I do not think I would have said it that plainly. I would have used better language. More luminous language. I would have talked about awakening, healing, remembering, becoming whole, returning to the sovereign self. But underneath all of that was often a hidden assumption that somewhere along the way I had gotten separated from the life I was meant to live.

I could look back at my life almost like a map of turns. Seeing certain choices as moving me closer to my path and others seeming to take me farther away. Perceiving a relationship as a detour. An ending as a correction. A career as belonging to the false self. A longing belonging to the true one.

It is a seductive way to understand a life, especially for those of us devoted to inner work. It gives the soul a heroic storyline. It gives suffering a kind of architecture. It allows us to imagine that if we can just find the true path, at last we will become who we were meant to be.

The trouble is that this way of seeing carries an old wound inside it. The wound is the belief that the life we are actually living cannot be trusted as sacred ground. That our humanity is too messy. That our bodies are too needy. That our attachments are too ordinary. That our choices, unless they can be arranged into a beautiful enough myth, may have taken us away from what is holy.

So much religion and spirituality begins with this suggestion. We are broken. Fallen. Sinful. Fractured. Too human, too embodied, too wounded, too attached to the world. The path becomes improvement, purification, correction, transcendence.

Rise above the body.

Rise above the world.

Rise above the self that made such a mess of things.

There is truth in some of this. Some roads do need to be left. Some identities do need to be shed. Some relationships, systems, addictions, and inherited roles do not need to be made holy. They need to be exited.

But there is also a subtle violence in any spirituality that distrusts the life we are actually living. That is suspicious of the body. That makes a judgment about the ordinary. That holds the belief that our humanity is the problem our soul must overcome.

A truer spiritual path, I believe, is uncovering what has been hidden. Hidden by culture, survival, grief, obedience, inheritance, and all the ways I learned to belong by leaving myself behind. This changes the path from manufacturing a better self into remembering what has been covered, bringing back what has been exiled, and letting the unlived life begin to breathe through the life already here.

This spiritual path does not conclude in arrival and achievement. I do not get to declare myself finished and decorate my cage.

The path I want to walk more authentically now is one that keeps me moving and evolving, because my soul only trusts a path in motion. But the motion of my soul is now toward inhabiting the life I already have, and living it more deeply. This is the part that feels both simple and almost impossible. Because if I am honest, my instinct is often to turn every inner soul-stirring into a new outer form. This is part of my gift. I can see patterns. I can feel when a form has gone dead. I can listen for what wants to come through and begin building a vessel for it before it has fully made itself known.

But gifts have shadows. Mine certainly does. The shadow is that sometimes it is easier to imagine the next form than to inhabit the current one. Easier to build a new doorway than to walk through the one already open. Easier to turn the ache into a teaching than to let it change the way I make breakfast, answer an email, stand in my own kitchen, look at my own calendar, live inside my own body.

I live in Madison. I am divorced. I live alone. I have two adult sons. I curate a yoga community. I am getting older. I am staying sober. These are not dots on a moral map of right turns and wrong turns. They are not proof that I have gotten my life right or wrong. They are the clay of the life I am actually living.

And my soul does not need better clay before it can begin. It wants breath.

This home. This body. This work. This age. This season. This ordinary day. This dog at my feet. This grandson who will never be this age again. These are the living, breathing forms of my life.

They are the path waiting to be animated under my own feet.

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One year ago, on June 27, I wrote a GraceNote from my back step after several days of heavy rain. The garden was enormous. The green was almost indecent. The birds were singing so loudly I could not tell if it was joy or warning. It might have been both.

There was a lot of beauty and peace in my life then. My kids were doing well. I had a grandson. My work was steady. Luna followed me up and down the garden paths as if she had been hired by the moon to make sure I did not wander too far from myself.

And still, I could feel something. Not panic. Not exactly dread. More like a low hum beneath the surface of things. A body-knowing that something was shifting collectively. That in a few months, we might look back and say, remember when it still felt like that?

I named three forces that seemed to be converging at once. Climate collapse. Authoritarianism. AI. Each immense on its own. Together, almost impossible to metabolize.

I wrote as though something was coming. A year later, I wonder if I misunderstood how it would arrive. Maybe the apocalypse, if that is even the right word, does not always come crashing through the door.

Maybe it seeps in. It becomes atmosphere. It becomes Tuesday.

It becomes what we read about while making coffee. What we discuss between errands. What we half-register while answering emails, buying dog food, watering the plants.

And this is the part I cannot stop noticing in myself and in others. The things that would have sent us reeling a few years ago now move through us with a strange dullness. It seems our nervous systems have learned they cannot afford to fall apart every time reality does.

A year ago, I ended that GraceNote with a plan to plant more perennials. Yesterday, I went to the garden center and bought seven arborvitae trees. The biggest ones they had. Because I am too old to start with the little ones. I said this to the garden center guy, and he laughed. Then I told him I was going to name them after the seven dwarfs, and he looked briefly concerned for my well-being.

But now I have seven arborvitae waiting to be hauled home and planted along the edge of my backyard.

Doc. Grumpy. Happy. Sleepy. Bashful. Sneezy. Dopey.

A privacy screen, technically.

A fairy tale, accidentally.

And maybe, if I let them, something like a theology for living in this new world.

Seven ways to stay human, because apparently this is the kind of theology I am working with now.

Shrubs with dwarf names.

Doc

Doc is the part of me still trying to diagnose the age. She reads the charts, tracks the symptoms, studies the accelerating feedback loops. She wants to stay informed without becoming consumed.

I need the part of me that can name what is happening clearly. The part that can tell the truth without turning every truth into catastrophe theater. Diagnosis is not despair. It is the beginning of honest relationship.

Grumpy

Grumpy is the part of me that refuses to make peace with what should not be normalized. She is sacred refusal. Grumpy is the part of my soul that still knows the difference between learning how to live in this world and agreeing to it. I do not want to lose this part, and some days I feel her disappearing.

I get it. I have to keep living. I have to keep buying groceries and celebrating birthdays and changing furnace filters and learning the new software, though maybe I draw the line at that one. I cannot live every day as if I am standing in the last scene of an apocalypse movie.

I find myself saying, this is just how things are now. But my inner Grumpy remembers that some things deserve resistance. Not the brittle resistance that turns me into what I oppose. Not the self-righteous resistance that needs an enemy in order to feel alive.

The deeper resistance. The one that says no without hardening the heart.

Happy

Happy is laughing with the garden center guy. Coming home with dirt under my nails and a ridiculous plan. Happy is the part of me that still notices the absurdity of seven trees in seven pots, lined up like a tiny forest with stage names. And still feels ridiculously glad I did it.

Happy is letting beauty still get all the way in. This may be more radical than it sounds. Joy is not a betrayal of the severity of things. It is part of the repair. Happy does not say everything is fine. Happy says the world is not only its wounds.

Sleepy

Sleepy is my exhausted nervous system. The strange dullness that arrives when too much keeps happening for too long. I recognize Sleepy in myself when I read another headline and feel almost nothing. When something outrageous, dangerous, cruel, or surreal happens and some part of me says, yes, of course. What else is new?

Some amount of Sleepy is merciful.

A human being cannot live forever at the pitch of emergency. My animal self is wise. It knows when to lower the volume so I can keep walking, keep loving, keep planting trees.

But sleepiness can sand the edges off outrage until everything feels equally far away. So I am trying to pay attention to how much time Sleepy gets in my life.

Bashful

Bashful is humility. The admission that I do not know how this story turns out. I do not know if I am becoming steadier or slowly disappearing from my life. I do not know if planting trees is hope, denial, instinct, prayer, or all four wearing the same muddy shoes.

Humility feels important now because certainty is trying to be everywhere. We are all trying to be sure we know what is happening, who is to blame, and what comes next. But maybe part of staying human is refusing false certainty.

Maybe I have to say, I do not know. And then keep going anyway.

Sneezy

Sneezy is the part of me that reacts before my mind has language. She is my allergy to this age. My anxiety. My insomnia. The fatigue no nap quite touches. She is the part of me carrying the world’s weight in my shoulders. Feeling it in my immune system, my attention span, my grief threshold, my capacity to answer one more text.

Sneezy reminds me that I am not only thinking my way through this time. I am breathing it. Digesting it. Dreaming it. Absorbing it.

Sometimes the body is the first one to tell the truth.

Dopey

Dopey is the holy fool. I think she is my favorite. She’s the one who plants seven enormous trees in a collapsing world because, honestly, what else am I going to do? Lie down in the mulch and let the machines win?

Nope.

So I plant trees and name them something ridiculous.

There is something almost embarrassing about hope right now. It sounds too soft, too innocent, too scented-candle-in-a-burning-house.

But I am less interested in hope as a feeling and more interested in hope as a behavior. Carrying trees from my Jeep to the yard. Digging the holes. Loosening the roots.

The inner fool is not stupid. She is refusing to let despair have the final claim on creation.

There is no one right way to meet this moment. I think that is what the seven trees are showing me. No single response will work. Not diagnosis alone. Not refusal alone. Not delight alone. Not rest, humility, bodily truth, or holy foolishness alone. I need the whole strange company.

A year ago, I ended that GraceNote with a plan to plant more perennials. Now, one year later, I am planting seven arborvitae because the future must not be left to the frightened, the greedy, the disembodied, and the cruel.

So here I am again. Coffee. Garden. Dog. Seven trees of life ready to be planted.

Doc. Grumpy. Happy. Sleepy. Bashful. Sneezy. Dopey.

And me, muddy-shoed and mortal, watering what I can.

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I was sitting at a red light when I saw three young people standing on the corner waiting to cross the street. Still kids, really. Fourteen or fifteen, maybe. Old enough to be out in the world without adults, young enough to still belong fully to the first days of summer.

There was one girl standing in the middle, with a boy on either side of her. All three of them were holding sub sandwiches, the kind wrapped in paper and already beginning to lose their structural integrity because teenagers do not eat sandwiches so much as wrestle them into surrender.

They were laughing and chewing at the same time, which is one of the great lost arts of youth. I decided, with no evidence except their joy and the sandwiches, that they had the munchies.

This is one of the small privileges of being stopped at a red light. For thirty or forty seconds, you become an accidental witness. You know nothing, so naturally you make up an entire story.

In my version, they had just walked out of the sandwich shop, slightly high, completely ravenous, and alive in the specific way teenagers are alive when no one is telling them what to do next.

Then I noticed the boys.

They were both turned toward the girl in the middle, standing on either side of her like devoted little pillars. Their bodies had that unmistakable stance of a first crush.

I thought, both of those boys are in love with her.

No sooner had the thought crossed my mind than both boys, almost right on cue, each kissed her on the cheek.

All of it was so sweet and funny that I laughed out loud in my car. The choreography of it. The innocence of it. The full summer-theater of it all.

Two boys, one girl, three sandwiches, and the ancient ritual of young love unfolding on a street corner while I sat in my car like some more-than-middle-aged oracle waiting at a left-turn signal.

But those three little punks were carrying the Dharma I needed.

I have been watching so many endings lately. Some personal, unfolding in the intimate rooms of my own life. Some collective, playing out on the great cracked screen of the world.

All around us, old ways of holding things together are coming apart. Some endings we chose. Some we resisted. Some we saw coming. Some we keep hoping are not really happening.

And some days it feels as though dignity, integrity, and truth are still here, but so hard to hear beneath all the noise.

I had begun to feel as though endings were becoming the whole story.

But there they were.

Not outside the world. Not spared from it. Not floating in some innocent bubble beyond history, consequence, grief, or change. They were just standing on the curb right inside the same world as the rest of us, with sandwiches in their hands, laughing.

That is what stayed with me. The first days of summer and young love beginning right there, in the middle of everything.

None of this will fix the broken systems or explain why human beings keep making such a spectacular mess of the Sacred.

It will not solve the world. But for a moment, it interrupts the lie that the world is only what is breaking.

I sat there at the red light, suspended inside my own life, my own private ledger of endings, and the ache of a world in transition, watching them wait to cross into whatever came next.

Then the light changed.

They stepped off the curb.

I turned left.

And the world, which had not been solved, went on ending and beginning.

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There are seasons when life feels heavy with effort. We push. We plan. We try to figure things out. We stare at our lives as though the next step will reveal itself through sheer determination.

But some of the most important movements in a life arrive differently.

Not as decisions.

As invitations.

The ancients understood something we have largely forgotten. The most powerful force shaping a life is often the least visible.

Not earth.

Not water.

Not fire.

Not even air.

Spirit.

The invisible current that arrives unannounced and changes the direction of a day, a relationship, a vocation, a life.

One of the ways we encounter it is through inspiration. The Latin root of the word inspiration means “to breathe into.” To be inspired is literally to be breathed upon.

Which raises the question, how much of our lives are we spending trying to invent ourselves, and how much are we spending allowing ourselves to be inspired? There is a difference. One begins with effort. The other begins with making space.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes of El Duende, the mysterious force that appears in folklore as a kind of wild inspiration, a living presence that arrives like wind through the trees. It cannot be manufactured. It cannot be controlled. It can only be encountered.

Most of us know this force. We’ve felt it.

When an idea arrives fully formed and seems wiser than we are.

When a sentence in a book follows us around for weeks.

When a longing suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.

When grief breaks something open and suddenly we know what matters.

When a conversation, a poem, a piece of music, or a single encounter seems to know us better than we know ourselves.

When we find ourselves drawn toward something without fully understanding why.

When life begins whispering in a direction our plans never anticipated.

Something in us recognizes the voice. And we remember.

Not who we should be. Who we are.

The challenge is not that inspiration is rare. The challenge is that modern life leaves very little room for it. We fill our days with noise. We crowd our schedules. We become managers of our lives rather than participants in them. And then we wonder why we feel so disconnected from spirit.

Yet spirit is still speaking. The invitation is still arriving. The question is whether we are becoming the kind of people who can hear it. Living is itself a creative act. The way we love. The way we speak. The way we protect. The way we create beauty. The way we offer our gifts to a hurting world. All of it belongs to the art of living.

Perhaps the task is not to ask what we should do with our lives.

Perhaps the task is to become more inspirable.

To create enough space within ourselves that beauty can touch us, love can move us, and the voice of spirit can still be heard.

To let life itself shape who we are becoming.

Because spirit is not asking merely to be felt.

It longs to be carried.

What enters us longs to move through us.

The wind is already blowing.

Somewhere within us, a sail is waiting to be raised.

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No new matter arrives.
None leaves.

The matter in our bodies has been here from the beginning, endlessly changing form.

Which means the matter that makes up you and me was once part of something else.

A different child.
Another grandmother.
A horseshoe crab.
A coral reef.

And someday what is now called you and me will become something else entirely.

A future hand.
A desert cactus.
A blue whale.

Maybe this is what matters.

Not the forms themselves, but the way life keeps passing itself from one to another.

The way life keeps making us from one another.

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Decades ago, I was married to a man who looked good beside me in photographs.

We had the house, the careers, the children, the vacations, and the life many people hope to build. Looking back, we were a little like Ken and Barbie. Beautiful on the outside. Well arranged. Functional. Successful.

And yet beneath all of it, something in me was dying.

At the time, I couldn’t have told you exactly what was wrong. Nothing was dramatically wrong. There was no great catastrophe, no obvious villain, no crisis that would have justified blowing up a life that appeared to be working.

There was simply an ache. A feeling that some deeper current inside me was waiting for permission to live. I spent years trying to heal that ache. I analyzed it, prayed about it, worked on myself, read books, attended workshops, and tried to become a better version of who I already was. But no amount of healing seemed to touch the thing itself.

Years later, I encountered an idea from Carl Jung that helped me understand why. Jung suggested there are two kinds of suffering. The first comes from life itself. Loss, trauma, abandonment, illness, disappointment, and the inevitable heartbreak of being human. This suffering needs our compassion. It needs tending. It needs healing.

But there is another kind of suffering. The suffering that comes from the life we have not lived. The conversation we never have. The truth we never speak. The gift we never develop. The desire we never trust. The part of ourselves waiting beneath the life we have constructed.

This suffering does not arise because something happened to us. It arises because something within us is trying to happen through us.

For much of my life, I treated these two sufferings as though they were the same. Whenever I felt the ache, I assumed there must be another wound to heal, another insight to uncover, another layer of work to complete before I could finally begin living.

Many of us do this. We turn our lives into endless preparation. We imagine that one day we will become sufficiently healed, sufficiently clear, sufficiently worthy, sufficiently ready. Then we will write the book, start the business, make the art, speak the truth, love the person, begin the life. But someday is a moving target.

And over time, postponement becomes its own kind of sorrow. Not because we have failed, but because some part of us recognizes how long something beautiful has been waiting. This is where healing reaches its limit. Because the remedy for the unlived life is not more healing.

It is participation. There is a word I have come to love for this. Consecration. To consecrate a life is to stop standing outside it, evaluating whether it is safe enough, healed enough, or certain enough. It is to offer yourself to what calls you. To allow the deeper current beneath your days to become stronger than your hesitation.

When I look back now at that marriage, I can see something I couldn’t see then. My deepest suffering wasn’t coming from the marriage itself. It was the growing realization that I had become a stranger to my own soul. The ache was never asking me to become a better version of the woman I was. It was asking me to become the woman I came here to be.

I suspect many people know this ache. Not because they are broken. Because there is something in them that wants to live.

And eventually we realize we are running out of someday.

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This June, quietly and without much ceremony, I will cross nine years sober. Nine years since alcohol stopped running my life. I used to think the hardest thing I would ever do was stop drinking.

It wasn’t.

What took far longer was untangling myself from a relationship dynamic I kept returning to, hoping the place wounding me might somehow also become the place I could finally rest.

Recovery from alcohol began with admitting I was powerless against something that was harming me. Ending the bond began the same way. I had to stop romanticizing the loop we were in. I had to stop believing the next conversation, the next moment of tenderness, the next small reaching toward me would finally resolve what had never once resolved before.

And finally, several months ago, I faced the humiliating truth that I was participating in my own suffering.

Not consciously.
Not maliciously.

But faithfully.

That is the part people do not understand unless they have lived inside it.

From the outside, it seems obvious.
They see the lies.
The betrayals.
The inconsistencies.
All the reasons someone should leave. But inside this kind of bond, even temporary relief from suffering starts feeling like love.

There’s a line in a song that says, “You gave me words that sounded tender.” This is exactly how it happened.

There would be warmth.
Attention.
Compliments.
Hints at loyalty and commitment.
Moments when I genuinely felt seen and chosen.

And then, just as predictably, something else would return.

Distance.
Withholding.
A lie.
Another woman.

And with it, the subtle but unmistakable realization that I was not safe or central in this person’s life. And as painful as it is to admit, I became attached to trying to earn my way back into the warmth. Because underneath this relationship was a much older wound. One that believed love had to be earned. And if I could just be wise enough, forgiving enough, special enough, irreplaceable enough…maybe this time I would finally arrive in the place where I could rest.

But there is no resting place inside a wound built on proving your worth.

Only exhaustion.

The most baffling part is that the betrayals themselves never ended the loop. You would think they would. You would think discovering another lie or another fracture would have been the moment clarity arrived and I walked away forever. Instead, I would feel the hurt. Feel disgusted. I would even feel genuinely finished. And then time would pass. No real accountability would come. No repair. No deep or even shallow reckoning. And before long, I would step back into the loop again.

This is the part that has been hardest to forgive about myself. How I kept returning to the person that was hurting me hoping he would somehow become the place where an older wound inside me might finally stop hurting. Now I see that what I kept mistaking for love had, in many ways, already left the room years before.

What remained was only the cycle. Just enough tenderness to make me believe connection was still possible. Enough pain to keep me working for it.

Until eventually something inside me began to change.

Not dramatically.
Not all at once.
Not because of one final betrayal.

Slowly, through one quiet wound at a time. The repetitions stopped bringing relief. Returning no longer soothed the ache. I realized this relationship was never the real site of resolution. It was just the stage where an older wound kept replaying itself. So I stopped trying to get him to choose me, and started realizing I was the one abandoning myself every time I re-entered the loop.

That is still hard to say out loud.

Because there is grief in recognizing how long I accepted being loved halfway.
How long I mistook emotional intensity for depth.
How long I kept hoping inconsistency would someday turn into safety.

But there is also something sacred and exhilarating in finally realizing that every return to the loop fed the very thing that was starving me.

And finally,
without ceremony,
without a glass shattering moment,

I stopped.

Take A Listen

and dance while you do!

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There are moments in life when something begins pulling at you quietly.

A restlessness inside a life that otherwise appears perfectly functional.
A strange ache when you witness someone living with a kind of aliveness you have lost contact with. A recurring pull toward something you cannot fully explain and cannot quite dismiss.

For many people, this feeling arrives alongside guilt. Your life may look good from the outside. You may love your family. You may have built something meaningful. Nothing is necessarily “wrong.”

And yet something inside you keeps whispering that your life has not fully made room for who you are.

Most people try to manage this feeling quickly. They turn it into a plan, a reinvention project, a spiritual identity, a productivity strategy, a new relationship, a dramatic decision. Anything to relieve the tension of not yet knowing.

But longing has its own intelligence.

Longing is often the first sign that the soul is trying to come back into the conversation.

And the soul rarely speaks in fully formed answers. It speaks in pulls. In patterns. In recurring fascinations. In grief. In beauty. In envy. In ache. In the persistent feeling that some deeper current inside you wants more room to live.

Beneath all of this is something essential about being human. We are archetypal beings Not in some distant mythological sense, but in the most ordinary and human way imaginable. Every one of us carries deep patterns of energy that have existed across cultures and generations for as long as human beings have been telling stories, making art, forming families, waging war, tending the dying, seeking meaning, falling in love, and trying to understand what it means to belong here.

These energies appear through endless forms and combinations. The Lover. The Warrior. The Healer. The Mystic. The Caregiver. The Rebel. The Artist. The Trickster. The Seeker. The Mother. The Visionary. The Destroyer. The Witness.

There are countless expressions because human beings themselves are countless expressions. No one is a single archetype. No one fits cleanly into a category. These are living forces, not personality quizzes. They move through each of us differently, combining and expressing themselves in ways that are entirely unique to a particular soul and a particular life.

Some people carry an instinct toward beauty and devotion. Others toward protection and clarity. Some toward healing, disruption, truth telling, creativity, contemplation, leadership, or transformation.

We do not invent these energies.

We participate in them.

And each life becomes another variation in the unfolding tapestry.

But these archetypal forces do not emerge in fully integrated form. At first, they often arrive distorted by fear, conditioning, survival strategies, and the deep human need to belong.

The Lover can collapse into desperation or self abandonment.
The Warrior can harden into control and rigidity.
The Healer can disappear into endless caretaking.
The Mystic can drift away from grounded life.
The Rebel can become consumed by opposition instead of truth.
The Trickster can manipulate instead of illuminate.

Shadow is an archetypal energy trying to move through a nervous system and psyche that has not yet learned how to hold it consciously. Most of us were never taught how to relate to these energies consciously, so we swing between repression and over identification. We push certain energies down, hand ourselves over to others completely, and slowly lose contact with the deeper intelligence underneath them.

And this is where longing becomes sacred.

Longing is the movement toward right relationship with your own nature.

Longing begins when you can no longer fully tolerate the distance between the life you are living and the deeper pattern trying to emerge through you. At first, this awareness can feel disorienting. Something inside you starts pressing against the shape your life has taken. You realize how much energy has gone toward maintaining identities, relationships, ambitions, or ways of being that no longer fully fit.

Longing asks you to pay attention.

To notice where your life feels deadened.
To notice what repeatedly calls to you.
To notice the places where your energy contracts, performs, overreaches, or disappears.
To notice the forms of beauty, creativity, honesty, or aliveness that stir something ancient in you.

Longing also asks for honesty about the strategies you have used to survive. The ways you abandoned yourself to belong. The ways you hardened. The ways you learned to shrink, please, control, hide, achieve, disappear, or stay endlessly in motion so you would not have to feel the deeper ache underneath it all. And slowly, often imperfectly, you begin learning how to carry your own energy with greater consciousness.

The Warrior learns protection without domination.
The Lover learns intimacy without disappearing.
The Healer learns presence without self erasure.
The Mystic learns embodiment.
The Rebel learns discernment.
The Artist learns devotion to the work instead of devotion to being seen.

Over time, your inner life becomes strong enough to hold more of who you actually are. As that happens, the strain of trying to manufacture an identity begins to loosen. The performance exhausts itself. The endless negotiation between who you are and who you think you need to be starts falling away.

And underneath all of it, essence begins to emerge.

Essence is what begins to emerge when the performance starts falling away and your energy no longer spends itself trying to become someone else.

There is a different quality to people who are living close to their essence. You can feel it immediately. Their life may still be messy. They may still be grieving, uncertain, imperfect, unfinished. But something about them feels coherent. Their energy carries integrity because what is inside them and what is expressed outwardly are no longer at war.

Essence has a kind of quiet radiance to it.

A person rooted in essence does not need to constantly justify themselves because they are no longer negotiating their existence against someone else’s blueprint.

The archetypal current moves more freely through them. And this matters far beyond individual fulfillment. The collective tapestry depends on each of us expressing our own thread instead of imitating someone else’s.

When we abandon our nature in order to belong, entire forms of intelligence disappear from the human field. The world loses certain kinds of artistry, leadership, protection, tenderness, vision, disruption, care, wisdom, and truth telling.

A culture filled with imitation becomes spiritually thin. This is why the Bhagavad Gita teaches that it is better to live your own dharma imperfectly than to live another person’s dharma well.

Dharma is not simply career or role. Dharma points toward the deeper architecture of your being. The particular way consciousness arranged itself through you. The shape of your thread in the larger weave. Walking someone else’s path may bring approval. It may even bring success. But somewhere underneath it, the soul begins starving.

Walking your own path often feels less certain at first. Longing rarely arrives with a five year strategic plan. It arrives as sensation. Pull. Ache. Curiosity. Grief. A growing inability to betray yourself with the same ease you once did.

And this is why longing matters so much. Longing is how the soul begins clearing a path back toward essence.

If you want to begin listening more closely to your own longing, pay attention to what consistently pulls your attention and energy.

Notice what brings a feeling of expansion or quiet aliveness into your body.
Notice the people whose way of being awakens something in you.
Notice what grief keeps returning.
Notice what forms of beauty undo you.
Notice what truth you keep circling but have not yet fully spoken.

You do not need to force clarity immediately. You only need enough honesty to follow the thread a few steps further than you did yesterday.

Over time, the thread strengthens. And somewhere along the way, you begin realizing that the life you were searching for was never fully outside you.

It was waiting for you to remember the shape of your own soul.

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The other morning I opened his bedroom door and couldn’t see him yet.

The hallway light poured in behind me, making the room feel far away, almost hidden. I stood there a second, letting my eyes adjust.

And then I heard it.

A long, drawn-out “ahhh.”

I answered without thinking, matching his tone.

“Ahhh.”

A beat.

Then his again, followed by laughter that came up from somewhere deep in his little body.

We went back and forth like that, calling and answering, before I could even see him clearly.

Like two birds sending out a call to find each other.

It started differently. I would ask, “Can Grandma have some love?” At first he would come toward me, offering a hug or a kiss, soft and wholehearted. Then one day he shook his head. No. So I pretended to cry, a ridiculous, exaggerated “wah” that had no dignity in it at all. He laughed and laughed, and something settled into place. A moment tipped into a rhythm and became a dance between us. Over the next little while the “wah” softened, stretched, turned into something longer and less like a pretend cry, more like a sound we knew each other by. Now it isn’t about asking or giving anything. It’s a shared moment that arrives on its own.

We are taught to look for meaning and connection in wisdom traditions and ancestral practices and sacred spaces. In seasonal rituals, in nature, in gestures repeated and handed down over time. And it does and these rituals do hold us when life feels too shapeless to bear.

But some of the most alive moments rise up from inside ordinary life. The little languages we make with the people we love. The gestures that become touchstones. The absurd things that carry tenderness because they belong to us. There is no need to curate them into meaning because meaning is already moving through them. That is what I felt with Quinn in the doorway, a current of connection already present and alive.

I think we are hungry for this kind of aliveness because so much of what fills our life is overworked and underfelt. We try to create meaningful experiences, when the deeper invitation is to notice the ones already forming in front of us. Like a fake cry that becomes a birdcall in the dark.

When we are awake enough to receive them, these moments move with us through the rest of our day. We become a little softer. A little more available.

Maybe this is another way light enters the world. Not through grand gestures, but through the small, strange, living moments that find us when we are present enough to answer back.

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A door is open or closed.
A light is on or it isn’t.
Something was said, or it wasn’t.

Agreement does not make them true, and disagreement would not make them false.

Truth does not require agreement to exist.

And yet, something is happening in the world right now. A bending.
A rewriting of the truth so it doesn’t have to be faced. We like to think this only happens at the level of politics or power. That it belongs to conspiracy theories, propaganda, or the loudest voices in the room.

But it starts much closer to home. It starts in the quiet places where truth would cost us something.

A lie is told, and the person who caused the harm assumes that time will repair it. So they wait. And then they return with kindness. A warm message. A compliment. A gentle reaching out that asks to be received as if nothing remains unresolved, without ever acknowledging or owning the truth.

On the surface, it looks harmless. Even generous. But underneath, something has been rewritten.

And if you confront the truth, it shape-shifts.

You’re overreacting.
That’s not what happened.
Why can’t you let go of the past?

The truth has not disappeared. It has been reorganized.

Because facing it would threaten too much. An image of oneself as good.
An identity that cannot withstand the truth. The protection of a story someone needs in order to keep going.

So truth bends. Not completely. Just enough. Enough to stay intact. Enough to keep moving. Enough to avoid the place where the truth would require them to change.

Once you see this in one place, you begin to see it elsewhere.

In families, where certain truths are never spoken because they would fracture the system.

In institutions, where belonging depends on repeating the approved version of reality.

In the wider world, where what has been documented, witnessed, and verified is still denied. Not because the evidence is lacking. Because the truth is unbearable. To accept it would require a reckoning with cruelty, complicity, or the collapse of an entire worldview.

So the mind edits. It questions what is clear. It elevates doubt over evidence. It finds a version of truth that can be lived with. This is not new, but it is happening out loud now. And that can make you feel like you’re losing your footing, like truth itself is up for negotiation.

It isn’t. But people’s relationship to it is. This is where it becomes disorienting. Because you cannot make someone face a truth they are organized to protect themselves from. You cannot stabilize truth by getting agreement from those who are invested in distorting it. But you can stop abandoning your own perception in order to stay in relationship. You can stop explaining what you see to someone committed to not seeing it. You can let truth be truth without requiring it to be confirmed. This does not make you rigid. It makes you rooted in what is real. Without that, your sense of what is real begins to erode. That’s what happens when you keep negotiating with people who rearrange truth to fit what protects them. At some point, that cost becomes too high and something in you stops negotiating. We stop trying to force truth into places that are organized against it. We trust that life has its own way of bringing truth to the surface. Sometimes through time. Sometimes through consequence. Sometimes through the quiet accumulation of what can no longer be denied.

I keep catching myself looking for the path.

The next clear plan. The next stable form. The thing that will tell me how to move from here to there without having to feel quite so much of the groundlessness in between.

I understand this impulse.

We are living in a time of rapid dissolution. Structures that once offered people a sense of meaning, belonging, identity, and safety are cracking under the weight of what they can no longer hold. Religion, education, wellness, work, money, even the corporate gospel that tells us our lives are most valuable when they are efficient, optimized, and profitable. All the systems that once told us, explicitly or implicitly, “Walk this way and you will be okay.”

Some of those structures still have beauty in them. Some still carry wisdom. Some still matter. But we are beginning to see what it has cost us to let them stand between us and our own knowing.

Many of us feel this before we can explain it. A soul-weariness. The exhaustion of building lives inside systems that can give us a life from the outside, but cannot give us a life we feel alive inside of.

That is the fracture.

We were taught to trust maps more than our own direct contact with life. We were taught to look outside ourselves for permission, direction, truth, and safety. We were taught to hand over our discernment to structures and leaders that were meant, at their best, to help us live together and guide us back toward our own deeper knowing.

But somewhere along the way, many of those structures became idols.

They stopped pointing us back to our own inner authority and began asking for our obedience instead.

This is where we have to become very clear. The answer is not to reject all structure. We still need forms that help us live together, care for one another, and shape a shared world. Structure itself is not the problem. The problem is structure that replaces the living authority within us. Structure that severs us from the intelligence that can arise between us when we are willing to listen, respond, and move from the inside out.

The real wisdom traditions were never trying to make us obedient. At their best, they were trying to make us awake. Capable of living with responsibility, discernment, devotion, and form, without mistaking any of those for the source of our freedom.

True wisdom does not ask us to turn doctrine, leaders, or systems into the source of our salvation. It does not use fear to make obedience feel like safety. It does not ask us to keep looking outside ourselves for what can only be known from within.

So this is the crossroads.

We can keep placing our trust in the same paths and powers that have brought us here, or we can stand in the tension of what is breaking without immediately looking for another path to replace it.

There is no path already laid down for what comes next. The work is not to go searching for the right one. The work is to learn how to live as if there is no path beneath our feet, and still keep walking. It means we stop pretending certainty is available when it isn’t. It means we stop turning every moment of uncertainty into a reason to surrender our authority to someone else.

We can stand where we are without a map and make contact with what is true right now. The beauty. The heartbreak. The confusion. The aliveness. And from there, we can begin to rely on the one form of guidance that has not been packaged, sold, legislated, or enforced upon us.

Our own deeper intelligence.

I think this is the initiation of our time.

People who can participate in what is emerging without demanding guarantees. People who can make one honest move, then listen. People who can build forms without worshiping them. People who can let something end without betraying the ending by rushing to replace it.

This is not passive.

It may be the most demanding way to live.

Because it asks us to stop outsourcing our lives. It asks us to stop confusing compliance with goodness, certainty with truth, and order with freedom. It asks us to create lives from the inside out, not according to doctrine, domination, or the corporate religion of endless profit, but through attention, relationship, courage, and direct contact with reality.

And yes, something has to dissolve for that to become possible.

The path we have followed unconsciously, the path we have given our blind allegiance to, is dissolving. It is unnerving. It is terrifying at times. But more and more of us are beginning to see how much life force we have handed over. How much authority we were never meant to give away.

We are not off the path.

The path itself is what is dissolving.

And maybe what feels like the loss of the path is actually something else entirely.

The moment we stop following and begin walking…from within our own authority.

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I wrote this early on, before many of you were here. I came back to it yesterday as Kali moves through the Mystery School I’m leading. Lately, she feels close again. A fierce, uncompromising force for love coming from me.

And not just from me. From so many of us.

When Kali Comes

There’s a difference. Between holy rage and raw, reactive pain. Between the sacred fire of truth, and the hot flare of old wounds still looking for justice, or safety, or someone to finally say, I believe you.

Not all anger is the same. And it’s important, no, essential, to learn the difference. Because there’s a kind of rage that drags us backward, keeps us caught in old loops, lashing out or shutting down, reenacting the same hurt again and again. That’s not power. That’s residue.

And then there’s another kind of rage. One that doesn’t spiral us back into the story, but pierces clean through it.

Sacred Rage. The kind that clarifies, liberates, and names what must no longer be tolerated. The kind that breaks spells.

But here’s where it gets paradoxical, because these two energies are not always easy to untangle. Wounding and wisdom live side by side. And sometimes, it’s through the old wound that the holy rage gets born. What starts as grief, or helplessness, or shock—can alchemize into fire.

This is why we go inward. Why we sort and sift. Why we do the work of tracing the origin point, untangling what is ours to carry and what never was. It’s the sacred act of separating wheat from chaff so we don’t throw away the part of our pain that holds the power.

Because sacred rage often begins in the wound…but it doesn’t stay there. It becomes something else. Something clear. Something fierce. Something that knows exactly when to burn and when to bless.

Now, if you’re not familiar with Kali, she’s the Hindu goddess with wild hair, blood on her tongue, a necklace of skulls, and an unapologetic appetite for truth. She’s not here to soothe you. She’s here to wake you up. In my experience she comes like a cosmic bitch slap. And while that imagery is powerful, and for me, deeply sacred, I should be honest. I’ve never seen her walk through my front door in her dark as night skin and bone jewelry. She hasn’t perched on the edge of my bed at night all decked out in her iconography.

She Comes as a Force. I know she’s here when something hits so hard and so clear I can’t unknow it. When the universe grabs me by the shoulders and says, “This ends here.”

When I feel the sting, the snap, the undeniable interruption of an old storyline, that’s her. When I suddenly see what I couldn’t see before, and there’s no going back…Kali has swept in.

At least, that’s how she shows up for me. And I absolutely adore her. She led the charge in some of the fiercest turns of my life. I knew I needed to leave my second marriage. While a part of me knew it was an illusion from the get-go I kept second-guessing, waiting for proof I couldn’t argue with. She gave it to me. Undeniable. Undeletable. She made it so clear that to stay would be a betrayal of my soul.

And she was stride for stride beside me when I finally entered true sobriety, after years of trying to scheme my way there. Negotiating, managing, spinning prettier versions of reality. Telling stories that almost sounded like healing. Until she burned all that down too.

Kali doesn’t just destroy for destruction’s sake. She clears the way for what’s real. And sometimes, what’s real doesn’t arrive until what’s false has been completely torched. Kali doesn’t coddle. She clarifies. She cuts through illusion. Not for vengeance, but for liberation.

I’ve had to practice checking myself. Because I carry wounds and have triggers and when I don’t attend to them, my “clarity” can quickly turn into projection. My “righteousness” becomes reaction. And my rage… well, it might still be loud, but it’s not necessarily sacred.

So here are a few questions I’ve learned to ask myself. Checkpoints, if you will, when I feel the fire rise:

• Is this rage coming from the present moment, or only from an old wound?

• Is it asking me to destroy, or to liberate?

• Will speaking this out loud make me feel more connected to myself…or just temporarily powerful?

• Is this about protecting life, or proving a point?

• Can I locate the tenderness underneath the fire?

And perhaps most importantly:

• Is my rage clarifying truth, or just confirming an old story?

Sacred rage has a texture. It has precision. It leaves room for paradox. It doesn’t need an audience. It doesn’t need to convince. It’s not about being “right.” It’s about being aligned. That’s how I know the difference. Or at least, how I try to.

Because sometimes, yes, what we think is righteous anger is just a hurt child running the show. But sometimes, that hurt child has alchemized into a wild and sacred woman who knows exactly what must be named and what must no longer be tolerated.

When Sacred Rage Arrives, So Does the Backlash

And once you have been initiated…Once you’ve received the slap, shed the illusion, and started showing up with your rage in tow, expect the backlash.

Because domination never goes quietly. Especially the disguised kind. The kind that smiles and tells you to calm down. The kind that hides behind “civility,” or “neutrality,” or “it’s just a difference of opinion.”

Sacred rage is a threat to systems built on inequality. It calls for truth where there has been silence. It calls for justice where there has been comfort. It calls for reckoning where there has been delay. And that’s not something the old paradigm wants to reckon with.

So it will push back.

It will question your tone, your timing, your mental health, your spiritual maturity. It will name your clarity as hysteria. It will call your fire “too much.” It will try, again, to send your truth underground.

That’s why we have to anticipate the backlash, because otherwise we’ll do what we’ve always done. We’ll equivocate. We’ll turn on ourselves. We’ll start to wonder if maybe we are being dramatic. Or angry. Or out of control. Or whatever word has been historically weaponized to make power, in feminine form, retreat.

But this time, we don’t go underground. This time, we recognize the backlash as confirmation. Confirmation that the our rage is not only sacred…but disruptive in the way that Truth needs it to be.

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Modern life has a way of thinning things out.

Not just our time or our attention, but our relationship to the moment we’re actually standing in.

We live by fixed dates, glowing screens, and climate-controlled rooms. We can move through entire days without noticing where the moon is, how long the light lasts, or what the air is quietly shifting toward. Because of that, something that was once lived as rhythm gets flattened into concept.

Easter is one of those things. It starts to feel theological, symbolic, optional. A story you either believe or don’t. But it didn’t originate that way. At its root, it wasn’t about belief first. It was about alignment.

Easter is not set by a calendar page. It’s set by the sky. It follows a three-part rhythm.

Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. It’s set by the turning of the earth, the pull of the moon, and the return of light. A ritual placed inside the movement of the living world.

At the spring equinox, day and night stand in balance. For a brief moment, light and dark meet as equals, and then light begins to win. Not dramatically, but unmistakably. Then comes the full moon. The sun gives us seasons. The moon gives us pulse. Waxing, fullness, waning, dark. Easter waits for that first full moon after the equinox, which means we are no longer just at the threshold of light returning, but in the first swelling of that light reaching fullness. And then Sunday, a day long associated with rising, with light returning after darkness.

This is cosmic timing. Balance tipping toward light, light swelling into fullness, a day devoted to rising.

Over time, another layer was added. The Christian story of resurrection, the rising of Jesus after death. But that story didn’t land on empty ground. It entered cultures already marking this exact season as a moment of renewal. Eggs as symbols of new life. Hares and rabbits tied to fertility and lunar cycles. Even the name Easter, possibly linked to older spring traditions.

A merging happened, which is why arguing about whether Easter is pagan or Christian misses the point. They are different stories with the same pulse.

Call it resurrection, call it spring, call it return. The language changes, but the pattern remains.

And it’s happening right now, in the actual conditions of our lives.

And this is where it becomes more complicated for me.

I’m not walking around feeling Easter in my body. I don’t feel a clean sense of renewal just because the days are getting longer, or a natural lift into hope because the light is returning. Because I’m also aware of a larger cycle of time that doesn’t feel like spring at all.

In yoga, it’s called Kali Yuga. Other traditions name it differently, but they point to a similar pattern. A long arc of unraveling. A season marked by fragmentation, disorientation, and decay. I feel this long arc too.

So there’s a dissonance between the earth tilting toward light and something in the wider field that is still moving through a much longer dark night. Being alive and awake right now requires holding both as true.

The simplicity of a single cycle doesn’t hold. What we’re actually living inside is a set of layered cycles moving simultaneously.

There is a spring happening in the soil beneath our feet, and at the same time there is a winter moving through the larger arc of the world. There are places where something is rising, and places where something is falling apart, often within the same life.

So the question shifts. It’s not whether this is a moment of light or a moment of darkness, but whether we can live inside both without collapsing into one or the other. Whether we can recognize the return of light without denying the presence of a longer night, and feel the weight of what is breaking down without losing sight of what is still trying to emerge.

For me, this is where Easter becomes real. Not as a single story or a single cycle, but as a moment where these different rhythms of time are visible at once. Something is ending, and something is rising, and they are not happening separately.

Not the ordinary kind that slips through curtains or pools under a door. This light descended. Fine as silk threads. Filaments drifting down over my bed as if the ceiling had opened into some luminous orchard and I was the gardener.

I would lie there watching. Then I would reach up. The filaments felt as is they were arriving from a place I had recently left but forgotten. I remember moving my hands through them. As they came toward me I gathered certain strands and let others diffuse back into the dark. There was choice in it. It felt like collaboration. It felt like a conversation with the unseen and what was going to unfold would bend toward my reaching. A sort of co-creation of a garden I would one day walk freely through. A place I would tend and shape and grow.

Then I grew up.

And that imagined, eden-like garden has not appeared. Instead there have been long, unremarkable seasons. Soil that would not yield. Days that felt dry and ordinary. And a few very dark winters.

Boxes packed. Rings removed. Plans revised. The humility of starting over again. The big and small losses that come with incarnation.

Not just heartbreak.

Something deeper.

A kind of homesickness without a map.

Not just sorrow over what has happened, but over the experience of being here at all. Over the distance between the world I remembered and the one I inhabit.

What I am coming to know is that my grief is not only about the losses I can name, it is about the reality of being human. About the way something vast and luminous has narrowed itself into a body, a biography, a timeline. About the compression of soul into form.

It is mourning immensity made small enough to live a human life.

Sometimes I think those filaments were soul markers. Evidence that somewhere in me lives a memory of wholeness. A way of living where love isn’t rationed and the garden isn’t theoretical.

But longing for a remembered world can become a way of standing above this one. A subtle refusal of the uneven and weathered soil I have actually been given. Yearning for the imagined garden becomes a form of exile from the here and now.

The practice is to love the garden that belongs to time.

To feel the homesickness without trying to outrun it. To stand inside the weight of time. To admit that love here comes braided with loss.

And to stay.

Some nights I still open my eyes in the dark, half-hoping the filaments will be there.

They never are.

But dawn comes. Ordinary light across ordinary walls arrives. And I am here.

A woman learning to love a life that feels smaller than her remembering.

Wu Wei

In my last writing, The Threshold We Must Cross, I wrote about inner alignment. About coherence between thought, word, and action. About what happens when we stop outsourcing our authority and begin living from what we Know.

Wu Wei is what that looks like.

It is a Taoist phrase often translated as non-doing. But it does not mean passivity. It means unforced action. Action that arises when you are no longer internally divided.

When alignment is real, life begins to move differently.

When you are living the Wu Wei way, it looks something like this:

1. You notice your thoughts without assuming they’re true.

2. You let your emotions move through you instead of stuffing them down or acting them out.

3. What you say and what you do line up with what you actually believe.

4. When you get reactive, you recover more quickly.

5. You set boundaries without turning hard or hostile.

6. You can hold mixed feelings without rushing to resolve them.

7. Under stress, you return to your values instead of reacting from fear or chasing approval.

8. When you’re wrong, you adjust without spiraling into shame.

9. You stop trying to control how others see you. You show up as you are.

10. Your sense of purpose comes from within, not from what others expect or reward.

This is Wu Wei.

It does not mean you are calm all the time. There will still be friction. There will still be moments when you are stretched.

But there is no longer the exhaustion that comes from being internally split.

When thoughts, words, and actions align, tension remains. But you are no longer split inside.

And in a world built on division, living undivided is a radical act.

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Perennial, a yoga community. That name is true. It tells you something real. But it does not tell you the whole story of what and who we are.

Yes, yoga is the door most of us enter through. We come for the movement, for the steady return to breath and sensation, for the quiet recalibration that happens when body and awareness meet. And community is true, too. People arrive week after week. We learn each other’s names. We build courage and aliveness together. Something steadies in the simple act of practicing side by side.

And yet lately those words feel incomplete. They do not quite describe what is happening inside these walls.

For many years, I have imagined Perennial as a tall structure.

On one floor is the hospital. A place people come when something hurts. Sometimes it is a shoulder, a hip, a low back. More often it is heartbreak, grief, a nervous system that has been white knuckling life for too long. The hospital is where we stop pretending we are fine. Where the body is allowed to tell the truth.

Another floor is the school. Not a school of perfect poses or spiritual gold stars, but a school of self-awareness. A place where people begin to recognize the immense inner capacity already living in them. This is where the sovereign self is revitalized. Where you learn to perceive reality more clearly and speak and act from that clarity. Where you meet the version of you who is no longer governed by old survival grooves.

Another floor is the temple.

I almost want to apologize for that word, because so many of us have been burned by churches and temples that wanted our obedience more than our awakening. But I mean it in the truer way. A temple as sacred space and a time and place where True seeing can happen. A moment when and where you can touch truth through your own lived experience rather than borrowed from external authority.

And this year, 2026, this epic year of transformation, I keep sensing that the architecture of our structure needs one more feature made visible. Not another floor. Not another program.

A wide open front door.

A threshold.

Because Perennial has never only been about who comes in. It is also about who goes back out. The healing and growth done inside Perennial goes with you back through the threshold.

I have felt this shift in my own life.

After this past election, I told a family member I was not coming to a gathering. We have long trusted very different places as our source of truth. Over time, my practice has committed me to coherence between thought, word, and action, to living from inner authority rather than against it. Because of that, I knew that if I showed up and stayed quiet, I would be splitting myself in two. I would be betraying that inner knowing in order to keep things comfortable. I would be keeping the peace outwardly while abandoning myself inwardly.

Yoga, over time, makes that harder to tolerate.

The practice cultivates alignment. A steady coherence between thought, word, and action. When you begin to live that way, you cannot unsee the cost of pretending. I could no longer participate in a version of relationship that required me to diminish or deny what I Know to be true.

Speaking my truth carried consequences. The relationship as it had existed could not continue. But if I am honest, that version of the relationship depended on my silence. It depended on my willingness to live out of alignment. When that willingness ended, the structure could not hold.

And here is what matters. There are consequences either way.

Living in alignment may disrupt a relationship built on accommodation. Living out of alignment erodes something inside of you. One fractures the outer structure. The other fractures the inner one.

For many generations, most of us have chosen the internal fracture. We have stayed silent. We have been shaped to deny our inner authority and adjust ourselves to preserve harmony. We call it maturity or diplomacy or keeping the peace. Over time, those micro-moments of self-abandonment accumulate. They shape our families, our institutions, and our nation.

The world we are living in did not appear overnight. It is the cumulative result of millions of small misalignments. Conscience separated from speech and action. Inner knowing outsourced for the sake of comfort, belonging, or safety.

And this does not happen because people are evil or unintelligent. It happens because fear distorts perception. Because belonging can feel safer than truth. Because families, institutions, and faith traditions can slowly train us to look outward for authority instead of inward. Over time, we forget that conscience is meant to be consulted directly. We inherit narratives. We repeat them. We defend them. And eventually we mistake allegiance for integrity.

So when I chose not to attend that gathering, it was one small act of coherence. One moment where thought, word, and action lined up. And that is how change happens. Not all at once. But through choosing, again and again, to let your inner knowing shape your outer life.

One word. One boundary. One honest action at a time.

This is the work.

So when I say Perennial is a hospital, a school, and a temple, I am not speaking poetically. I am describing the architecture required for this moment in history. A place where healing steadies you, learning strengthens you, and clear seeing deepens your discernment.

Because the shift we need will not come through one heroic gesture. It will unfold the slow way. The human way. Through more and more of us becoming willing to sit inside friction and tension without fleeing, without collapsing, without outsourcing our truth for the sake of comfort. Real adaptation comes through the heat of contact. It always has.

This is what conscious life asks of us. We are shaped by the world, yes, and we are also shaping what comes next.

This is how the practice works. As inner authority becomes clear, division dissolves. From that clarity, right thought, right speech, and right action follow.

You no longer move from the old fracture. You act from the coherence that arises when you are no longer divided.

Perennial is not here to tell you what to believe. We are not here to install an ideology. Perennial is here to help you remember what you already Know. To practice alignment until coherence becomes the way you move through the world. From that coherence, courage rises.

Perennial is a threshold. A doorway you cross again and again, entering to deepen your coherence and stepping back out to embody it in the world. It is a place you enter to remember who you are and leave to live it.

Out to your workplace and your neighborhood. Out to the land and out to strangers. Out to the places where your voice feels inconvenient and your integrity might cost you something.

That is the door.

And this year, may we pay attention to it as if our future depends on it.

Because it does.

Share GraceNotes by Megan Grace

This essay names the threshold, The Wise Wu Wei Way explores what it feels like to live on the other side of it. Ten grounded ways inner alignment begins to show up in real life.

I’ve been reciting the River Teaching for years.

It landed almost a decade ago and made my bones shake. Because it felt true in the way truth sometimes arrives. Unmistakable. As if an ancestor’s hand landed on my shoulder and said, “pay attention.”

Hopi cosmology speaks of worlds rising and falling. Of humanity drifting out of right relationship with the earth and eventually being brought back into balance. There are prophecies about purification, about the end of one world and the beginning of another. But the part that has stayed with me is not the apocalyptic imagery. It is the river imagery.

This teaching, widely attributed to Hopi elders, has been shared in many circles. This is the version that first reached me.

The River Teaching

The Elders say the river is flowing very fast now.
It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore.
They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.

Know that the river has its destination.
The Elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water.

And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves.

For the moment that we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.

The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves.
Banish the word struggle from your vocabulary.

All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

The river is flowing very fast now.

You can feel it in the collective nervous system. In the way headlines barely land before the next one crashes in. In the way technology is outrunning our wisdom. In the way economies tilt and climates shift and our shared stories unravel. In the way so many of us are waking up tired before the day even begins.

The current is strong. The suffering comes not only from the swiftness, but from our refusal to release the shore.

The shore is the version of normal I’m still bargaining to get back.
The shore is the illusion that comfort equals stability.
The shore is the version of my identity that was built for a slower world.
The shore is the belief that I can out-argue or out-strategize forces that are ecological, technological, planetary in scale.

Push off into the middle of the river.

Pushing off into the middle of the river means orienting differently. It means accepting that something is ending and asking me to live awake inside the ending. It means choosing practices that bring me back into my body when everything else feels abstract and accelerated. It means tending my nervous system so I can respond instead of flail. It means strengthening my connection to community.

It also means I/we are to

take nothing personally. Least of all ourselves.

That line always stops me.

How much of my exhaustion comes from narrating every disruption as a personal affront? Every shift as a referendum on my worth? Every loss of control as failure?

The river is not about me. Or you.

It is about a turning.

And in a turning, we have two choices. Grip what is dissolving. Or learn to swim with others.

See who is in there with you and celebrate.

That line feels almost outrageous. Celebrate?

But celebration means remembering that even in upheaval, we are not alone. It means choosing to gather. To practice together. To tell the truth together. To build forms of life that are more aligned with the world that is coming than the one that is receding.

The elders say,

banish the word struggle from your vocabulary.

I hear that as instruction. Struggle implies opposition. A clenched jaw. A war against what is already underway. The river does not need my resistance. It asks for my participation.

What if the work now is not to overpower the current, but to become skillful inside it?

More resilient.
More relational.
More rooted in what actually endures.

Perhaps the invitation is simple and exacting. Strengthen what can float. Loosen what cannot. Build the kind of life that makes sense in moving water.

Not alone. Never alone.

The time of the lone wolf is over.

And if that is true, then this moment is less about bracing and more about gathering. Less about predicting the future and more about embodying the qualities the future will require.

Steadiness.
Clarity.
Community.
Reverence.

The river is moving. We can feel it.

Somewhere beneath the fear and the fatigue, a deeper knowing is rising.

We are not waiting for rescue. We are not waiting for a savior. We are not waiting for the old shore to reassemble itself.

We are the ones the river has been preparing.

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I keep hearing this in articles, in podcasts, in the conversations after yoga. It surfaces when another document is unsealed, when another institution falls short of what it promised, when the headlines stack up faster than any of us can metabolize them.

Yes. What once felt solid is no longer steady.

Politically. Structurally. Culturally. Morally.

History tells the truth about seasons like this. Systems unravel. Empires fall. People in powerful positions eventually reveal their rot. It has happened again and again, and I imagine every generation living through it felt the same vertigo, the same sense that the sky might not hold.

Perhaps what is breaking is not reality itself, but the illusion that the current reality was ever stable or just. When illusions crack, it can feel like the sky is falling, even when what is falling needed to fall.

Even when the institutions that shape our lives grow unreliable, something more fundamental remains. Human decency does not depend on governments to endure. Community has never required permission from power to exist. Small groups of people have always gathered and cooperated with one another. Not because powerful systems mandated it, but because it is how humans remain human.

Human decency and community are the enduring currents running through every changing reality. Systems rise and recede, but people keep gathering, tending, cooperating. This is what has carried us through every period of upheaval we’ve ever known.

This season inside our small, beloved Perennial community is where we will practice that truth.

We’ll keep coming together so fear does not get the final word. We’ll continue to steady our nervous systems so reactivity does not define us. We’ll metabolize what is happening so we can respond rather than spiral. We’ll build capacity - physical, emotional, and relational - so our care for one another is resilient.

Staying in beloved community is how we take part in what truly endures.

This is the reality we are creating.

I tuned in only for the halftime show. I wanted to see that one thing, and then go back to my actual life.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few weeks, you knew there were going to be two interpretations of reality staged at the same time. Two versions of America running side by side. One familiar. One that has been muffled for centuries, even while it built the whole damn thing.

I tuned in because I wanted to watch the one that’s been muffled. I wanted to let my being receive it. I wanted to take it in as beauty, as expression, as presence. And this surprised me. I felt more connected watching a sea of human beings who didn’t look like me or share my first language than I ever feel watching the version of America that’s been curated for comfort. The one that’s been homogenized and then sold back to us as safety.

This year, because some people didn’t get what they wanted on the main stage, a second version of America was promptly offered up. Curated to keep looking like their Pinterest board. Served up as American.

And the irony of choosing Kid Rock as the symbol of the so-called real America is laughable. It’s cartoonish. It is almost impressive in its commitment to missing the point.

The point is the need for a substitute mirror. The scramble to replace what was actually happening with something that felt whiter. Something that says, no, no, this is the real show, this is the real America, look over here instead.

When I watched the halftime show and saw that white people were the minority, I felt a brief disorientation, like my nervous system lost its map for a second. The map of reality that centers whiteness and English.

And then, when Bad Bunny left the field, I turned the TV off. And the strangest sensation, one I haven’t felt in a very long time, came over me. I felt patriotic. Not in a flag-waving, chest-thumping way. More like a quiet pride. Like, yes. This is where I want to belong. This is who I want to be with.

Ironically, the framework that fits this halftime split-screen moment best comes straight out of the Bible. Imago Dei. Image of God. It’s the claim that every human being carries the image of the divine, not because of belief, behavior, or belonging, but because that image is woven into what it means to be human.

Which is, of course, exactly what some Christians have spent a very long time trying to quietly edit out.

Far too many white Christians have needed Jesus to be white. They have needed the sacred to wear their face. Because if the sacred lives fully in bodies and cultures that do not resemble theirs, then the hierarchy cracks. The illusion of safety cracks. The story that their version of reality is The Version cracks.

It is a strange thing to be living through a moment when many are claiming to pledge faith and allegiance to a brown-skinned, colonized, oppressed man from the Middle East, and then spend their lives defending the comfort of whiteness as if it were part of the gospel.

If the biblical proclamation of Imago Dei is true, then you don’t get to keep pretending the sacred is only safe when it looks familiar. You don’t get to keep calling your insulation acceptable. You don’t get to keep confusing a curated sameness with peace.

Imago Dei is the opposite of making some people central and others peripheral, some stories universal and others optional.

So if you need a second halftime show to protect you from the sight of other people existing loudly, beautifully, and unedited, then what you’re defending is not Jesus.

You’re defending whiteness.

You can call it tradition. You can call it values. You can call it patriotism. You can call it wanting things to feel normal again.

But it’s a betrayal of the faith you’re claiming to defend.

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For quite a while now, the image of the musicians on the deck of the Titanic has been looping through my mind as I watch both myself and others respond to the moment we are in collectively.

It is that vision of a small group standing on the open deck, making beauty as the ship lists toward the Atlantic.

I keep returning to it because it feels like a snapshot of what humans do when the moment gets too large. We reach for the familiar. We keep the rituals going. We keep playing, even as the structure beneath us shifts.

And this is what we are doing now. Only the ship is on land, on the land we call the United States.

The Titanic, like the United States, was built for a certain class. Built to feel unsinkable for the people who benefited most from it. Built to carry some people in private cabins and luxury suites while others labored below deck. And when the damage was done, we learned what the ship had been telling us all along. The lifeboats were never meant for everyone.

That is the part I cannot make poetic.

Because in this country, safety has always been rationed. Black and brown people. Indigenous people. Disabled people. The poor. The undocumented. The chronically ill. The already targeted. Many have been asked to survive what others never had to notice.

So when I use this image, I am speaking first to myself. And I am speaking to other white people, especially those of us who have gotten to live as if this ship is ours.

Not only as passengers. As crew.

As the ones who keep the thing moving. The ones who swab the deck, serve the meals, keep the lights on, keep the story intact, keep the music playing, keep the whole enterprise feeling normal. The ship has depended on our participation. Our labor. Our silence. Our willingness to call it “just how things are.”

If you are white, you may still be standing on the deck with access to music. Access to normal. Access to the belief that this can’t really be happening. Not to us. Not here. Not on a ship this grand.

And some aren’t even on the deck. Some are behind closed doors. The private cabins. The elite. The ones with locked doors, stocked bars, and lifeboats already reserved.

This is where the deck tilts. The people in the cabins count on the crew to keep doing our jobs. To keep things tidy. To keep things calm. To keep people distracted. To keep serving the meals. To keep guiding bodies toward lifeboats we may not be invited onto.

They are counting on us not noticing, or noticing and calling it nothing. Because many of us have been trained to believe that if we keep the ship afloat, we are saving ourselves.

When the harder truth is that we are trying to save a vessel that was never built for everyone, and has been harming others the whole time. And we are being asked, in a hundred direct ways, to keep helping it sail anyway.

If this sounds sharp, it’s because the hour is sharp. It isn’t meant to shame. It’s meant to name what has been true beneath the surface for a long time. Some people have been taking on water for generations. Some have been forced to swim in cold water their whole lives. Some have been sacrificed so others could stay warm and dry on the upper decks.

The difference now is that the tilt is undeniable. We have an opportunity to not stay oblivious or defended or above it all, but to see clearly, and to choose differently while we still can.

So here’s the question I can’t get away from.

What song am I playing so I don’t have to change course?

If you look closely at those musicians, you can see at least three reasons they kept playing. Three different inner logics. Three ways a human meets catastrophe without fully meeting it.

The first is putting faith in being rescued.

This is the part of us that keeps scanning the horizon for the one who will arrive and fix it. A leader. A rising star. A heroic institution. A sudden wave of restraint from the people who hold power.

For some, it is explicitly religious. Jesus. Divine intervention. A story that says history will be interrupted from above, and the drowning will be spared.

I understand why that stance is soothing. It gives the body somewhere to put the weight.

But there is a kind of hope that is actually a trance. A waiting that looks like devotion, but functions like paralysis.

And still, the music.

The second reason is pride.

Not pride in the shallow sense, but the deeper, more intimate kind.

The kind that can’t bear the internal sentence, “I was wrong.” Wrong can feel like exile.

The kind that can’t bear the humiliation of changing course, because changing course means admitting you had a hand on the wheel. It means letting an identity crack.

This is where I want to speak plainly, and gently.

I understand you were sold a story. I understand you were promised protection, belonging, dignity, a return. I understand how persuasive that can be.

But you have to look around. Not at the promise, at the results.

And I don’t say that with contempt. I say it because I don’t want you to be the last one to realize you’re being used.

Here’s the hard mercy. Most of us who have already lived through an ego collapse are not waiting to punish you. We know that terrain. We recognize it as a brave moment, not a shameful one.

And still, the music.

Because if you keep playing, you don’t have to admit the ship is sinking and you helped choose the route.

The third reason is a particular kind of spirituality.

Not the kind that makes you kinder and more grounded.

The kind that treats attention like electricity.

The ideology that says whatever you look at, you feed. Whatever you name, you strengthen. Whatever you grieve, you attract.

So you don’t look at the water.

You don’t talk about the water.

You don’t name harm.

You keep the frequency high. You keep the gaze lifted. You play louder. You call it consciousness.

There’s something elegant inside that worldview, I’ll grant it that. What we attend to matters. Our inner state shapes what we can touch.

But there’s a difference between attention and allegiance. Witnessing is not feeding.

There’s a difference between naming and worshiping.

There’s a difference between refusing panic and refusing reality.

An earth based spirituality does not float above harm. It goes toward it without becoming it.

And still, we play.

Because if you can convince yourself that looking is the problem, then you never have to come down onto the deck with everybody else.

And here’s the paradox.

The musicians were not doing nothing.

They were holding a thread of humanity in the middle of panic. They were insisting, in the only language they had, “we will not become only terror.”

We need that thread now, too.

We need dinners. We need laughter. We need art. We need beauty that keeps the heart from turning metallic.

But beauty cannot be a blindfold.

Beauty cannot replace movement.

Joy cannot require blindness.

So the question is not whether we keep playing.

It’s what we play, and why.

Do we play the kind of music that returns us to love, to courage, to the truth?

Do we play the kind of music that helps us come down out of trance and into responsibility?

Do we let the song make us more human, more reachable, more willing to act?

Because this ship, as we have known it, the version built and governed by white supremacy and money and myth, is taking on water.

And I don’t know if it can be saved in the form we’re attached to.

But I do know this.

We can decide whether our music is a lullaby.
Or a summons.