This is what I believe–

When we are born, we are souls without obstruction — complete, whole, and brimming with wisdom that is uniquely ours. But as we navigate through childhood, then adolescence, then adulthood, we lose touch with parts of our true selves. Today I’m exploring some of the ways I see the beauty and potential of the complex dance between our shadows and our growth, and how sacred time can support us in calling those parts back to ourselves.

The Making of Shadows

As we grow from infants into children, a mental filter is constantly at work: What parts of me are safe, welcome, and affirmed? What parts are not? Based on the feedback and responses we receive from our caretakers, parts of us get sidelined, shunned, or turned away. These parts become our shadows.

This creation of shadows is a natural process — one that I see as a function of what in physics is called entropy. Time passes and things fall apart. Patterns change, passions are left fallow, creative urges are left on the shelf, powers and gifts we hold are unexpressed and even forgotten.

The Play of Entropy and Syntropy

I don’t see this as an entirely bad thing. I think that in the absence of our innate gifts, we develop other qualities. We develop skills and discernments and passions, and all of these things contribute to our growth. All of these become who we are.

I also believe that a part of the work of adulthood is calling our shadows back to ourselves. This is a process of syntropy. Syntropy is the inverse correlate of entropy, they are each other’s dancing partners.

If entropy is cosmic heat-death, then syntropy is gravity. And if love is a metaphysical gravity, well then, the act of calling our shadows back to ourselves must be an act of love.

Rediscovering the Golden Shadow

For much of 2020, I explored the concept of the Golden Shadow — the brighter, more vibrant aspects of ourselves that we’ve overlooked. Unlike the dark shadows, which may consist of traits we consider negative, the Golden Shadow is filled with untapped potentials and unexpressed talents. In a previous project, I developed a comprehensive 60-page workbook that explored the idea of the Golden Shadow with ritual guidance and a lot of deep inner work. A byproduct of that project was the development of my own framework for how to operate with Spiritual Integrity. In retrospect, this was my first big project after being ordained after two years in Interspiritual Seminary, and that work laid some groundwork of fertile soil for me to return to.

This year, my guiding phrase is “simplicity.” It took me three years to distill my thoughts, but a simplified approach to working with the Golden Shadow finally emerged, quite effortlessly, on October 1st. Something about the magic of this season has brought a clarity and aliveness to this Golden Shadow work, and I’m excited to see what emerges in the month to come.

Honoring our Golden Shadows this Halloween

Halloween, or Samhain, is a mystical time when the veil between our world and others is thin. It’s a sacred time to touch these distant parts of ourselves, to connect with our ancestors, and to craft new patterns on our own terms. For me, Halloween offers a chance to fully embody archetypes that resonate with my Golden Shadow.

An example, a memory:

Nine years ago, as Halloween approached, I was living in a new town while I was painfully extricating myself from a codependent and profoundly unhealthy partnership that I’d left behind. In that partnership, I felt my own care and love and kindness used as a weapon to harm me again and again. Parts of hardened, and other parts of me were banished out of self-protection.

That was the year I learned about my rising sign, Cancer. In my process of healing and releasing the traumatic relationship I’d left, connecting with the Cancer archetype of mother, moon, water, expression, care, on my own terms was profoundly healing. Taking the care I’d poured into someone who betrayed me deeply and turning it toward myself, claiming it as something sacred for me was powerful.

So, for Halloween that year, I dressed as a sort of lunar goddess. I asked a friend to paint the symbol for Cancer in between my shoulder blades. I wore a large lunar lapis necklace that had belonged to my grandmother. I painted my face with silver and gold and I created a gown for myself out of scarves and a skirt I bought for $10 at Buffalo Exchange. I used bobby pins to weave a string of costume pearls in my hair.

I felt magnificent.

That night was full of powerful magic. I went with a new friend to a private party where I knew next to no one, and discovered parts of myself through this archetypal expression I hadn’t known before.

I was gifted a selenite egg.
I said things to women I met in the bathroom that they said changed their lives.
I became a part of myself that I hadn’t touched consciously my whole life.

The next day, I spoke to someone who was surprised to meet me in daylight because he thought he’d hallucinated me. The reason? My kindness.

That simple reflection, which still makes me laugh, was helpful for me integrating that archetype and knowing deeply that yes, that is me. I can trust my love, my care, my devotion, my kindness. It is safe to be who I am in this way.

The Dance of Cosmic Regeneration

That experience changed my life. It’s one of many Halloweens that have been powerful portals of transformation and return.

The season gives us permission to shed our old identities like autumn leaves and allow them to nurture the soil for the seeds of ourselves which have scattered and lay dormant to sprout new life.

This is the cycle of entropy and syntropy in action:

• Leaves fall, entropy
• They nurture new life, syntropy
• We reject ourselves to protect ourselves, entropy
• We creatively play, discovering freshly who we are, syntropy
• Dreams wander in the cosmos, entropy
• We call them back, refreshed and more dynamic, syntropy

This is the dance of cosmic regeneration applied to our own lives, which are not separate from the cosmos (in case you need the reminder, as I often do).

Your Own Journey

If the idea of consciously and lovingly reclaiming your Golden Shadows resonates with you, I welcome you to join The Gold in Our Shadows. It’s affordably priced, and the lessons are brief yet impactful, offering dynamic rituals and creative applications that can adapt to your life’s circumstances. There won’t be live calls, however a shared space for reflection and discussion will be available. I’m excited to see the beauty that will emerge from this shared journey.

Click here to learn more or join the process.

Last night I made a confession to my husband, something I had actually never told him before. A pattern of shame that lives in my body daily that I have been holding in isolation, unconsciously. But to tell you about it, I have to set the scene of dinner last night.

Yesterday was Seth’s birthday, and I had planned a meal all week that I knew would remind him of his grandmother and make him feel connected to his ancestors on his special day. I wasn’t following a recipe, but I’d heard some stories of the Jewish Hungarian dishes that were her love language to him, and I innovated. I braised cabbage steaks, I fried mushrooms, I did my best approximation of farfel using pearl couscous, I made an herbal, sweet, and tangy sauce to tie it all together, garnishing with dill blossoms and serving it with all of my love.

My approach to cooking uses all of my creativity. It involves creating rich, complex, many-layered dishes that experiment with seasonal, abundant ingredients. I’m proud of the relationship I have with food, and many people have said that meals I’ve served are as good as or better than anything they’ve ever eaten in a restaurant. Last night, eating dinner, my husband said exactly that, with additional praise about how this was EXACTLY the meal he needed to feel more deeply into some ancestral healing work he was specifically focused on doing on his birthday.

I’m proud of that. So why do I have an intrusive thought in my mind, often, telling me that I’m probably not a good cook and that people are probably just lying to be nice?

Tuning in, I realize it’s not a thought in my head. It’s a feeling that washes over me. I feel it as a sudden gap I feel in the space between my belly and my chin, a sinking, empty feeling. And then I feel a blandness in my mouth, like no flavors truly differentiate themselves from one another, and every meal is the same.

This feels shameful.
It also feels sometimes like a part of the creative process that propels me forward.

I experience this specifically with any form of creative expression that feels vulnerable to me. It’s why I often don’t sing in public, show my poetry or paintings to literally anyone, and struggle with publishing essays like this one.

But what if we can lose the shame and have a creative process that propels us forward, truly feeling proud of ourselves and enjoying the fruits of our labors?

I’m curious, if you have areas of your life in which shame has been a protective boundary, which you are feeling ready to release? Feel so welcome to share with me, I will hold it with no judgement whatsoever, and celebrate the small brave step it takes to share like this.

Lessons from the Living World: Shedding Our Skin to Grow

When we observe the living world, we see examples of growth and transformation. Snakes, insects, and lobsters all shed their skin or exoskeleton when they outgrow it, allowing them to expand and thrive.

This happens only when their body has grown, with time, to need to take up more space than their current boundary allows. The process of shedding involves tiny chemical interactions throughout the entire body, signalling release. Release, release, release. The signal moves through every part of the body until the release is complete.

I imagine that the build up to that release is uncomfortable.
I imagine that the process of that release is ultimately profoundly pleasurable.

Understanding the Prosocial Shame Ladder

Humans are social creatures. Much of what we need comes from one another. Our growth-shedding cycle is psychological, and it happens by being witnessed by others. We grow in our sense of self, self-love, self-compassion, self-confidence. What do we shed to grow into this? We shed shame.

Cultures that are healthier than ours have rituals and ceremonies to bear witness to one another’s’ shames, failings, growth. There are circles for restoring trust in the community, rites of passage, and ways that ritual theater is employed to heal the shadows and the wounds and the shame of community members, so everyone can grow more whole, together.

There’s a fundamental principle at play here, that we must be witnessed in our shame in order to grow beyond it.

The prosocial shame ladder is a concept I learned about recently in the Trauma of Money course Seth and I are enrolled in. The prosocial shame ladder is a framework that helps us recognize and navigate different layers of shame. It illustrates how our feelings of shame can either hinder or propel us, depending on our response to them.

The ladder consists of four stages, which are interconnected with the concept of being witnessed and growing through our shame:

1. Denial: At the bottom, we deny or dismiss our feelings of shame, remaining trapped within our psychological boundaries. In this stage, we are not yet ready to be witnessed by others or acknowledge our shame.
2. Awareness: Climbing the ladder, we become more aware of our feelings of shame and their impact on our lives, preparing ourselves for a psychological shedding. This awareness opens us up to the possibility of being witnessed by others and encourages us to share our vulnerabilities.
3. Sharing and Witnessing: In this stage, we allow others to bear witness to our shame, and we share our vulnerabilities with them. Through this process, we begin to shed our shame and grow into a greater sense of self-compassion and self-confidence. The act of being seen and heard by others helps us to accept and integrate our experiences.
4. Transformation and Growth: At the top of the ladder, we have successfully moved through our shame, allowing it to transform and propel us forward. The shedding of our shame has allowed us to grow into a more authentic and whole version of ourselves. Our self-love, self-compassion, and self-confidence are strengthened, and we emerge more resilient and capable of facing future challenges.

By understanding the prosocial shame ladder and its stages, we can better navigate the complex emotions that accompany shame. Through sharing our vulnerabilities and allowing others to bear witness to our shame, we can shed the limiting beliefs and experiences that hold us back, ultimately growing into the best versions of ourselves.

Inviting Connection and Growth

Shedding our skin to grow is a process that we all go through in different areas of our lives. Whether it’s with our creative expression, relationships, or relationship with money, shedding our shame and limiting beliefs is an essential part of the growth process.

In our work, Seth and I have realized how connected the roots of sexual shame, financial shame, and religious trauma are. We also know that these forms of shame must be shed through connection with others. That’s why we’re convening a 12 week cohort to gently, thoughtfully, and deeply look at these areas of our lives, how they’re connected, and how we can grow in all three directions together.

Sex, God, and Money is designed to be a safe and supportive space for you to shed your shame, be witnessed by others, and grow into the best version of yourself. If you’re feeling that itch to shed the shame and beliefs that are no longer serving you, you’re so welcome to join us. Click here to learn more.

But there are themes I am tracking, rites of passage than every person I come in contact with these days seem to have in common. This is what I am here to explore today, themes of metamorphosis, transformation, initiation.

I’ve been in contemplation around the topic of initiation for many years, and never more so than the last many weeks. From a mythic and anthropological level, we can understand that initiations always include a few keynote elements. They involve entering into an enclosed, liminal space, an environment that is in between worlds, in which identity dissolves, in which time moves differently, and in which the possible unfolding paths are many. They also involve death, a dissolution of what has been familiar and reliable. And they require a choice to emerge on the other side. We have to choose to enter into the new world in our new form, we have to say, “I Do.”

The nonhuman living world gives us many models of initiation, perhaps none more poetic than that of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly. We all know about this process, perhaps it feels overused or tired to some.

For decades many of us have been referencing this metamorphosis, particularly returning to the microscopic element- the awakening of the imaginal cells, those cells in the body of the caterpillar which stir, independently, and far away from one another, to begin to initiate a change. They only stir when the caterpillar has become so possessed by its impulse to feed, that it has all but consumed the very substrate on which it lives. When this consumption has become enough, and there is hardly any more that the caterpillar can eat, miraculously, this is the time when enough imaginal cells have awakened, and the initiation can begin.

When we think about human civilization, and in some cases our own lives, we can clearly see that the path we have been following is similar to that of the caterpillar. Senseless, constant hunger to the point of nearly destroying that which gives us sustenance- our home, this Earth. And now we find ourselves in the midst of a chaotic transformation, the other side of which has yet to be known. There is a chance that this crisis that we face can, like the caterpillar, be one that brings us from the childlike dependency of our voracious consumer culture, into a new, mature phase of human existence, in which we are true reciprocal partners with the rest of life.

Boundaries

A key stage of metamorphosis is the construction of boundaries. The chrysalis emerges, hardens, creates a firm barrier between the inside world and the outside world so that the metamorphosis can happen in safety. Have you found refuge in boundaries, walls, enclosures recently? Whether it’s the cloistering of a family inside of a home, the closing of a bedroom door to process in solitude, or the closing down of national and state borders to slow the spread of this virus, we are all more aware of the boundaries that keep us either together or separate, confined or exposed.

From an astrological lens, this is a strong theme of this entire year which is powerfully shaped by the history making conjunctions of nearly every planet with Saturn throughout the year. Saturn teaches us lessons of separation, of boundaries, of patience, and of hard won transformations.

We know by now that everyone is learning these lessons, navigating the loneliness, the harshness, and the necessary boundaries of this time the best we can. While the walls we erect may need to be strong and clear, what happens within these walls must necessarily be a tender time of softening. Like the caterpillar, we require a relatively safe and stable environment in which we can collapse completely, to die to our former selves.

Not everyone has this privilege. But those of us with safe homes, who aren’t working on the front lines, and with enough financial stability that we have the ability to breathe easy once in a while during this crisis- we have a responsibility to take notes from the chrysalis and have the courage to fully dissolve, to experience the undoing, the dissolution of the identity and the world which we have known.

Dissolving

This is death at every scale. People are dying. Identities are dying. Institutions are dying. Life as we know it is dying. To look at this mass death from many different scales is not to diminish the real human suffering that is rampant right now, but to open ourselves to one of the most important tasks right now- to grieve.

We must dissolve ourselves into our grief, feel the passing of the world we knew fully, if we are to emerge from this initiation truly transformed.

When I first began looking seriously into the symptoms to watch out for with this illness, the emphasis on the lungs was of course foremost in all the reports. I was quickly reminded of the emotional correlation of the lungs within Traditional Chinese Medicine- grief.

I took a deep breath, and began to feel it.

A sting welling up behind my eyes, a hot lump in my throat, my shoulders dropping as if weighed down by a thick wool blanket.

I know grief; grief is familiar to me.

I’ve grieved the deaths of my father, my teachers, my dog.
I’ve grieved victims of state violence who I have never met before, and grieved the untold billions of nonhuman lives already ended by the unfolding ecosystem collapse all around our planet.

Do you know grief?
Have you grieved a loved one?
A stranger?
The world as you knew it?

If you’ve grieved once, you may know that you will be grieving for eternity, or you may have shut the lid on those feelings, deciding that grief was in your past and that you’ve moved on.

Times like this show us that grief never ends because love never ends, and grief comes from having loved.

To grieve is an honor and a responsibility we have been given, for in grieving we remember, we honor, we make sacred what we have lost.

What have you lost?

It may be intangible, inanimate, or banal, but it is real, this grief is real, and when we feel safe enough or desperate enough we feel it.

How do we grieve well? We allow ourselves to feel everything, to feel deeply. We must cry, we must let off the steam of anger, we must rest deeply, we must laugh loudly, love passionately, acknowledge our unknowing. To grieve is to be present with the fullness of our humanity, to feel all of the blessings and consequences of life and love at once.

To remember how to do this, i turn to the poem from Rumi, the Guest House:

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.

meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

This being human is a guest house. Can you feel this? Can you feel the new arrivals, joy, depression, meanness? Can you welcome them, feel them, give them enough loving attention for them to feel safe and witnessed, and then allow them to leave in peace? Feeling deeply, without holding on to identification with those feelings, this is the process of grief.

We have a responsibility now to grieve, to feel deeply the loss of life, loss of meaning, loss of sense in our collective world. We grieve those who are dying alone in hospital beds and at home. We grieve our vulnerable loved ones, and the time we may lose with them far sooner than we’d hoped. We grieve the income we’ve lost, the security we thought we had, the plans we’d made.

Some few of us have nothing acute to direct our grief toward, but I guarantee it is there, in the collective field, waiting to be felt.

Grief is an undoing, an unbecoming, the dissolution into goo of the identity, the friends, the self that we took for granted. This dissolving is the only way we come to what is next, what is metamorphosing.

It is only when we have allowed ourselves to unravel, through the liquid force of our emotions, that we can begin to make clear choices about what comes next.

Choice

Initiation does not come merely from struggle and loss. Whether at individual or collective levels, initiation requires choice. In these liminal times, our attention to choice can become far more acute, as we see clearly that every choice matters.

Will I enter this public space, or will I stay home?
Will I ask another to risk themself for my safety?

Will I offer shelter to someone who has been traveling and who needs a space to wait out this crisis?

Will I wash my hands now or in 20 minutes?

These are questions which we have to ask ourselves, and to which we may find different answers than if we were asked a year ago.

The most important question of all, is this-

Who do I choose to be?

The imaginal cells do not have preassigned roles- they are like stem cells, capable of becoming anything. It is when they are in the state of dissolved goo that they begin to arrange themselves into their new structure, the glorious body and wings of a butterfly.

Who do you choose to be?

Do you choose to create a new world, or cling to the old models?

And what will you choose if the worst comes to pass in this time in which so much power can be misused, so many rights restricted, so many freedoms curtailed, how we choose to respond, to live, to use our voice makes a difference. Will you numb yourself? Will you create more fear? Will you take the time to really examine what is truly going on on this planet at this time?

We all have these choices. No one can make them for us.

A poem by Wilreke Sophia offers us wider reflection on the choices we have, today and every day:

Today I choose to bow my head from respect instead of ignorance,

as I acknowledge all that is happening as an opportunity for growth, even if it’s unpleasant.

Today I choose pain over suffering,

as it is my choice to hold on to whatever hurts me — or to feel and let go.

Today I choose to dance and sing,

as it frees me more than it scares me.

Today I choose to be gentle and soft with myself,

as I realize it’s my responsibility to take care of me.

Today I choose courage over fear,

as walking the unknown path is more exciting than sitting still in a safe haven.

Today I choose love over hate,

as opening my heart allows more light to shine through.

Today I choose to live.

Life affirming maturity takes conscious, courageous choice, and no one can make that choice for another. The world will continuously present us with challenges and choices which shape our world at every step. It is those challenges which form us

Emergence

The final stage of metamorphosis, is perhaps the most glorious. It is the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis. If you have seen it, then you know that it is not an easy process. This is like a second birth, and there is struggle. The boundaries which have kept this creature safe must now be torn open from the inside, and the butterfly begins this process weak, uncertain, fueled only by a new hunger, and a primal impulse to reach out for the light.

If you were to come across a butterfly in this process, you may take pity, you might want to help her out. Use your fingernail and gently help her pry open the chrysalis, make her struggle easier. This good intention would be the death of her.

See, the strength of the wings of every butterfly is forged in the struggle of emergence from the chrysalis. Just as no one can make our choices for us, no one can take on our unique struggle in the journey to become our next, most magnificent selves.

Mary Oliver, bless her forever, wrote a poem that I feel so beautifully describes this stage of initiation, this struggle, this emergence, and offers us a glimpse of what lies beyond. This is Crossing the Swamp-

Here is the endless

wet thick

cosmos, the center

of everything — the nugget

of dense sap, branching

vines, the dark burred

faintly belching

bogs. Here

is swamp, here

is struggle,

closure —

pathless, seamless,

peerless mud. My bones

knock together at the pale

joints, trying

for foothold, fingerhold,

mindhold over

such slick crossings, deep

hipholes, hummocks

that sink silently

into the black, slack

earthsoup. I feel

not wet so much as

painted and glittered

with the fat grassy

mires, the rich

and succulent marrows

of earth — a poor

dry stick given

one more chance by the whims

of swamp water — a bough

that still, after all these years,

could take root,

sprout, branch out, bud —

make of its life a breathing

palace of leaves.

On the other side of the swampy struggle, can you imagine what a new world the butterfly enters?

A breathing palace of leaves.

She has new eyes, new probosci, she can sense entirely new dimensions of color and texture, the scents and flavors of life, she can feel the subtle pockets of shifting temperature and speed in the air. The world opens to her as a flower, waiting to be tasted. It is a whole new world for her, and she is right at home in it.

Has the world changed or has she? Does is matter? She now has the ability to flutter from flower to flower, pollinating the world, creating more abundance in the garden rather than eating it bare. She can travel great distances, fly to great heights, and see everything from a new vantage point.

The birth of a new life for humanity begins now. Begins here. Begins with you.

What life will you choose?

I read this poem this morning,

And it settled into my bones in a way it never had before. I am living in a world that is dying. We all are. Things are changing in ways and at rates that we can’t fully understand yet. We may never fully understand. But the seasons changes and the wisdom of long dead poets hold deep wisdom for us, if we remember how to look, how to listen.

Rilke’s wisdom so deeply came from a sense of premonition about the ending of his world, an intuition that came about through the devastation and horrors of the World Wars.

So many of us feel a dread that seems similar to where he was coming from. As the pain keeps coming to the surface, as Extinction Rebellion gears up to disrupt business as usual (through their methods of strategic joy, art, and celebration of life), we are faced with this intense, undeniable, fertile, powerful truth: things are changing.

Want the change.

If the living world can teach us anything it is this: life is never truly over; and nothing is ever truly lost. Life wants to continuously cycle through the processes of change, decay, transformation, and rebirth.

This is as true in our own lives as it is in the life of a forest.

Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.

I know I am not the only person who is reminded of grief and loss this time of year. The brilliant colors of changing leaves, heralding the long dark of winter, the change in the air, the shifting of light. The increased awareness of our planetary crisis is bringing this felt sense of loss into wider and wider spheres of our own consciousness. We do not know how chaotic things will get, but we know there will be immense chaos. We do not know if humanity will survive, but we know that things cannot remain in the realm of business as usual.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be grey and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered

We are in the Great Turning, a term coined by Joanna Macy, the translator of this poem by Rilke. Nothing will stay the same. We have the opportunity now, while there is still some sense of choice, to choose how we live. If there are to be generations to remember us, what would we want them to say?

I want to be remembered as a person who lived in congruence with everything that I hold sacred. That I loved and nurtured my family, and that I had no borders of exclusion around who my family was. That I welcomed every being that entered my space with compassion, presence, and kindness. That I helped people to become free of their fear when fear was destroying the world and ruling people’s lives. That I was uncompromising in this, that I sacrificed many comforts and opportunities so that my life’s work would be nothing less than devoted service to all that is sacred to me.

That I helped as many people as I possibly could, in the ways that I was able, with the time that I was given.

I know this world is ending, that it is dying, and dying violently. And I know from sitting at countless deathbeds that with every passing there is a new life, new meaning, new mystery born, waiting for us to become aware of it.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive.

I don’t know the trauma that you have survived to be who you are, now, reading this. I don’t know what your ancestors went through to allow you to be alive, now, at this precious moment of profound opportunity on this planet. I don’t know the prayers that were whispered in darkness, the courage that had to be found in the face of despair. But I know that we share a home together, now.

We must learn to care for one another if we are to care for ourselves.
We must find the courage to imagine new ways of existing.
We must choose to embody those ways in every moment.
We must forgive ourselves and learn from our mistakes.

We must want the change.

Change is coming.
Change is happening.
We must want the change.

Wanting gives us choice.
What do you choose?

The Bad News

If you’re reading this then you likely know these things, but it’s worth getting on the same page. We’re surpassing planetary thresholds that are setting into motion exponential feedback loops of chaos. The wettest and coldest places on Earth are burning, and many of the fires have been set intentionally by humans driven by greed. We are waking up to the fact that the genocide of indigenous people is as much a reality today as it has ever been, and even with the leaders of the world’s governments assembled, it seems like very little radical change is likely to happen from the ‘top‘. We can’t wait for people in positions of power to wake up to this emergency, and we can’t count on them to act in the interest of all when they do.

The Good News

There is so much potential for meaningful connection, decentralized leadership, and mutual aid right now. We are able to understand now that the Earth is a living organism which has survived 5 mass extinction events and still be able to create tremendously diverse and miraculous life (including you). Recognizing the Earth’s intelligence, and the evolutionary impulse that continues to create new life, we have choices about what to do with the energy behind our horror, our anger, our grief, or even our numbness about the death and destruction human ‘civilization’ is wreaking for all of life.

Ok, that might not sound like great news, but in a moment when so many people are losing the will to even live because the chaos coming down the pike seems so frightening, one of the most important things we can do is begin to look with new eyes, to see what we might make of our lives that is good and possible.

So, what are some things that you can put in motion this week to help transition humanity into a regenerative culture?

• Educate yourself about today’s earth based indigenous & black leadership. Listen to these voices. Open yourself to uncomfortable truths. Ally yourself with them. Consider all of your resources, and how you might be able to support these movements.
• Commit to making changes to the way you eat. Find your local farms, ideally based in regenerative, permaculture, and/or biodynamic practices. If they have a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program, enroll! You’ll help them in a really tangible way, and you will receive regular, seasonal, delicious produce.
• Assess and reduce your use of fuel. Consider flying less, driving less, and using less electricity in your daily life. We in the global north are driving the global catastrophes of extractive capitalism. If you can fly less, drive less, and use less electricity this year and inspire others to do the same, you will be helping to reduce extraction in invisible but significant ways.
• Leverage & unhoard your resources. If you have any more money than you really need right now, there is a lot you can do to support justice and regeneration. Be discerning and research well. Send some of it to the people who are protecting and regenerating the most important ecosystems on earth. Consider it insurance if you like. It is necessary that we unhoard and decolonize planetary resources as effectively as possible. (Huni Kuin Fire Response is one fund that has come highly recommended at this urgent time.)
• Befriend death, chaos, and entropy. These are realities of existence in the phenomenal world that western culture tries desperately to hide from our consciousness. We don’t know how to talk about these elements of reality without profound discomfort, bypassing, or nihilism. Find practices (like composting or volunteering at hospice) that can help you wrap your mind around these life giving processes. This is an element of regenerative living that I feel is absolutely vital for humanity’s transition. This is why I’ve begun hosting digital salons which are safe, grounded, community based gatherings where we can bring death and chaos into our consciousness. Please feel welcome to join me!
• Turn to community. Find people you can turn to for vulnerable, intimate connection around these topics, and everything that they bring up in you. Here is a facebook group that will serve you. And this is also why I’ve been hosting digital salons to create space for this kind of deep connection.
• Think critically, love deeply. We all have choices around how we use our minds and hearts. Some of us hide in judgement and blame, some of us hide in love and light. I propose that we find the middle way. We look closely at data, we listen carefully to people’s stories, and we commit to loving everyone and every thing in this world completely and unconditionally.

All of this is going to look differently to everyone, and I invite you to share with me how you choose to think and love and act and regenerate in your own life.

It’s an idea that has remained in such a narrow niche of human thinking that there’s not even a satisfying wikipedia article about it.

The term was popularized in the last century by R. Buckminster Fuller, whose life was dedicated to making “the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous collaboration, without ecological offense or to the disadvantage of anyone.” He was an engineer, a poet, a polymath, and a prophet, and he was aware of the mechanisms of living systems enough to be able to articulate things that humanity had never been able to see before. It’s time for this concept to become a meme. It’s time for us to see at least glimpses of what Bucky saw.

If you ever hang out with physicists or have personally dabbled in nihilism, you probably have encountered syntropy’s counterpart, entropy. Entropy is well known as the continuous expansion of the universe and the source of a lot of people’s existential dread.

That expansion is a process of decay. Entropy is what brings something like a solar system which at one time had an order and a harmony and a rhythm that was predictable into a disordered and chaotic field of decaying space objects. Syntropy on the other hand, is the force that takes scattered space dust and compresses it into a new star, new planets, a new arm of a spiral galaxy. Both processes are happening, just in different places in the cosmos, and at different times.

As above, so below, so let’s bring the metaphor down to earth a little bit.

Think about a tree. If you can, take a look outside and if you can see a tree, great. This is the tree you’re thinking about. At its peak, a tree is beautiful, luscious, thriving with birds and possibly flowers, teeming with life. It certainly at one point or another will have leaves. The leaves of a tree fall off frequently. Maybe it’s every year, maybe it’s a few every day. It depends on the tree and its ecosystem, but parts of the tree do fall. This falling off, or falling apart happens so that the tree can grow and expand, the leaves need to fall off the branch because the branch will grow a tiny bit further in the place where the leaf had been. The leaf, which we would say is now dead, has only one job now- decay.

In our hyper-sanitized world, a lot of people will look at a pile of rotting leaves and be disgusted. They might rush to rake them all into big black plastic bags and leave them on the curb to be picked up by the garbage collectors on Tuesday. This is an error that points to the many errors of human civilization at this time.

To reject and sequester rotting leaves is to deny the soil and all the species who depend on it the return of the nutrients which make life possible.

Syntropy is not only the opposite of entropy, it is its dancing partner. One cannot exist without the other.

Syntropy is the coming together of life.

Syntropy is the potential for new life, new meaning and new ways of being which emerges from the chaos and decay of entropy.

In our cultural obsession with order, predictability, and cleanliness, we have become repulsed by any sign of entropy. This is the fatal flaw that we are fucking ourselves with in a really bad way. In the example of leaves and soil, we see a microcosmic example of one of the most urgent threats to human life on earth now: the massive degradation of topsoil. Every food we have ever eaten came into existence because there was topsoil on the earth that took around 500 years per inch to develop. This topsoil developed because leaves and all kinds of biomass decayed there. It existed because worms and insects and fungi all helped to break down what used to be alive, and turn it into another form of life: fertile soil, rich enough in the nutrients that we need that it provided for the creation of the entire population of humanity to date. That creation is a syntropic process, and you exist because of it.

In space, syntropy is gravity.

In time, syntropy is evolution.

Among humans, syntropy is love.

As a response to a culture of extraction, syntropy is regeneration.

See, syntropy is happening. It’s happening all around us, and you are participating in syntropy, even when you can’t see it.

But it’s hard to see when things are going well. Elementary schools rarely get calls from parents telling them what a good job they’re doing. When my body is not sick or in pain I often forget to notice that it’s there at all. When things are working the way we like them to, we don’t pay attention. This is understandable, it makes sense that our awareness is usually primed to focus on what’s not working, what needs healing, what is falling apart. But if we didn’t have a word for health, all we would be aware of is sickness and death.

This is one of the reasons we don’t know much about syntropy in our culture. But we find ourselves in a human civilization that is falling apart at nearly every level, so we need to know what healing looks like. We need to understand the process of evolution which made all this life on earth possible even after 6 massive extinction events.

We can develop an embodied and conscious relationship with syntropy. We can make every element of our work and lives be consciously participating in syntropy and entropy all the time.

One of the beautiful things about syntropy is that unlike many other memes that people share to generate a sense of hope in the face of despair, this is a force of nature. Syntropy is undeniable, and when we begin to see it we realize that it is going on everywhere, all the time. Not only is syntropy always unfolding in what we call nature, that wild landscape outside of us, but it’s happening in human communities as well:

• The community garden at the end of my street is syntropy.
• Whenever women gather together to connect and make anything, from a quilt to a social movement, that’s syntropy.
• The ongoing work of indigenous peoples everywhere to preserve, celebrate, and bring forward their culture in the face of so much destruction, harm, and abuse is syntropy.
• Whenever a neighbor does a kindness for another neighbor in need, that’s syntropy.
• Every form of regenerative practice, from land management to business to culture creation is syntropy.
• The joy and creation and inspiration being generated by the Extinction Rebellion movement is syntropy.
• Every organization that has ever won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge is operating at peak syntropy.
• The organic growth and spread of permaculture knowledge is syntropy at play, and even if they don’t know it, all permaculturalists are students of the entropy-syntropy dance.

We would do well to pay attention.

We would do well to participate.

The urgent and deep need for a humanity which understands and embodies syntropic principles has never been greater. This is the motivation behind my work and so many others’ work in the world.

One of Buckminster Fuller’s closest friends, J Baldwin said that

Our purpose and duty as humans is to be syntropic.

So what does being a syntropic human look like in your life? The answer will be as unique as your fingerprints, and as universal as the air we breathe. I invite you to bring this question into your life. And, if you would like to receive support, reflection, and companionship in that question, reach out. I’d love to know how I may serve the vision that you are serving.

You can reach out through the form on this page.

I am daily overwhelmed by news of catastrophe and also of hope, and though I try to maintain a wide and inclusive view of what is unfolding on this planet, there are some things that are so dynamic, so nuanced, and so rapidly evolving that it takes some time for me to really feel that I have an understanding of what’s going on. Extinction Rebellion is one such phenomenon.

Most things about Extinction Rebellion that I’ve seen since October 2018 have intrigued me. I had a sense that their actions have centered creation rather than destruction. I knew that they were driven by the same awareness of catastrophic ongoing biospheric destruction that drives me and all of my work. But I hadn’t committed to understanding the full picture of their motivations and methods, their vision for the future, and the degree to which they operate in decentralized and pluralistic input/decision making models. Because I didn’t understand them, I couldn’t fully trust them.

That’s why, last weekend at Shakespeare and Company, I picked up a copy of the Extinction Rebellion Handbook, This is Not A Drill. I’ve been reading it this whole week, everywhere I’ve gone in Paris.

I’ve read it on the metro, where I’ve seen more people reading in public than perhaps anywhere else in my life. I’ve read it by the Seine, where Paris’s mayor Anne Hidalgo is planning to plant biodiverse wooded areas. I’ve read it in a creative concept workers space in the Marais where creativity has expressed itself through textiles and bright feminine designs. I’ve read it here, sitting along the Canal St Martin, where evidence of the Rebellion is strongest as I wander through the side streets of Republique and see pamphlets and posters and sidewalk markings all beating with the same pulse of the small pink book in my hand.

For me, now, Extinction Rebellion is inseparable in my mind from this city where in 2015, an agreement with no teeth, no penalties, and no vision for a truly thriving future was negotiated by political representatives from 196 nations. The Paris Accords are a little better than nothing, but incomplete science, reductive goals, and vague strategy all emerge from political interest to maintain business as usual for as long as possible. This will certainly result in the premature deaths of billions.

Extinction Rebellion is what it looks like when many ordinary people discover the extraordinary gifts that await us all when we take personal responsibility, and come together with creative devotion to life.

This small book explores the rebellion from many angles. I am, as is my habit, reading it nonlinearly, and I think that this approach serves me in integrating it’s contents. The first section of the book, “Tell the Truth” is heavy. The weight of the grief of this world is heavy. The degree to which life is falling apart is overwhelming. And so we must balance it with our understanding and engagement of what life is coming together in new creative forms. “Act Now” is as much an imperative as it is a meditation and a contextualization about the actions and co-creations that have emerged thus far. More than inspiring, it is clarifying of the path ahead, even when my path is almost certainly different than the paths of those whose words are printed here.

For anyone who feels the call to serve life at this perilous moment in history, familiarize yourself with this movement.

It is rebellion for life, for love, for mutual aid, for interdependence as a lived reality. It is a rebellion for biodiversity, for the thriving of all beings.

This may not be your path or your community, but the truth that any of us are telling, the good that any of us are doing, the love that any of us are being, is inherently going to bring us all courage when witnessed and experienced by others. So bear witness this movement, become a part of it, or creatively come to your own form of love in action.

I am deeply grateful to be a part of this living moment, in devotion to all life.

I feel grounded and steady, like I’m rooted to the earth, or have a blanket, heavy and soft, wrapped around my shoulders. I feel a smile coming over my lips, a joy that feels like laughter and tears washing over me, astonishment that what I love exists. I feel a tugging, from deep within my belly, a yearning to be close to what I love. I feel excitement because I know that when I am immersed in what I love, the opportunity for creation is endless.

Love shapes our human bonds, our choices, and whatever we may identify as our purpose in life. Love is a reason for tremendous creation and destruction in our species, and the boundaries of who is included within our love create the lines in the sand beyond which lies the land of “other,” the land of “them.” If I asked any cross section of humanity to precisely define love, I would receive mostly frustrated, confused responses. If I asked you to describe it, the answers would come flooding in, full of adjectives, poetry, strong feelings, and just by thinking about love, your body would physiologically change.

Buckminster Fuller, beloved American architect, systems theorist, polymath, poet once wrote, “love is metaphysical gravity.” To some this is a statement that lands naturally, for others it’s an idea that seems alien and confusing. After all, the meaning of metaphysics has changed tremendously in the last few hundred years, and we don’t really know much about gravity either. To make a statement equating something so deeply personal that our motivations are shaped by a longing for it from the morning we are born with something as abstract and impersonal as our grade school lessons about Newton’s law of universal gravitation seems, to some, at first absurd. This disconnect is because our culture doesn’t tend to cultivate awareness about gravity as much as, perhaps, we should.

If I asked anyone at all to precisely define gravity to me, just as with love, it wouldn’t be easy and it wouldn’t be precise. If I ask you now, to be fully where you are, and observe how gravity feels, after a moment of contemplation, you would have something interesting to say.

For me, now, as I write this, and stop to notice- I realize how much of my body is resisting gravity. I’m sitting in bed, but most of the muscle groups in my body are tensed, holding me in an alert and slightly uncomfortable position to be working on my laptop. I take my hands off the keyboard, move the computer to the side, and spend a few moments moving the joints of my hands, arms, and shoulders in circles. I allow my head to fall to the side, and then down, and slowly bring it back to center, leaning it back against the pillow behind me. I scan my body for any tension, resistance, any muscle activity at all. As I scan, I notice the compression of my pants around my hips, I feel the weight of my dog’s head resting on my ankle, and the subtle pressure of the blanket between us on the rest of my legs. More subtle still, I feel my body settling into the mattress and pillows beneath it, feel myself being pulled to this planet.

This relationship with gravity, this ability to drop the physical tension in my body in an instant is new. A few years ago I took a movement course from Matthew Nelson which completely changed my relationship with gravity and my body. This course came during a time of my life when I was spending a lot of time with my father, a psychologist and author who only ever talked about love, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. The course was a tool that I chose to use during this time to allow me to process and express the deep feelings of dread, longing, confusion, love, and sorrow that come with anticipatory grief. Most of the movement practice had to do with surrendering to gravity, yielding, noticing what it feels like to not be straining, even if just for a moment. The word ‘yield’ was carefully chosen by Matthew in this practice, because of its dual meaning. Yes, it means to surrender, but it also describes harvest. In yielding to gravity with consciousness every day, I was able to begin to understand in an embodied sense what Buckminster Fuller might have been talking about.

I began to know the felt experience of being held gently to my place on this planet, I felt the love that I have for this earth more strongly than ever because I felt that love as a mutuality. Through gravity, I felt the earth as alive and beloved, and that I was beloved by the earth. A poem by Raymond Carver which describes this was pulsing through my heart during this time, and I made art with that poem, writing its words on my heart. I began to felt a deeper commitment to making good use of my time here on this planet. I noticed my anxiety lessen, and my mind expand.

A few months into this practice, I visited the California Institute of Integral Studies to explore the option of a Masters in Cosmology, Consciousness, and Philosophy. While in the building, I had three hours worth of conversations about this beautiful correlation, and learned about the presence of great bands of gravitational waves at the outer edge of our galaxy.

Spiral arm galaxies, like our Milky Way home, are shaped by the forces that make stars. There seem to be vast gravitational arms that spiral through the cosmos, bending space-time, and concentrating space dust into new forms. Sometimes, this results in the precise concentrations of hydrogen and helium atoms needed to begin the process of nuclear fusion, and new stars, new gas giants, new planets and moons begin their cosmic dance.

The most simple interpretation of “love is metaphysical gravity” is that the two invisible forces pull things together.

In Systems Theory terms, the two forces bring about emergent properties, systems that are created from two or more other systems coming into contact. We, for example, are an emergent property of our biological parents, but not only them. We are an emergent property of all of our human ancestors, the cultures they built, the meaning and purpose that fueled them, the love and care they provided their children so that we, one day, would live. We are also an emergent property of the rest of the species of the earth, every single organism that has lived to transform matter on this planet for the last 4.54 billion years. We are also the emergent property of the pulsing, breathing metabolizing forces that have been shaping this cosmos for at least 13.82 billion years.

Every creation is an emergent property, of not just two, but infinite dynamic systems throughout time and space giving rise to all that we know in creation.

Love and gravity both generate the conditions for this creation, and, given time, evolution. I believe that when Bucky wrote “love is metaphysical gravity” he was helping us to understand two different ways that we experience syntropy, the universal force that counterbalances the entropy of an ever expanding universe. Syntropic forces, including love, gravity, life, and evolution, are difficult to identify, because it’s much easier to see when things fall apart (entropy). When things are operating harmoniously, whether they be our bodies, our households, our social networks, or our biosphere, our solar system we hardly notice them.

The forces of syntropy in our lives regenerate chaos back into harmony, they support us in finding meaning and coming home to ourselves. I believe we have the responsibility to understand and embody these principles, not merely to understand them.

To that end, today is Valentine’s Day, and I am committing my life ever deeper to the path of love, and I do not begrudge being held close to the body of this earth. I am grateful you are here with me.

Walking along the dirt road path between my home and the temples of Kashi Ashram, the community in which I was raised, the steady rhythm of my footsteps gave rise to this sentence. All I could hear in my mind were these words, “this is a new life, and I am not afraid, this is a new life, and I am not afraid, this is a new life, and I am not afraid.” This became a prayer I breathed as if it were an oxygen mask handed to me as I was drowning in an ocean of sorrow.

At the time, I had just come through months of grief and solitude following a painful two years of severe emotional and sexual trauma. For five months, I had retreated into solitude, become friends with my own company, reclaimed my sovereignty, and let go of most of my ideas of who I was and where I was going in life. There is beauty and terror in such times.

I did everything possible to release old versions of myself. I gave clothes away, I shaved my head, I released treasured books, I changed positions at work, I lived with new roommates, I lost friends, I stopped going out, I bought myself a big bed, and I stayed in it most of the time. I became acquainted with the tenderness of my raw and vulnerable self, heart cracked open, drinking deeply of the well of grief.

On hard nights, I felt my body and heart wracked with terror and pain, not knowing how to cope with any of my fears, and I would numb myself often with at least three episodes of Star Trek. On good nights I focused on discovering what pleasure I truly desired, which often looked like long hot showers, oiling and blessing my body, and expanding my mind by watching at least three episodes of Star Trek. It’s curious how thin the line between depressive self indulgence and tender loving self-care can be. The primary medicine for my wounds were daily walks to the Sarasota Bay where I watched and photographed the light on the water at sunset.

These times of withdrawal, grief, and seclusion come to pass in our lives, and we rarely see them as a blessing. Grief is a sledgehammer that cracks open the structure of our lives and leaves us feeling naked in wide open spaces we never new existed in ourselves. These spaces are frightening and full of possibility, full of glass shards and diamonds. In order to harvest the blessings, we must stop running, get low to the ground, and look carefully at the wreckage around us. Until we do this, we cannot know what will cut us and what will turn into riches beyond imagination.

It’s hard to feel gratitude for anything so brutal as grief when we are immersed in it. I was fortunate to have four walls around me to retreat to, and grateful that my classes and work schedule were such that I was able to spend much time alone. This was four years ago, and I am writing about old grief because I am still navigating the pain and potential of the intense grief I feel from the deaths of my father and one of my most respected elders this summer. Their passing from this life profoundly transformed my understanding of my place in this world. I am still bringing patience, breath, and light to the far corners of the places inside of myself that this grief has cracked open.

We cannot know who we will be on the next edge of life’s spiraling evolutions, and we cannot predict what loss and sorrow we will be faced with next. We can, however choose to seek to understand our selves, to go into the frightening places and bring our love with us, to be willing to allow our being to grow into these wide open spaces, to clean them up and make of them a new home, a new being, a new life. We can transcend and include all of our life’s experiences as we grow into the full potential our lives have to offer us.

This is a new life, and I am not afraid.

I say this to myself now on the border of my twenty-sixth year, while resting in a garden with the sun on my face. I say it with you, whoever you are, on the border of our new year on this garden-planet with the sun on her face.

We have an unknowable amount of grief and beauty and living ahead of us. May we remember that we are in it together, and may we explore the open possibilities of existence together during beautiful, brief shared time and space that we have on this earth.