally took in how cute the tree in front of me was, sway flirting in her heavy snow stoles, then throwing pine needles in the air like she just don’t care, snowfetti everywhere.

And suddenly, bam wush, wheee. I was here. In life. Happening now. Warm gush of heat from a cozy car, now a thousand times cozier. Moonroof holding the entire sky of infinite storm at bay, a warmth of personal gratitude buzzes my veins. My hand puts the gear in park, seemingly of its own accord and I can acknowledge a weariness I’d been trying to coffee away. The droopiness that wants a nap. So I do the very radical thing of putting my seat down and the tree does the very radical thing while of continuing her snow show to everyone and no one. I close my tired eyes and let the sigh happen.

You know the sigh. The nearly involuntary release pin that trap door flies you into a kind of non space, a Way Less Trying space, like ducking off the path during a marathon and letting the thundering herd, well, thunder-herd wherever they always perpetually thundering to. The heat, the soft roundness of the snow, gentling everything into the possibility of snowman white smiles, the agenda-freeness of this sliver of time, the sweet sweet draught of non-trying, all spelunk me into a relaxed state that feels very close to where my joy emerges from. Such an infinite softness here, and here also is the soil where all the seeds of my future delight lie, becoming. Also here, is my current best hack for addiction.

Not a conscious hack (I have those too) but a hack the way whales having blubber is a hack for them staying warm and floating. It’s a return to innocent wholeness, and a re-rhythming to some wave pattern more innate to human Beingness.

A kinder wave-pattern, one that accepts, with curiosity, innate human expression rather than driving over that innate expression with the studded tires of mental agenda, (that comes from hooby knows where TF or who TF). Approaching my own beingness with a mental dictatorship has been the fastest way to create an atmosphere that is PERFECT for addictive avoidant patterns to bloom up, like a hot moldy closet for the cultivation of many excellent molds.

One of the ways I survive the pain of forcing myself to be or do something that I am not is to get addicted to some response or thing or thot pattern (really, in a pinch, anything will do for getting addicted! Cheese! Vacuum commercials! Gluing buttons to other buttons!). The addiction serves a dual strategy that is both avoidant and self-soothing. 1. Avoiding. Ducking the call to express Life Force ever more genuinely thru this human vessel (and all the painful change and feelings feels and trauma heals and all the allness and messyfuckinghumanmessyshittyshit of the deconditioning process) and 2. self soothing. There is an innate anxiety that is always calling me back to true expression (call this the Cosmic GPS). It’s an indicator and gets louder and harder to ignore the further off path I get.

Lying there on my Subaru seat, watching the moonroof become all whites, then slowly melt into gooey glimpses of the puddling sky, I began to feel fat. Fat with presence. Whale blubber returning, breath by unfettered breath.

Part two, The Hammer

But after a time, using the thing (whatever it is) to avoid and soothe, becomes a pattern, something I do, not even in response to a rough moment. I just do it because the mind is efficient and reduces friction and uses repetitive for both those aims. Therefore, creative, tuned in responses are inefficient and take a lot of life energy to engage and maintain, and the mind won’t really help you do it. So I find myself in a rut that equates not being present and not listening to GPS.

The perpetual avoidant/soothe path creates an innate frailty, a thinness, an utter lack of fat blubber in the important places of our Beingness. You’ll know someone is heavy on addiction and lite on presence when they snap easily, have little sustained presence, run away from life more than they run towards it.

But in the using we are also utterly fucking up our relationship to those things/relationships/experiences that we use to avoid or soothe. When we use a thing to do something, we are inevitably in a tool/user relationship with the thing.

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When I use a hammer I have very little curiosity or wonderment about its capabilities. I arrive with a fairly certain sense of what it can or cannot do. I do never attempt to have it make a phone call for me or to warm my soup. I exclusively use it to bang things or to remove things, which I have banged. I put it away when I am thru with the banging activities. I don’t think about it after I have utilized its services. There’s a closed door energy to interaction with the hammer, show, drug, relationship, cheese, whatever. We have it niched into it’s avoidant/soothing niche and don’t get to know or truly interact with its true itsness. Whatever that might be!

I am currently listening to an audiobook that I listened to years ago. During this relistening I am frequently so moved that I have to turn the book off and weep for all the feels I’m feelsing. My experience of it this time around is like a new book. I only vaguely remember the plot line and often realize that what I had remembered of it before was wrong. As I pondered why this was, I remember that my son and I tore thru this audiobook on our travels during a period of time when my heart was working on getting ready to enter the pilgrimage of devoted marriage, so, of course, all my fear patterns and corrupt beliefs were UP and terrifying me so I was devouring this long epic fantasy as a way to avoid drowning in the terror overwhelm. I was using the book to avoid and stave off the emotional torrent of liberation that was trying to break through me.

Now, I’m not. I listen to it in down times, or in baths. I soak up the nuances, the long character development, the moments that are so resonant with my own shero’s journey. I am with the book. I am in a relationship with the moment. Because I’m not desperately using it to avoid my deeper life I hear when I have had enough. I can easily feel when I full of food, or when I crave silence, or alone time. These are recovered knowingnesses hard won by first engaging a lot of things as ways to avoid and soothe. Then to recover my original innocence with a thing! Ah! The pleasures of reading and fucking and drinking and feasting! And communicating and frolicking online and playing with connection and network building and leaning into experience without the addictive slant. What purity of heart is fed by this way of experiencing

Here’s the play by play. A difficult feeling emerges or tries to, and my nervous system interprets the discomfort as an intruder and tries to send me into fight or flight. I struggle to avoid the freak out melt down. Messiness is so unattractive. So I scan my immediate environment for the most effective way to avoid facing and exploring the chaos pain circus that’s trying to get my attention. I just do. Despite all the nice things I just wrote about not doing it, I am human. Avoiding discomfort is hardwired. Sometimes I am able to avoid directly addressing the hard thing, once, or twice. But I know now, it’ll keep coming until I greet, meet, and learn to accept and allow its wisdom that’s locked inside it. So, in this view, addiction is becoming way less fucking useful. It becomes inefficient to avoid the invitations of the cosmic GPS, unloving and boring to use something to avoid experience. More and more I remember this is what I am here for. It is only in the fullness of presence to now that I am With Life, and not against it.

Somehow, and who knows how, I have been gifted by a true goal. I’ve ever had such a heart-swelling one before: I want to be a genuine human. Living a full life cycle. Hopping over no essential steps. With transparency and love for the whole damn game. This means I’m excited to move up the levels, to become an adult, an elder, a cosmic elder holding the stars inside my heart’s eyes to help guide the next sprens and sprites coming up the pilgrimage path.

The burning fire of that one genuine goal holds me when my soft and lazy mind wants to avoid seeing and experiencing pain, or admitting I was wrong and hurtful, or that I need to give energy to transmuting and loving open ancestral wounds that I came in with.

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It creates pauses. The gravitas of the goal draws from The Field, the space it needs to come alive and affords me those brief, whale fattening moments, to buoy and pad my fearful mind before the urgent pressure to avoid comes along and brains me senseless. The goal lends me the gift of fairy sight. I can see myself racing along the shunt/scaffolding path, not seeing or touching or interacting with or healing any of the difficult things and then I see myself turning the fuck around and having to come back through the room, again and again until I’ve opened every window, dusted every dusty difficult thing.

The deliciousness of this distinction is that those things that were once used as shunts or avoidance tools now get to be whatever kind of hammer or pillow or funny strange object they actually are or can be.

Some of them have absolutely no life or true gift beyond being a shunt or avoidance technique, like heroin, or white sugar or using and hurting other people. But others will right themselves and stop wobbling and become sources of delight. Like this book, so full of metaphor and meaning, none of which I was able to grok or be moved by before when I was using it instead of experiencing it. Or the beer I had with my sister, whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, and which we cried over, which I didn’t finish, which wasn’t a scaffolding or an avoidance measure, but one nourishment molecule amidst all the other perfectly arriving molecules, like her being paralyzed with laughter to the point where she wasn’t clear any oxygen was getting to her legs and had to lay face down on the carpet in my my mom’s house as midnight and fin kick her legs silently while she laughed so hard we were both fairly certain she may actually particalize out into laughter.

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Prior to this I wasn’t against it per-say, I just hadn’t really heard anything very interesting about it. Also, I was listening from a mentality that was primarily trying to avoid suffering because that current mental framework didn’t understand either truth or suffering or genuine growth or karmic destiny or anything really, and it certainly didn’t have adequate skills for working with, loving with, and dancing open the gifts inside a challenge, honestly met.

My history with honesty and truth reads like a whole season of Jerry Springer episodes. Exhibit A: I had an entire pregnancy where two possible baby daddies (I actually referred to them thusly) were on pins and needles for a paternity test. That kind of stuff. Real page turner stuff.

Because the plot line of every rom com is predicated on someone hiding their truth. That’s what turns the page. My kids and I like to undo films while we’re watching by identifying exactly how short and boring a film would be if the people involved were just frank and up front with each other and with themselves.

I started to whiff my own dishonesty, slowly and kind of sneakily (when a part of you is trying to realign to your Essence, the conditioned part is gonna pitch a fit because change is hard and inefficient and we avoid it).

I heard Martha Beck talk about a year of honesty so I did one too. Except I didn’t. But I really really tried to. The shallowness of my trying and the resulting bummer of a year matched the shallowness of my own relationship to truth itself. I focused a lot on not telling other people lies out of my mouth. I didn’t even consider the lies I told myself or even deeper, the fact that running a pattern that runs counter to my

Essence is a lie. I didn’t even succeed in not lying to people with my mouth hole. It was a bit of a wash of a year.

I tried various measures of this over ten years and I think it’s like asking many people to open a lid until finally, pop! It goes and everyone “loosened it” but really, maybe, you just worked up the gumption to do it right?

So when I met the mental and spiritual framework of the Gene Keys did it surprise anyone that my core shadow, to work through in this life, is dishonesty? (gk 59 in my purpose & Attractor sphere for you nerds out there). It surprised no one. And, if I was a betting man, I’d wager that if you (the reader you, you!) get real about the thing you are most dicey and hard to grow on in yourself and you ran your gk chart you’d find it reflected there. (For questions about how this works please refer to the Great Mystery at the center of all things.)

So then I had this new centrifuge for truth, this new wind tunnel of pressure, and a new expansive perspective - all pushing and elevating and awakening a more genuine and innate relationship to truth itself. I remember noticing this was shifting for me when I was on a call where a woman was railing against a young person for not just “telling the truth” and why was she such a yellow bellied coward etc? When I found myself defending the person who was having a hard time sharing “their truth” by explaining that we have to create a garden of gentleness and self acceptance if we want truth seeds to have a place to come home, and grow and tell their stories. Slowly, I’d started to actually understand truth.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned as a lifetime liar, newly hot on truth.

Intimacy is the goal. Wherever you are lying, you cannot be truly intimate with that place. Intimacy is like building an invisible house of cards with yourself or someone else. Saying something is true for you when it’s not is crashing the house of cards. You’ll feel it. The integrity of the moment is gone. And you’ve missed a chance to experience real integral strength with that moment, which, is sad. Because if you weren’t truly present (requires your exact truth), what were you doing? What were you present with?

You probably don’t know you’re lying about most of the things you’re lying about. If you’re still deconditioning, unmasking, self-recovering (most of us are) you are likely operating on some codes, patterns, lifeways and expectations that aren’t real for You and you are at some point in the process of unraveling all that, but “all that” is held together by lies. And if you try to fire hose them all at once, you will burn your life, and the house you live in. You have to let life bring awareness of these things slowly and in a timing you can handle (spoiler alert, if you’re having a truth emerging for you now, you can handle it, you do have the tools for it or it wouldn’t be up for you, so yay.) I suggest “show me”prayers. Arms wide open, passionyells to the wide open skies, “Show me! Show me what I need to see/be/open to.” It’s very dramatic and effective. A showdown at the Cosmic Corral. The scene will play well in the biography of your life.

I’m a big fan of acknowledging our infinitely expansive natures, often. The truth I know or can see now is what I’m launching off of. New ones are opening up, flying in as I leap. In our house we have two rules, don’t ever willingly deceive, tell the truth you know now when you know it, and 2, accept others truths as they unfold and expect both to change and evolve a whole bunch. The person you were when you began reading this article is not the person who will finish it. (If you can, pause and take that in.)

If you feel squirrely about an area of your life, you’re likely lying about it but truth is a soft little baby and needs treats and wooing and so many cuddly blankies. So I like to use the art of contemplation here, and just kind of get curious and open a soft willingness to see beyond my current limitations or dishonest boundaries. I try to bring a different quality of attention to it. If I’m usually avoidant I try something new, like, listening or curiosity. Paying attention to the squirrely bits can help you know what parts of you are still conditioned and needing space, air, a general loosening of the reins.

I like going on a treasure hunt in my personal stories for when I was With and Really Showed Up for my Truth. I like to relive those stories. How did it feel in my body? Who did it positively impact? What was able to change? (This is using appreciative inquiry btw). I do this because of the squirrely nature of changing from masked to Essential. And for how tender and bruised our nervous systems are. So, I bolster and remind myself how good I have been at being frank and living my truth (graduate school in poetry, traveling the world with my kids and living at intentional communities, unschooling, starting many weird and funky social initiatives etc) and it does my soul and nervous system good to re enter those spaces and kind of stand there for strength as I excavate and invite more truth to the party.

David Whyte (the poet I reference ad nauseam) has this image of a house in stormy meadow, all windows and narrow with a long table down the center. Inside the house, cozy and warm and bellied up to the feast are all the parts of ourselves we accept: our kindness, our humor, our ability to handle crisis. And outside banging on the windows, hungry, forgotten and rejected, are all the parts of ourselves we cannot and do not accept. I think it’s dangerous to our abiding sense of self to just fling open the doors at once, but I do often sneak bowls of soup to them in the night and sometimes, on a brave Sunday morning, I’ll sneak one into the table. One at a time. Bowl of soup by bowl of soup.

Dishonesty has been at my feasting table for a while now. I am more honest than I’ve ever been and it’s become almost joyful to have a gritty conversation with someone where we co-correct a prior dishonesty. It’s like getting a good crack at a chiropractor. It sounds and feels like you’re breaking something but then the alignment is so liberating because it correlates to some true inner reality.

If none of these help, then get mad. Remember that after Trump’s debate people were interviewed about their views on his more than 35 bald face lies during the debate. The consensus on the response was that truth was not something they were very interested in, but safety and financial security were. As if you could ever have either without honesty.

If that doesn’t work, get practical. That invisible house of cards is the foundation of our future. If we’re lying about ourselves we’re breaking the integrity of the entire future we are trying to co-create. And we’re likely making ourselves sick. You can’t stay off path, ignoring your cosmic GPS that’s trying to pull you back to your innate truth, for very long, without your physical body wearing down in the fight. Speaking of fight, our truth is the precise fuel the authenticity revolution needs to burn true. And the authenticity revolution is the garden soil the new humanity will and is blooming out of.

If that all feels too big and overwhelming, remember Frankie, my 24 year old child, who is trying to dream a life for themselves that has meaning and goodness in an increasingly dystopian reality.

So they keep it general, they keep it honest, and they say their simple little mantra often

I live with my truth

in love.

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These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included.

If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating. Follow it where it wants to go

1. Poet David Whyte tells the tale of the warrior Beowulf, called in by King Hrothgar, to save his kingdom from the horrible beast Grendel. For three days and three nights he battled away until finally he vanquished Grendel and saved the kingdom. Everyone partied victorious, went to sleep, and that night Grendel’s mother rose from the deep and slaughtered everyone where they lay. The moral of the tale is that it’s not not your problem you’ve got to worry about, it’s the mother of the problem you’ve got to get at. It’s not Trump or guns or oil or climate change, babes, it’s what created the soil conditions for those things to bloom unchecked.

2. Something in me has always positively connected to change in general, but also, more recently, with the Great Change so the title of this piece is misleading - because when we turn a garden over, we do so that we may plant new seeds. There is great potential joy in tilling the soil, at last, and stopping time wasting trying trying to fix what is beyond fixing and was really just a bunch of experiments anyway.

3. The first year of teenage motherhood I struggled to keep up with my equally teenage friends, none of whom had hitched the wagon of their wayward life to the shooting star of a human child. Whereas they might have ten extra hours in a day I had ten extra minutes. While they flummoxed and flailed away the twin turbines that is attention and time because they were drowning in these, and had no perfect limitation to help them have a felt sense of their natural edges, I had to use my sometimes excruciating awareness of those edges to go way beyond what I would have if I had remained soft and formless, unhardened and not yet blasted apart by a meteor to the womb. The modern world is drowning in meaninglessness and can’t feel the edges of its own inner candle. My joy always feels like it has a candle somewhere deep within it.

4. Any relationship of any true heft in my life got hefty via some Very Difficult Human Shit we went thru together. The challenge demanded so much of us that we didn’t have left over energy to maintain false selves. The rigor was innately truing. I remember accidentally taking way too many shrooms on one fabled Halloween night long ago and just as the donkey’s ears sprouted on the man’s head standing in line in front of my friend Mo turned to me, stuck out her hand, and said firmly and clearly, “bond to me now.”

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5. Nebulae or star nurseries are where things get hot enough for stars to come into existence. Imagine that. Baby stars are actually born. Do you know what would be nice? Grown ups. Real ones, heartfull ones, ones who have soul-rooted integrity that bends but never breaks. But in a world o’er run by pathoadolescents, where can we find true grown ups? Here I want to overuse (in my own work) the “coal makes a diamond metaphor”. But in my boredom at imitating myself, I decided to research how this coal to diamond miracle actually happens. Turns out, it doesn’t. Happen at all. Coal doesn’t make diamonds. It’s too young and too full of plants😱 Diamonds are formed in earth’s mantle and are then “delivered to the surface by a deep-source volcanic eruption.” So, to all us baby-diamond-future-adults, our perfectly timed, deep-source volcanic eruption is here. Time to pony up

   

   .

6. When I first watched Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones I didn’t lust, I ached. Not for sweaty him, but for the veracity and mystery of his Quest. And how absolutely imperative his participation was. In many ancient traditions there are predictions of end times, times of great rebirth and renewal. We are in one such prophesied time right this hot human HUMAN moment. A prophesy from the human design/gene key perspective talks about a shift in planetary energies from Cross of Planning (been going on last 400 years, ending now) which is about strategic foresight and deliberate organization and has been a holding energy for consciousness to mature and stabilize. In 2027 we kick into

   Trail Buddies with Brownies

   Clarified, Not Crushed

   I wrote the holy shit out of this piece. It’s REALLY good and it ties a lot of stuff together and it has a FREE and astonishingly deep and effective lab I built for recovering friendship as a flowway so will you you comment something at the end? It’s so nice to hear from y’all and I’m curious how Phoenix energy is landing in your world. What are you no…

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   3 months ago · 11 likes · 8 comments · Miss Natalie Marie

   Cross of Sleeping Phoenix which is basically the cosmic gps coming online in humanity. Human Design teacher Kiara Maree describes the new cross as it “sheds outdated paradigms, invites a profound introspection that aligns our inner selves. It calls for a co-creation of a future where the transformative power of collective consciousness takes center stage, breaking free from conventional boundaries.” I don’t hold much truck by prophecies, not even these, but there is something comforting about attempting to back up enough, tune in enough, and garner a larger perspective, one that reunites my very isolated and very out of Rhythm view, with the innate truth of global and cosmic cycles. There’s a stepping towards a truer music, like leaving a warehouse I’ve been stuck in forever, to follow some strange lute and fiddle sounds emanating from deep within the forest.

7. The Night Janitor tells the story of a man who loved rhythm so much, and also loved people so very much that he started traveling to places where people had lost their rhythm and he would subtly start to change the beat there, in micro ways, like sitting in a cafe, just tapping his foot in a new way, or humming a little more softly and slowly, or stirring a spoon until the energy of the place aligned and snapped back into rhythm and then in larger and larger circles the rhythm reestablished. As he grew, his connection with rhythm grew and his responsibility toward it grew. He started going into scarier and harder to align the broken rhythm places, until finally, a war zone, where he had to go because his story needed him to not just live but also to die on beat. Something in this story makes me ache to live and die in true rhythm.

8. When our little series of mountain villages was wiped out by a recent natural disaster I encountered the people who I want to build a new world with. Plot twist, they were all my neighbors, all everyone’s neighbors, all off couches at last, off phone-shackles and running free, escaped from their isolation chambers and running straight towards the next person to help, to cook for, to connect with. It’s true that some of us are going to have to be dragged out the House of False Comforts in order to reencounter whatever puts us back in rhythm. But there are a lot of us who are finding great pleasure in learning anew to apprentice ourselves to the mystery at the heart of the question, “what does it mean to live in rhythm?”

   

9. The less false options we have on the table, and that we have to waste our time considering, the better our silly simple hearts can and will Go. Simplicity is a very peaceful thot for me. So much of what I have struggled with has been unnecessary complexity built up as an avoidance of growth. It’s simpler to just open the closet and see what we’re dealing with. It’s so very very very rarely actually a monster.

   

10. In Peter Pan, when Peter first flies up to Wendy’s nursery window, what he’s wanting is not a mother, not a night flight buddy either, but someone to sew his damn shadow back on. I look into the world as it is now and see many operating under false terms. The current state of the world is a logically perfect consequence, (consequence is too strong,) let’s go with response (as in call and response) of living outside of a merged state (which is walking in the outer world with an intact and continuous conversing with the inner, which is connected to All). How many people live in rhythm? Or inside of love? Or walk in a merged state? As the dystopian reality crumbles and Rome burns and burns and burns I see you there. Flying up to my window, or me to yours, and we are too light, too untethered to anything true and we are beginning to fade. So we tap on each’s window, and we whisper, (so as not to wake the dog Nanny) “do you happen to have a thimble? Do you know anything about sewing?

    

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This is how I feel about comments: In “How Far Away We Are,” Ada Limón writes:

                        I want to give you something, or I want to take
                  something from you. But I want to feel the exchange,
                     the warm hand on the shoulder, the song coming out
                        and the ear holding on to it.

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These notes belong to a larger living thing called The Greening, and the model growing inside it, building islands of coherence while the old world comes apart. All of it is mid-build, me and you included.

If a sentence here lit something, a yes, an ache, a that’s-me, that was your own interior wisdom echo-locating. Follow it where it wants to go

References and notes

I’m using apocalypse in a kind of tongue and cheek way because I like the drama. I have a very hopeful excited heart but I do believe the coming change will have a lot of suffering and difficulty and it is best to be frank about this and the gifts within the difficulty.

This is a fascinating read about diamonds and how they actually happen. https://geology.com/articles/diamonds-from-coal/

A glorious listen to the Night Janitor. I recommend you lay on the ground and listen to it with your heart wide open