over the edge

I'm leaving my job two weeks from Friday.

The fear claws at my solar plexus. What have I done?

I remember about a week after I had started this job, as an associate at a small public interest private law firm in downtown Oakland, that I had already started counting down the days until I was finished. At the moment, I was reading prior briefing in a California Environmental Quality Act suit, having to do with UC Berkeley's expansion plans; I was preparing to write the reply brief to the court of appeal. By all accounts, it was an important issue -- the classic town-and-gown dispute, the fate of downtown Berkeley's land use plans -- but to me it was the drudgery of the law. I thought, "I'll give it a year here."

In mid-winter and spring, my work was so dull it was physically painful. I spent about two months writing a terrible brief for a client who objected to the expansion of his neighbor, a fast food restaurant, because he was going to lose a few parking spaces. I remember being at my women's circle and asking to be held, needing the touch, the soothing. I crawled into the center of the circle, heaving a great sigh. I sobbed and sobbed. Meanwhile I was working feverishly to develop the Southwest project that just took place successfully in September. My health suffered; my hair started falling out in clumps. Through spring and summer I started cancelling my social plans, going into survival mode. I skipped all the festivals.

And then the apple moth came along. I'd heard about this issue in December or January, and brought it to the attention of my boss; it turned out that one of our clients was also interested in suing, so I was given free reign to do the research and write the complaint. It turns out that EPA actually made a pretty grievous error in purporting to exempt from normal registration processes the pesticide used for the aerial spray; I caught the error, and wrote a great complaint. After months and months, we finally filed it last Tuesday. To me, it felt like "mission accomplished!"

In June, I wrote an e-mail to a community list of which I'm a member, sharing my dilemma with them about whether or not to quit. I wrote: "there's a natural break in September, when I'll be doing some work in the Southwest for about three weeks, so it would be a full year here. When I feel into this possibility, I feel excited, scared, relieved, anxious, and doubtful. I'm not sure whether it's the right time for me to do this, I'm not sure whether I'd be making a huge mistake (i.e. my job isn't great, but it's not *that* bad, I'm getting paid, I can hang in there, I shouldn't abandon the moths, etc.) I'm secretly hoping that someone or something will tell me what I 'should' do; the deeper truth is that in my life I haven't cultivated a great deal of trust in myself to guide my life, since I've been doing (or attempting to do) what I 'should' do for such a long time."

Eventually, the quickening of the life-energy inside me moved me to decide to quit. I agonized and agonized down to the very last minute, but I finally gave notice in August, saying that I'd be working until the end of December. Pretty much immediately I went into a major fear contraction. What have I done? How could I leave my job, which isn't that bad, in the middle of a recession? What am I going to do instead?

That's the question my parents have always asked me. What would you be doing instead? I wasn't exactly forced to go to law school, but one could say that I found my father's strenuous recommendation that I go to be unopposable. And it was miserable, in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't trade it now for anything for the healing and strength and community and experience that it brought. In the midst of so much tearful suffering they said "what would you be doing instead?" And I could never answer that question with any kind of comforting specificity. There has never been anything more than a sense of the truth inside of me.

What would I be doing instead? It comes down to this: I'd be letting the life inside of me live. I'd let the truth about my life force, which is that it is not about conflict and adversariality, but instead about healing and collaboration and creativity, to emerge and be my guide. I've never done that before. I've been squelching and squashing and boxing it for a really long time; putting it aside in favor of what is the "right" thing to do. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but it is some combination of writing, advocacy, community weaving. All, ultimately, in service of the healing of the earth, our Mother Earth.

So I agonized and agonized some more. At my therapist's office I did a sand tray, and basically built an intuitive altar to the two choices I was facing. In one corner, a figurine of the goddess, in the other corner, a figurine of a postman. In the goddess' quadrant there was a red glass heart at the center of a circle of amber and green stones; there was a sand dollar, an angel, a spiraling shell. In the postman's quadrant there was a little girl riding a speedboat surrounded by paper money and fake pennies. Next to her stood a figurine of a woman doctor, an upstanding and powerful citizen. Between the two quadrants was a tree -- the driving force behind both energies -- and a roaring lion's head.

She took a polaroid of the array for me, and I called it "Confluence." I gazed into it like a crystal ball for several days, knowing that the movement of my heart and soul was towards the feminine quadrant, but feeling so much fear about stepping away from the masculine quadrant. Am I just a spoiled, lazy brat? Am I ridiculously naive for making this sort of decision? Who am I kidding?

I'm not sure exactly how it happened, but finally, several weeks ago, the fog lifted and I found peace with the decision to walk towards the feminine and to leave my job. To leave the security, the prestige, and even the excitement of working on the apple moth case. To leave this thing that's not half-bad, that's really okay, that pays a good sum of money, that gets me by. To take a leap off the edge into the absolute unknown, hoping desperately that my wings will sprout or that the ground will rise to meet my steps.

I remember that I have done this before, and it has always led to something greater: when I was supposed to be in my third year of law school I took the fall semester off. It gave me time to rest and heal, and it allowed me to have a third summer. I got an internship at NRDC that summer, which was the best law job I've probably ever had. And last summer I was offered a prestigious job clerking for the Supreme Court of Colorado, a year-long position which would have started this fall. I agonized over that one, too, but finally realized that my heart was not at all in it. And then this current job came along, which has been nothing if not a learning experience.

And I pay attention to the fact that in the few months since I've made the decision to quit, my health has been rapidly improving. I've lost about 15 pounds; my whole relationship to food has changed. A weight has, literally, lifted.

And still the fear plagues me. What have I done? Time will tell. My fervent prayer is that I will be shown what is needed of me, how I am to give my life over to the Earth's healing. My fervent prayer is that even if this quitting, this leaping is a terrible and foolhardy mistake, that I will learn from it. That life will not mete out punishment instead of blessings because I have leapt so blindly. That if this is a mistake, it will give me the wisdom that I'll need in order to leap again and soar. And my fervent prayer is that it is not a mistake, that this is not a figment of my priveleged imagination; that there really is something to this powerful, pulsing, unformed call that is so indescribable, so subtle, and so wholly irresistable.

I am in a great and painful birth canal, and when I emerge nothing will be the same. This is what I have done; I have said 'yes' to being born.

May it be so,
may it be so,
may it be so.

down to earth

I've spent a lot of time with my head in the clouds.

That's not to say that there aren't a lot of good ideas floating around up there. For example, I believe in bioregionalism as a political organizing principle. This is the notion that a polity should be organized around an ecosystem, taking into account that ecosystem's natural boundaries, its resource input needs and outflow capacity, and its ability to sustain human life over time. Bioregionalism is about binding human life to the land, acknowledging not only that we need to be in relationship with the earth in order to survive, but that the relationship between the earth and people in the arid west will be completely different, and will demand completely different governance, than the relationship between earth and people in the swampy south.

It's a beautiful idea, isn't it? Makes so much sense, doesn't it?

My dad and I have had different versions of the same argument for most of my young adult and adult life, about social issues like violence, racism, poverty, environmental destruction. The particulars are different, but our positions are basically fixed: he's talking about the free market, self-reliance and the law of the jungle, I'm talking about essential human proclivity towards sharing and caring. Usually these arguments end up with him fake-conceding; "I wish it could be true, Cait." The newspaper we pore over for long mornings, when I'm home to visit, invariably reflects that it's not.

But even as I trudged through law school, getting indoctrinated into the behind-the-curtain workings of this chaotic enterprise called civil society in America, I still rejected the idea that this is it, that this is the best we can do: this backward-scrambling system that seems to generate imbalance after imbalance, injustice after injustice. There's more to it, I knew, and so even though I was playing along, I wasn't really in the game. I was holding out for the rapture, you could say, the New Age rapture when everybody would finally heal the wounds in their hearts, love each other, and magically transform this whole mess. Back to the farm, or the ashram, or something.

That is, until recently. I've experienced kind of a triple-whammy catalyst for new thought in the last several months. A perfect storm, if you will, of awakening.

(1) Tearing down the wall. Remember when I told you, a few months ago, that it was time to step back and do some heart-healing? Well, I'm doing it. It's really happening, in an almost visible way. And it's pretty deep, and entirely new.

(2) Barack Obama's election. About 45 minutes after CNN called it, I was standing with thousands of people in Oakland's Convention Center, surrounded by some very dear friends. Our collective attention was aimed towards the huge TV screen, and Barbara Lee was trying to talk to us but kept getting interrupted because the anchor kept saying that Obama was about to give his acceptance speech. I don't remember when it finally happened, but it did, which is that I finally let myself cry.

And I sobbed, under the same blue-neon lights that illuminated the room when I took the bar exam there last February. I cried because I finally felt it: yes, we can. The witch is dead! After eight years of feeling like all of our efforts for peace and justice were going absolutely nowhere, while a power-addled moron made one destructive decision after another, all of a sudden I felt this lightness where there used to be a weight.

I hadn't even realized there was a presidential-sized weight sitting on my chest. But there was, and suddenly I recognized it because of its absence. Suddenly, the energy that all the peacemakers put out into the world wasn't going to be pulverized and blown back in our faces like so many shards of broken glass. Suddenly, there's an open channel that starts on the ground and goes all the way up to the top, and then flows on down again. Really? Really?

We whirled and hollered in the streets for a long time that night.

(3) Gay marriage. How do I even talk about this one? It was a suckerpunch, a body blow. It knocked the wind out of the community, and a lot of us started spitting ignorance and hatred as soon as we got our breath back. But the leadership is pulling itself back together, the people are calming each other down and speaking truth to power, and the fight goes on. The Cal Supremes are set to hear oral argument in March on the question of whether this proposition is a constitutional revision, meaning that it effects such sweeping change to the structure of government that it should only be ratified by the legislature, or a constitutional amendment, which means that it is among the class of decisions that may be constitutionally made by the voters.

As a privileged, able-bodied, urban California white woman, albeit of the Jewish faith, I have until now been wholly unfamiliar with the set of sensations which may be termed 'minority stress,' a set of sensations which too many people in our society have experienced and continue to experience each and every day. Just this week, a group of six Long Island teen boys were charged with the hate-motivated murder of an Ecuadorean man, in an episode of "beaner hopping." And today is Transgender Remembrance Day -- that's "remembrance," not "awareness" -- when we recall the lives that have been lost (43, in the past two years) of differently-gendered individuals who were raped, maimed, and killed for deviating from the norm. Ethnic violence in the Congo rages on, and the death toll climbs upward of 5 million. Not to mention garden-variety racism and sexism which pervade our cultural relations and which can turn deadly on a moment's notice. So many of us walk around scared, and scarred.

Me? I have always mourned this, in my head-in-the-clouds way. But in mourning I've tended to throw up my hands, resigning myself to sit and wait for the big, sonorous Crystal Vision that will unite us all.

As a queer woman, though, all of a sudden it has arrived in my body. Fear, rejection, self-rejection. How can this be? Don't they see that we are human, and that we just want to love? No, they don't see. The Goddess has not yet removed the veil from before their eyes; Barack Obama's ascendancy has not yet induced Buddha-like serenity in the hearts of the many. We're all still mucking around here together; the name of God is still used to justify hatred and separation; the book that says "Adam-and-Eve-not-Adam-and-Steve" still propels bullets out of guns and into bodies, bodies which love other bodies that feel just like home. Stares, taunts, silences. Denial of rights, denial of fellowship, denial of life in a split second.

All of that is in me now.

I used to think that as I moved through my own pain, my own wounding, I would find myself less and less engaged with this messy experiment called America. That I would become more involved in the esoteric, the personal, the ethereal. Not so, as it turns out. The more I wake up to the vibrant, quickening life-force inside of me, the more I realize that we really are all the same. We all want the same things, aspire towards the same goals -- safety, freedom, peace -- even if our means are wholly divergent.

The skinheads who threw a rock through the window of a ten-year-old boy in Billings, MT in 1993, because of the menorah on his windowsill, were trying to live out a vision of safety that was borne from ignorance, and fueled by hatred and violence. But 10,000 citizens in Billings called forth a higher vision, illuminating their own windows with paper menorahs printed by the local newspaper. 10,000 households followed a truer star, held a stronger common dream, one of love and mutuality. And that higher vision prevailed. Billings, which suffered for so long from KKK violence, has not experienced a single major hate crime since then.

Similarly, suddenly, my feet are here on the ground. My life is here, my fate bound up with the fates of the humans who surround me every day, the humans I will never meet, the creatures of the land and the sea. Truth is not esoteric, and it resides on a mountaintop only to the same extent it resides in a city storm drain. As long as we're all here together, the truth is that we've got to show up for it. We've -- I've -- got to live every day with full commitment to the possibility that some day, with enough sheer will and enough eyes-open faith, we can all be who we are, love who we love, and sleep soundly through the quiet night.

I'm in.

on hate and love

Can you hear that? Across the state, from south to north, they are cheering. Joyous tears stream down their faces, just like my own tears of "yes, we can" flowed on election night as I danced in the streets of downtown Oakland. They are the church-goers, the families of young men fighting in Iraq, the white people and the people of color, the concerned citizens of this state heaving sighs of relief because marriage has been codified as the province of the heterosexual.

They assure us that this amendment won't deprive anyone of any rights, but will simply affirm a longstanding definition. They say this is about love, not hate. But we know and feel otherwise. This constitutional amendment is a sharp blow to our hearts, our guts. It confirms our suspicions: all across our state and our nation, there are those who reject and fear homosexual relationships, who triumph in having defended the institution of marriage against incursion by an advancing army of sexual deviants.

And as the doors of this institution are slammed in our faces, as we hear the locks turning and the chains rattling, there is a profound sadness that arises -- a gaping and terrible vacuum where there was once energy, movement. Gays exist, they admit, but gayness must not be talked about, taught in our schools, seen in our churches, acknowledged as a protectable category by our government, or granted the same benefits and privileges as is heterosexuality with regard to state-issued marriage licenses. God says gayness is a sin, they say, and even if we can't really stop you from having all of that weird sex and perverse love, we can sure as hell make sure you're not receiving the same treatment as are we, the child-bearers, the keepers of what is sacred in our society.

This is a deeply painful message to receive. I grieve the receiving of this message as it enters my very body, this body of mine which aspires only to love and be loved. I don't feel any acceptance in their exclusion, as they claim; I feel only their fear, only their attempt at disciplining me out of my messy, dangerous desires. I feel only a sweeping of my heart under a heavy rug, so that it doesn't disturb a pretty picture.

What I want to say, though, as I move through my grief, is that it's this pretty picture with which we must contend. Any observer of nature knows that the world is a teeming, chaotic place, but a place which always manages to self-regulate in surprisingly elegant ways. And yet people, perhaps out of our fear, perhaps out of our quirky wisdom, continually attempt to impose order and organization on this wild web of interdependence. To erase the curves and draw thick lines instead. To dam the river and straighten out its banks. God wrote a book, it is said, which ought to be the instruction manual for the entire world. One book, one way, one paternalistic social structure for everyone, no matter how many people it sickens and kills from smallpox or heartbreak.

This is what we're up against. The book says that gay sex is transgressive, and that transgressors burn in hell. As such, I think we were fatally misguided in our attempt to conduct this ballot initiative fight solely according to reason and a civil rights framework. In the contest between secularly-granted rights and God's word, the believers won't be swayed by suggestions of discrimination under the law. This is about God's plan for the way all humans must live -- and rights either flow from God's word, they say, or aren't real.

And we're up against this with a massive handicap: internalized homophobia. After generations of shielding yourself against the violent screams of "you're not supposed to exist," can you muster the will to fight against God and his book? Can you even fight against such a deeply-held belief about love and its barbed-wire parameters, especially if your collective strength has been continuously, insidiously sapped? Can you rally your spirits to say, "here I am, and my existence is just as real and beautiful as yours," when you've been so "other"-ed, so alienated, so villainized?

It's a challenging task, and it's exactly the task we must undertake. In order for us to stand upon solid ground, to align ourselves with the inviolability of our constitutional right to equal treatment, we have to somehow meet this God-driven negation of our existence with a God-inspired knowing that we are here, that we do exist, and that homosexuality is neither a sin nor a lifestyle choice. There must be a shared moral vision of equality among us -- in addition to a shared legal vision -- in order for us to achieve that equality. We must have more to rely upon than our tender hearts and our political acuity and our spandex short-shorts that we wear once a year at the Pride parade. We must wholly love and believe in ourselves as individuals and as a group before we can convince other people to love and believe in us, especially people who are so angrily invested in God's decree against us. Whether we believe in God or not, we must be aware that there is love for us -- even us -- that is infinite and unconditional.

So please, begin within. Love yourself. Respect yourself. Hold fast to your inherent human dignity and equality, even as you feel the reverberations of this dizzying electoral slap in the face. Feel your innate belonging, and from that place, step forward to speak your truth.

Roses

This one rose,
dressed in a pink so pale it verges on gray, juts out
at an alarming angle from the vase
on my dining room table.
The remaining flowers stand proudly,
blooming their hues and fragrances
like women outside of a nightclub,
shifting their feet and laughing
moved towards the thumping, smoky recesses
by the momentum of their hope.
I tug the odd-angled one out, slowly,
careful not to budge the arrangement.
I see that its stem has been bent in two places.
Two dark elbows through which
water cannot travel.
I twist at the fibrous stalk,
no longer a conduit,
at one of the broken places. As I do,
two sets of leaves fall to the table, starved.
I am ministering to the life that remains.
Into a small glass jar filled with water
I put this rose,
with its three remaining inches of stem.
Where is the place in my house
that can host this delicate refugee?
I think of the way
my mother does this,
places flowers in small jars on the kitchen windowsill.
Somewhere in this forgettable sequence of events
I realize, in my body, the gravity of what it is to love.
To love
is to agree to tend,
to seek to restore,
to invite what is finished
into its rightful ending.
To love is to become a sentinel,
a quiet, awake guard
at the beloved’s heart-gate.
When it comes time to enter,
when the beloved lifts the veil
and permits passage,
the witness herself
must enter as an offering.
She must act
as dry wood acts upon meeting flame.
Grateful for the chance
to be consumed
and then to rise as glowing sparks against the vast sky
and finally to disappear.

let's never go this long again

Really, I don't know how the time slipped away!

Actually, yes I do.

"Tell us your top five highlights from the past, oh, four weeks or so," you say? Why, certainly! (Very kind of you to add, "because we know you don't have time to give a full report before your salsa dancing DATE tonight!" You are so considerate, dear reader.)

(1) I fully rocked the project I've been working on for the past year and a half -- more accurately, it fully rocked me. More details? See here.

(2) Rosh Hashanah dawn ceremony on top of a hill in Petroglyph National Monument outside of Albuquerque. Prayer in community on the land! I love it.

(3) I officiated my dear friend and colleague's wedding in Albuquerque; it was a blend of Buddhist, Hindu, and Apache prayers, and the bride and groom held candles to illuminate their faces in the late dusk. Part of their ceremony was sending the rings around to have them be "warmed" by each guest, so now their rings contain the blessings of everyone in their community. Beautiful!

(4) The absolute attention-getting hijinks of reiki; reiki basically tap danced for me in a top hat like that alien in Spaceballs. No less than FOUR significant events having to do with reiki took place in the course of about four days. Okay, universe! I get it. Heat. In the hands. Use it. Yes.

(5) At the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, the largest hot air balloon event in the world, watching the 6:30 a.m. dawn patrol -- in advance of the 700-balloon mass ascension that took place once the sun was fully out, twelve hot air balloons lifted off in the still-dark early morning, and once up, worked their engines so that the fire that's used to keep the hot air hot, lit up the inside of the balloon. Twelve twinkling balloons in the dark sky? A grand display of what humans can do when we're focused on making beauty and peace? Yeah, I was crying.

elegy for the felled

They've started cutting down the oak trees in Memorial Grove. Just within the last hour.

It's like being punched in the gut, to witness or even imagine a tree being toppled by a chainsaw.

There's an ache to it. Yet somehow the ache is spread thin, as if any decent, silent moment the heart might seek in order to grieve the loss of such a formidable elder is drowned out by progress' tinny victory march. It's a uniquely modern ailment. Another great tree falls, another great creature is lost -- and we just sigh, shake it off as best we can and smile bravely into another day. But the loss doesn't escape us, no matter how removed we might feel; something inside us still flinches, still stumbles under the weight of every plummeting 600-year-old trunk, every newly-erected power plant belching soot, every wanton gesture of crazed consumption.

My law firm represents one of the plaintiffs in this case. We raced to assemble a Supreme Court appeal and file it on time. Attorneys were running down the hallways and the secretary was fielding press call after press call (as well as calls from one of the tree sitters, Air, whose voice was low and urgent. "They're cutting!" We know. "Did you file yet?" We will, by 4:00 p.m.). We enlisted two of the neighborhood copy shops to prepare the final versions of the documents. Four of us fanned out into the City to file at the various courts and serve the documents on opposing counsel.

At 3:45 or so I found myself in a big law firm's climate-controlled waiting room on the 20th floor of Two Embarcadero, a gleaming chrome and glass high rise in the heart of downtown San Francisco. I waited for the receptionist to return, gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows framing the panorama of the Bay, flanked by two bushy potted palm trees. The industriousness in the building was palpable. I felt like such an unkempt hippie, somehow out of place, and still so thankful that my contact with the world unfolds at ground level.

The lawyers here toiled for months on this case, introducing very promising novel legal theories and waging a remarkably refined fight on behalf of the oak trees. And the tree sitters climbed up into those branches nearly two years ago. All of that work sure bought a lot of time. But despite our best efforts, here comes the machinery, once again clearing the way for taller, bigger, stronger, more.

My mom always implores me not to let things like this affect me. "It's not your pain!" she says. But it is. We're all inextricably interwoven into this community of life -- what impacts one, whether one is a mighty oak tree or a little brown moth, impacts us all.

Nonetheless, the sadness does not serve. All that can be done is to continue.

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone, therefore we must be saved by love." -- Reinhold Neibuhr

softening

That was Zelig's assessment last night, while we sat and talked on his couch, before I walked out into the warm, dark evening to witness the honey-colored new moon hovering over West Oakland. "You look great," he said. "Clear." And, "softer."

(This was after five of us sat, cringing, gasping and laughing, through Sarah Palin's speech and the attendant camera-pans over the legions of rapturous, button-wearing idiots. Now, I never had very many bad things to say about Hillary; to the extent that I believe that federal government is worth the powder to blow it straight to hell, I thought Hillary was a viable and interesting candidate for the presidency. I loathed the easy and off-handed dismissals of her as a "bitch." Hillary is a tough, smart lady, with a great deal of experience and some wise ideas. In her case, behavior which, in a male colleague, might have been called "strong" or "no-nonsense," was derided as "bitchy" when coming from her. I despise that.

. . . Sarah Palin, the Killa from Wasilla? Bitch.)

Anyway, my dear friend's take on the state of my being feels, at once, totally out of left field, and wholly accurate.

Left field: because I'm up against one or two of my most persistent demons at the moment, with not a lot of breathing room, it feels like. I see the old, tired techniques I'm using to handle it, and at some moments it feels like nothin's gone nowhere.

But more than that: wholly accurate. Mainly because I'm practicing something I've never practiced before in any kind of sustained way, which is compassion for myself. Oh, compassion. I can dish it out with all the juicy mama-energy in the world. I can usually receive it from the folks I love. But self-directed compassion? Who knew it would turn out to require such a massive expenditure of energy! Nonetheless, it is a project I have undertaken, and it requires much focus, clarity and dedication. It's an effort to silence judgmental, angry, cruel voices, and in their stead, to speak to myself in tones of kindness, patience, and forgiveness.

What I find most compelling is the voice of faith: that the truths I remember about my being, which arise most clearly when I am out on the land and in deep, heartfelt connection and in moments of creation -- those truths abide, and can be like a lighthouse for me when I am feeling lost and cut adrift. Staying connected to those truths requires a leap of faith, I am finding, and it is a leap I am convincing myself to take, more and more.

It's pretty nice!

I attribute much of these shifts to the time I've spent in communion with the earth this summer. I just got back from a yoga backpacking trip in Yosemite, which was phenomenal. (Earth said to me, "you are my beloved, and I miss you when you're gone from me.") And my experiences in Mt. Shasta, and the Trinity Alps, and Mojave, and Western Shoshone land, and even the Santa Cruz mountains have all yielded new peace and awareness. Sometimes, in these happy moments of realization, I feel energy moving in my body like glaciers calving and breaking apart.

I'm about to go out of town for three weeks, to facilitate this journey in the Southwest with an amazing group of women attorneys who will connect with Native American women environmental justice leaders. Then I get to celebrate Rosh Hashanah in Albuquerque (complete with a dawn ceremony in Petroglyph National Monument), hang out with my most beloved Reiki teacher who lives in Santa Fe, and then officiate the marriage of my dear friend and colleague. A lot of powerful experiences, and I think I'm able to show up for all this -- my life -- in a way that is entirely new. The bonds of fear seem to be, well, loosening, and boy-oh-boy does that free up some space! I tell you what.

So here I am on my path, one foot in front of the other, not sure what to make of it all, but committing to practicing non-judgment every step of the way. You may not hear from me for a while, but when you do, I promise I'll have some fine stories to share.