Hollowed Out and Heavy with Light: Arrival is Not a Soft Landing.

This month has been a static of half-formed thoughts and insights. I am the spring leaf breaking the honeyed lock of a bud’s tight fist. Waking slowly from winter’s sleep, yet pulled apart by the splintering of it all. It is the world rushing in. It is the robin diving head-first from the peak of the silver birch:a total and terrifying commitment to the fall.

I tried to write my usual essay, but every thought I reached for came out broken, and could not hold its shape. Instead of forcing something into coherence, I chose not to wrestle with the wisdom of this moment.

I can feel that the conversation I often avoid is with this milky, paused place, this sense of being suspended, not yet born. I want one version of the conversation, one face of the divine, one voice, one sound. And when it does not feel like the music I prefer, I turn away and try to leave the very place I am in.

But the divine, our connection to life itself, has as many expressions as the world does. Endless faces. Some we move toward with ease, others we resist, refuse, reject.

I have been sitting with a series of questions.

Is there a room you are trying to get out of, instead of learning how to be inside of it?
Is there a place you are only willing to visit if it leads you somewhere else?
Are you relating to what is here now, or only enduring it in the hope that it will change?
What is here that you are refusing to enter?

So my offering this month, though part of me fears it will be useless, is a collection of loose threads. These are notes pulled from my journal over these last few weeks, fragments of a half-formed life. This is my wrestling with the many faces of the divine. Call it midlife, or perimenopause; call it Joanna Macy’s 'Great Turning.' They are only names for the winds of change that reshape the path beneath us and the body that walks it.

Things feel unsettled, and yet there is a strange clarity inside that unsettledness. Something is in focus, even as something else remains just out of reach. This is the way of things for me right now.

Recently, I went into the forest looking for a place to set this large stone, somewhere I could return to, somewhere I could build a small altar. I stumbled into a break in the trees that felt uncannily right. The ground was thick with moss, soft and cupped in places where the earth dipped into a kind of cradle. Pine and cedar reached overhead, their branches brushing lightly above me. It was further into the forest than I am used to going, just at the edge of what feels comfortably held, and what feels uncomfortably raw and wild.

Around it ran the paths of animals. Coyote, deer, bear, bobcat. I could hear the creaking of aspen, and at times the hollow, unsettling sound of a tree falling somewhere out of sight.

I felt comforted there, and also afraid. Both things at once.

I wondered if I would be able to come back each day, weighing the distance and the aloneness and the unknown. I thought I might be too afraid to settle into that place.

And then something in me interrupted that thought and asked, almost plainly, is not being afraid the point?

Perhaps fear is not an obstacle to avoid, but the landscape I am meant to inhabit. The place where the sharp pierce of the edge is what wedges the senses open, allowing me to hear what the safety of the shore keeps quiet. Here, at the boundary, something hidden finally begins to enter my awareness.

This place in the forest felt exactly right.

I offer you this version of myself. I am still waking and still half-formed, carrying the weight of grief and love at the same time. I am standing at the edge of something that knows me before I do. I can feel it, even if I cannot yet hold it. Perhaps you are here too, in the middle of all things at once.

My practice is to feel the pulse between connection and separation, between life and death, between what I can hold and what I cannot control. To welcome the days I feel held by everything and the days I feel turned away.

There is an ache that moves through all of it.

When I find myself resisting the room I have been asked to enter, I begin to notice how I am in conversation with what is here. The face may not always be easy to look at. The work now is to remain in relationship with every part of it.

We begin here, not in refusal, but at the door swinging open and closed, where leaving and arriving share the same eerie breath.

*for those who missed the story of how my relationship with the stone began(and the year-long apprenticeship I am now walking) you can find that history [here].

My knuckles are dusted with black ash. I enter a small room, a fire snapping her sticks before she swallows them. There are wet spots on my knees from where I have been kneeling on the damp moss, my forehead pressed to a blue-green stone, cold as the air at midnight.

I have sung to the stone most every day, for several weeks, and walked around it in circles, wandering, lost, and found, along the forest floor.

It is beautiful that I believe, at times, that I am lost, only to watch as some very old part of me remembers herself.

Not knowing why, she ties a white thread from tree to tree, encircling herself and the stone. She ties red ribbons to the white thread. She gathers small and large stones from piles of sand and builds a circular garden in front of where she writes. She plants calendula, cosmos, ranunculus the color of blood along its edges.

Oh yes—indeed—I am so lost. So lost that everything, somehow, is also being found.