This handful of days has been a bouquet of roses, berries, wild flowers, medicinal herbs, thorn bushes, bittersweet, invasives, choke-cherry, poison ivy.

A wild, dangerous, lovely, intense ride.

From two gorgeous days filled with beautiful meals, wide-ranging conversation, and heartfelt friendship with Sharon Knight and Winter Jp Sichelschmidt.

To a day of ritual, housekeeping, and introvert-recovery. Followed by an evening of truth-telling and surprising self-advocacy that’s been needed for decades.

Two days of teaching and Story-ing with a beloved student, punctuated by community ritual, laughter and love.

Learning a dear friend took his own life. Energetically holding his wife and children, while holding my own grief and that of my Youngest. Knowing this timeline with all its unrecognized, unshared, unsupported, isolated, secret grief and terror is driving us all to the edges of hopelessness, apathy, immobility. The fallacy of each “new normal” becoming more grotesquely ridiculous with each passing day. We are too exhausted to rage. We are too deeply indoctrinated toward keeping on to protest. We are too overwrought to listen or discuss each days fresh hell reported in the news.

Swinging on the Gate between Seasons….the sun is making a long visit after nearly sixty days of rain and flooding. The light is slanty-golden. Crows are clamoring in the Maples whose leaves are tinged–too soon–with gold. The sparrows and jays crowd each other on fruit-bent branches–helping themselves to berries I’ve neglected to gather.

I’m brooding. Grieving. Pressed to keep creating amid the destruction. I am not without hope, though.
At every Gate, in each great Turning– of the Year Wheel or the Aeons–we face both death *and* birth.

Our denial is being destroyed. The scythe swooping in and cutting down — harvesting hope. Our bones, knitted of star-stuff, memory of mitochondria, and the Ancestral Mothers remember who we are, our place within the fractal-folds of Nature. Our cells thrum and sing the most ancient magics, weaving a future for Those Yet To Come.

We gather the thin harvest–first fruits and grain salvaged from rain and fire–preserving for the future we cannot yet imagine.We light the bonfire, the bale fires, the bane fires. Give thanks, and offer tears opening wept. We are the center–not the end–of a timeline. Look back and draw forth wisdom. But look forward–glimpse the future generations, for they are coming. Now is not the moment to succumb to morbid fantasies of total destruction.

Now is the moment to loudly acknowledge the grief we feel as the world we’ve known crumbles. Yes, grief for all we’ve known, even while acknowledging its disease. Now is the moment to gather in our grief, and grasp the thin thread of our Ancient Origins to weave New Ways for those who will come after us. Imbue those threads with love, with your most whole and generative visions of hope. What are your wildest dreams for those who will count you among their Ancestors?

Stand we now, at the center of death and life
Our Ancestors behind us
Their Life Force rushing into us
Strengthening, feedings, uplifting, blessing us.
Stand we now, at the center of death and life
Our Descendants beyond us
Our Life Force rushing toward them
Strengthening, feeding, uplifting, blessing them

Time isn’t linear.

When we do our own work–call it healing, magic, evolution, development, psychotherapy, shadow work, trauma release,
When we do the work of our time–call it environmentalism, anticapitalism, antiracism,feminism, moving away from fear and hatred . . . .
When we live a life of integrity, peace, purpose, and reparative effort . . . .
When we create what we are here to create from the marrow of our heart-mind-spirit
We stand at the center of death and life

Our Ancestors behind us

Our Descendants beyond us

Breathing . . . Life Force in both directions

Strengthening, feeding, Blessing, uplifting
The bloodlines, timelines, deadlines and lifelines

In all directions.

My work is not to make my Ancestors proud– It is to assure my Descendants live well.

A Mother knows this.

We are very busy looking backward, applying healing balm to the dead.
I assure you–they’re fine. They left their bodies and personalities in the grave.
Their spirits, immediately freed of the curses of epigenetics, ancestry, history.
History is for the dead. Why hang out there except to understand our present.

This moment right here? This skin, these aching feet, this sorrowful heart, this bright song, this joyful word, this morning filled to overflowing with gratitude. This is ours to be with. Ours to heal.

What hubris, believing we can change the lives of the dead.

Change your own life
Change the circumstances for the Descendants, that they may live.
We ignore our own pain, our own children, our own current mounting crises, to look backward.

I beg you, look forward.

The Descendants are feeding you now, with honor and offerings, your favorite cake, a sliver of something shiny and rare. They are blessing your name. They are thanking you for their lives. They are healing. They are counting among those blessings the epigenetic joy, softness, ferocity, brilliance, creativity, and love that descended from you, through your lines.

We’ve been Ancestors before
Old souls washed upon life’s shore
We’ll be Ancestors again
Not long from now, when this life ends
We bless forward and backward, downline and upline.

We give thanks. We give honor, blessing, lifeforce.
And if there’s healing to be done, heal thyself.
Let the bodies of the dead rest in their graves.
Their spirits are long gone–and re-incarnated here in new bodies…perhaps a stranger across the world, perhaps your lover, coworker, friend or enemy.

The Godsoul was never in need of healing.

It was the persona–the temporary accoutrement worn to disguise oneself as only human, to contain oneself inside social norms like war and poverty, genocide, slavery, colonialism, the burning time, the priesthood, wealth and poverty, servitude and master, governor and governed.

You, too, are nothing less than a shimmering, omniscient holy being, cloaked in the trappings and indoctrinations, abuses and rewards for compliance of this time and place. Heal YOURSELF,

Your prayers, your offerings–candle flame, incense, water, food, life-force–

Taken by the Godsouls of the now-living.