Dear ones, I’m writing to you, and the hummingbirds are back.

Well, at least one is. As of a few days ago. And I moved at the speed of light to make nectar and get the feeders out, the moment I heard that first wild jeweled trill. “You must be starving” I cried out the kitchen window, “YOU MADE IT!” and I felt that familiar, tearful relief in my bones. The beloved has returned, after such a very long time away. Over the winter, I decided I might not plant a garden this year. But as soon as the hummingbirds arrived, I dug my box of seeds out of the closet. Isn’t it amazing how love does that?

Why did I decide not to plant a garden, when gardening is such a dear part of my world? My dad died in September, and that’s where I’ve been ever since: in between worlds. His death came exactly one month after my 40th birthday, and marked a long-awaited descent into my own chthonic realms.

It has been terrible learning how to be here without him. A beautiful terrible. My dad was full of soul, and simply a “fine human being,” as his Buddhist teacher once called him. He cared deeply about our world, and he passed on that fierce tenderness to me. It is a precious gift I carry in a small velvet pouch, and it glows gently from the folds of my pockets. Even when I forget who I am, it is there.

I had always heard that losing a parent is one of those thresholds that changes everything. But I didn’t really get it. I had already gone through some devastating, inconceivable deaths, when I lost my two canid daughters Asha and Gaia (ten years apart). Those deaths each re-routed my path in significant, soulful ways. I quit my job, I left on pilgrimages, I watched my world crumble and change. I thought I somewhat understood the feral creature that is the grief process. I now realize this is a dire mistake in the wilderness of birth and death, to imagine you have any remote understanding of how it’s going to go.

But I had lived through grief’s mangled underworld of despair before, the loss of trust in what I thought I believed, the excruciating re-writing of everything. Mostly, the dark drowning wave that comes when a warm body you love is no longer here. I was prepared for That Wave when my dad died.

But the wave was different. It wasn’t a wave at all, just dark water with an inescapable undercurrent, no up or down or movement at all, like a fog-cloaked night with no stars. Nothing was recognizable, and the most irritating part was that I had to still pretend to be me, when I just wasn’t her anymore. This is the scariest and most mouth-watering part of a great loss: the complete and irreversible deconstruction of one’s former identity. Of course the whole world looks different, when seen through those new eyes. It is the painful but necessary process of birthing new selves, and therefore new worlds.

I have learned from the past decade of nature-based soul work that while we can study and practice these inevitable dark passageways, we cannot force or predict their arrival. This merciful dance with the great mystery is what links us all together, and is why we must treat each other with such tenderness.

A hole appeared, and I did walk through it. There was nowhere else to go. In the months after my dad’s death, a part of me went on her own migration to elsewhere. Just like the hummingbirds, and the humpback whales, the sandhill cranes, the wild irises, the canyon tree frogs… the ones who disappear into the dark and reemerge a thousand times. All these beloveds, these masters of descent, traveled alongside me under many dark moons. I have strange and unbelievable stories about those travels to “elsewhere,” but not for today. Today is simply, tenderly, about coming back.

Do you know who else is back, after her own long journey to elsewhere? VENUS, in her most sublime evening star form. For months during the long dark winter I would look at the sky and whisper urgently, “Where is Venus?? Where are you???”

I missed her desperately, but chose to let her whereabouts remain a mystery. I’ve loved her long enough to know that she does this, and I trust her fully to reemerge in her own timing. Then one evening, during the equinox new moon, at the most ordinary of moments, there she was: twinkling through the window, across the dinner table, just above my partner’s shoulder. My eyes bulged out of my head. I stopped talking, dropped my fork and flew outside. I would recognize her from anywhere in this universe. She is just so fiercely herself.

“Everything makes sense again,” I said to Andy later that night. “Because Venus is back.”

And another mythical, migratory journey recently took place: I mailed out the spring equinox Dark Moon Letters just a few weeks ago, and those folded mystery letters flew on golden wings to special mailboxes all across our dear planet. I took a surprise, mandated sabbatical from doing anything at all during the depths of my grief. I had no idea when I would ever have the heart to send the dark moon letters again.

Then one morning in early March, I was having tea in the before-dawn darkness, like I do every morning, and out of nowhere there was a stirring within me, the fluttering of tiny wings inside my rib cage. The dark moon letters rang like a bell in my chest. It was an unmissable message, and a complete surprise. I can’t tell you how excited I was, to feel myself return to what I love, without forcing it. It helped me trust myself again, to feel the creative heart waking up with its own authentic ripeness. This is the natural cycle when we let ourselves rest, grieve, lose track, lay fallow.

I went right into my studio that morning and watched myself become possessed, enraptured by pressed flowers, poetry, melted beeswax, plant ink, quill pens, glue sticks, all of it. The creation of the dark moon letters is rapturously analog and soulful, and makes me feel like I’m back in the 90’s doing art as an 8 year old. I use the bare minimum of screens/technology when I write those letters, cutting and gluing the whole letter together by hand. It results in an explosive wild mess on my desk that I find so beautiful.

Every step of making the letters involves touch, slowness, and curiously allowing the letters to take form with as little thought as possible. I don’t make a plan or know what’s going to happen. For this recent letter, I had no clue that I would end up making a spider web out of fallen ponderosa needles. I just sort of watched it appear, and I was so delighted to see an idea take form that I know came straight from the ponderosa tree.

I am in love with writing and sending the dark moon letters. And I am so thankful to those of you who are paid supporters of my work, and who choose to receive these letters. I can’t tell you the gift, the delight, in folding each one, and imagining your hands then unfolding it. Thank you for your participatory dreaming of this love story.

(If you didn’t receive this recent Equinox letter and would like one, I print several extra copies with each edition’s printing. The next dark moon letter will be sent in June, around summer solstice.)

I think this is where I will pause for now, and I will let the next stories brew. Regarding the title of this particular writing: “A sudden light from nowhere” — these are the words that came to me, like a clear crystal chime, in the days after my dad left his body. It was a visceral understanding, and those words continued to echo for months. It doesn’t make sense, and I can’t explain it, but I will tell you that the return of the hummingbirds, that sudden first sight of Venus, and the heart-flutter when I decided to write the next dark moon letter, those moments all carried the exact same feeling that accompanied me after my dad’s death. A sudden light from nowhere.

More on this mystery, I cannot say. But I offer it to you as an invitation to find where that unexplainable incandescence might suddenly flicker in your life. Those glimpses of pure mystery that touch your heart, in palpable ways that others might miss entirely. Those moments are the beads, the clues, the particularities, the threads that weave the strand of your most heartfelt aliveness. They do not go away, even when the whole world appears unrecognizable or terrifying.

No matter the heartache, the worst-feared consequence, something that loves you will always arrive, in the most unexpected moment, to invite you to do the most radical thing you could possibly do in an aching, crumbling world: to continue to say yes to this life.

thank you so much for reading this my friends, and for being here on Earth in these times. your presence here is a precious gift.

with love under Venus our evening star,

Kate

Some moon letters went as far as Finland and Australia. After dropping them at the post office, over that following week I imagined the letters landing in each mailbox with a curious luminosity, as one thread in a vast web. Once the letters left my hands, they dissolved into pure mystery. That is the magic I have longed for.

The second edition of the dark moon letters will be arriving to mailboxes after the fall threshold in late September. A new mystery is brewing.

If you are a paid subscriber and would like to receive the next dark moon letter, please make sure I have an updated mailing address by 9/15 (no need to re-send your address if it hasn’t changed!). Thank you again for your support and delight in this real-mail mystery experiment. It is very special to me.

and now onto this newsletter’s wild bouquet I’ve gathered for you…

the below newsletter is free for everyone, with the recorded class and practice session at the very end for paid subscribers. I hope there is a little flower tucked into this bouquet for every one of you who reads it.

the flower’s gaze: teachers of praise

Dear Late Summer, you are the tenderness of every beloved thing wrapped into one gold-drenched stretch of time. The wild meadows and the garden have reached their fullest expression of tangled aliveness. And here we are together, in this great work of flowering, the conjuring of seeds, the August-crowned joy of completion, when the flowering happens effortlessly, and madly.

As if it all wasn’t tender enough, it was my 40th birthday earlier this month. On the day of my birthday, it was the full moon. I cannot remember the last time this happened, nor can I conceive of a more numinous gift to receive. I gazed at the huge golden moon that night and said Yes, Mystery, I have received your message. And I will try my very best to pass it along.

Upon receiving that gift, I was inspired to arrange this bouquet to share with you, including a contemplative audio class and practice session at the end, which I hope might feel a bit like a gift. I recorded the first session in the days before the full moon, and the practice session a few days after. In between recording the two parts, I went camping in the wilderness with my partner and our dogs, Lilikoi, Santo, and Deva.

Beauty, yes. And yet every year I spend my birthday in a state of heartache. I know I am not the only one who experiences birthday despair. The preciousness of life is just so clear on that day. My deepest longing is to love this world and all of its inhabitants, without one exception. And yet I may never fully live that longing into this world. There are so many things I feel horrified and outraged by. Loving this world fully is a difficult aspiration in these times, and it is my life’s most tender work in progress.

All the unexpressed love wells up from the depths when I am confronted with my own life’s impermanence. As though there is just no more time to waste. In the wake of that divine tidal wave, I am humbled by the beauty that has made my life. I could never possibly say thank you enough in one lifetime. And perhaps that is the whole point.

As the flowers in late summer tell us, there is simply no time to hold back our love. The time to speak about our love is now, even if the words come out in a tangled mess. In fallen petals and shaggy seed heads. A million motions of praise, cast upward and downward and every which way.

what a flower knows

Recently I was driving and caught sight of one of those feral roadside wildflower arrangements, the kind that arrive in late summer. It was perfect, and wildly passionate, such a perfect display of unbound creative expression. Without a thought, something beautiful escaped my mouth, as though I had been holding a butterfly in there and finally set it free. I heard myself speak words of awestruck praise, directed at those flowers, meant for Earth herself to hear them. They flowed out of me as naturally as breath.

Tears came to my eyes as I recognized my own willingness to love and cherish this world, to be moved by beauty and thereby give birth to more. You make it so easy, I whispered to the flowers as I drove. You make it so easy… to love.

I remembered then what I have suspected for years now, which is that the flowers, those 100 million year old enlightened forces of beauty rising directly out of dark Earth, are indeed our teachers. Teachers of what? The flowers are literally training us to love the world more. By showing up in their most exalted, generous, brilliant forms, they effortlessly invite us to do the same. They are the wise old sages we have been searching for.

In a world full of unthinkable suffering and injustice, flowers somehow make it possible for us to speak words of praise through it all, as though they are our training wheels for loving this world. As though pain and beauty were never separate to begin with. A flower’s beauty invites us to recall our own true nature — which is awe, and profound belonging, and supreme care for everyone.

By encouraging us to speak more about our love, flowers train us to recognize the belonging inherent in beauty. Because whatever we love, we must already be part of.

Just as all beauty expressed through Earth is a teacher of attention, flowers are teachers of praise. So are many other wild beings, the moon, the clouds, rocks, our animal companions, babies of all species. Anything you love.

What moves you to speak out loud about your love? What, or who, makes loving feel easy? Take hold of that thread, and don’t let go.

the art of gazing

I have been sharing the practice of “flower gazing” for many years now, because I am in love with this practice. Although it is said to have Taoist roots, it is my belief that the practice is even more ancient and ubiquitous. After all, flowers were here when humans were still just a glimmer of a dream Earth was conjuring. From the dawn of human existence, the flowers have raised us, they made us who we are, and they are here to remind us of our common origins. All we have to do is stop and sit with them.

The curious thing is that I cannot remember who taught me the flower gazing practice. At this point I have begun to accept that it may have been shown to me by the flowers themselves. And it is so gentle, so heart-opening, so radically simple and free, that I feel sharing it is both beneficial and necessary.

The word gaze itself contains within it an essence of praise, doesn’t it? There is a gentle undertone of admiration. There is perhaps even an element of mutuality within it, as though to gaze means the eyes have fallen upon something with its own emanation of consciousness. What does gazing feel like for you? How is it different from looking, staring, or glancing?

Trataka is a Sanskrit word meaning “to gaze”, and is a meditative technique of gently concentrating on a single object. This practice teaches the mind to not only hold focus, but also to soften the boundaries between Self and Other. It is the practice of both attention and porosity. Many objects can be used for a gazing practice, common ones being a candle flame or a picture of a deity. Or, in this case, a flower.

Because a flower is a conscious being, practicing meditative gazing with a flower is also a gateway into interspecies communication. It is a place where we sit with another life form who appears to be different than us, and we allow the separation between us to dissolve. From that place, we might begin to hear the whispers of the universal heart.

A flower is also a teacher of our own ephemeral nature, and they help us access the inherent grief in being alive. There is vast death wisdom radiating from every flower. They rise gloriously and fall gracefully, somehow making letting go an act of equal beauty.

How many times have you watched a field of radiant blooms, riotous with life, slowly begin to fade before your eyes? How many billions of funerals have been adorned by these fragrant star-petaled teachers? They have been helping us with our grief all along.

When we practice flower gazing, we simply agree to sit quietly for a moment and visit with another life form. We practice offering our attention to another species, and just being with them. Flowers make it easy for us to practice our own most truthful ways of being. There is no need to hold back with the flowers— they certainly don’t. We can practice being ourselves with them, because they provide a safe, open palette to do so. And then we carry that love and tenderness out into the rest of our lives.

subtle activism for planetary care

What if we each devoted a few minutes each day, until the frost comes, to sitting with these wise old friends and just being present with them? Perhaps nothing will happen, nothing will change at all, and if that is the case, you will be no worse off. But what if something does shift, so subtly within you, that you begin to see new layers of worlds all around you? That you begin to radiate a sort of universal kindness you may have long forgotten lived inside you. What if the simple act of sitting with a flower and just being together, what if this silent, subtle form of activism does change the world?

Does sitting with flowers matter in the scope of this world’s suffering? Could this form of activism, which takes place in the secret realms of one’s own heart, actually be a crucial ingredient in a movement toward change?

It is an impossible paradox, this world we share. There are nuclear bombs being manufactured two hours from my home, on stolen native lands. The people of Gaza are not just starving, but being starved, to the point that our world has finally dared to whisper the word famine. There are thousands of homeless dogs sitting alone in shelters, who will be euthanized before ever getting to share their love with a human. There are lifetimes of reasons to walk around with a hopelessly shattered heart. I know you have your own.

In an aching world, does sitting with the flowers make a difference? How so?

Your response will be entirely unique to you, and it matters. This could be a curious journal prompt, or something to contemplate while sitting or walking outside.

In all my heartache, I will continue to sit with the flowers as a message to Earth that I am still listening. Because I need help learning how to better love this world, and I know she has the secret. I would like to believe that on this very planet, in a thousand years from now, there will still be whispers in the wind about those of us who loved this place, in all its diversity of expression.

The seeds will surely carry forth our stories, long beyond us.

Thank you so much for reading, and for being here with me.

Here are the details of the two audio sessions below, which are the gifts for paid supporters of this newsletter. The sessions are around 1.5 hours of audio and practice:

Part One: the flower’s gaze, intro talk (38 minutes)

An unscripted introductory talk on my own relationship with flower medicine, personal anecdotes, some background on the practice of flower gazing, discussion of single point concentration and samadhi

Part Two: a wild bouquet, group practice session (58 minutes)

foundational practices, explanation and instruction on the following:

• seed syllables (starts at minute 7)

• lantern consciousness (starts at minute 16)

• finding the crystal channel (starts at minute 22)

• the main practice: flower gazing & the nondual state (intro begins at minute 30, core practice session begins at minute 41)

If you would like to download theses recordings so that you can listen off grid, please email me for downloadable files! kategardinerclearlight@gmail.com

Read more

For the past three moons, I have been holding space for a group of fourteen women, journeying through an underworld descent with the dark moon as our guide. The inspiration for this circle came from a dream vision I had in the depths of January, of a subterranean grandmother cave. I listened to the dream, and sent out a call for the dark moon sessions. One by one, the women came forward with a heartfelt yes. The circle was complete within a day.

I was astounded by the wellspring of truth, tenderness, and ferocity of heart each woman brought with her to the circle. We shared wild longings, poetry, art and dream images, spoke with mystery and the muse, conversed with animals and other life forms. It felt like a dream. Each woman shared things that altered my own heart forever.

But I shouldn’t have been surprised, really, because when women circle together to honor mystery, darkness, and the phasing moon, gleaming new worlds are born. This is the way it has always been.

Three nights before the final dark moon circle, I had a dream that I was opening a very old letter. There was an antique letter opener in my hand, with a mother of pearl handle and a tarnished silver blade. The envelope was frayed and yellowed, and inky words had been scrawled by quill. There was no stamp or return address. The letter was a door to a mystery world.

I never got to read the letter, but its magic was conveyed through the tactile eros of simply holding it. The soft worn paper, the blotted ink, the weight of the letter opener in my hand. This sensorial feeling seemed far more alive, far more alluring, than any written content would have been. Holding that dream letter was, without exaggeration, a mystical, mouthwatering delight.

What I knew upon waking was that I wanted to share something that might evoke such a feeling. Here was the container of the dark moon sessions closing, and an unopened letter now arriving. I felt an unmistakable nudge to send letters in the mail, ones that might offer a similar glimmer of the curiosity I felt when holding that letter. To open up a space for something to happen.

I want to offer you something slow and real, and mysterious, glinting with beauty, because those are the things that feed me. I want to offer you something you can hold in your hands. This is a soulful experiment in channeling beauty and mystery into form, and sharing it with you, so that it might inspire and feed you in unexpected ways.

Starting in just a few weeks from now, as we blaze across the threshold of summer solstice, I will be sending paid supporters of this newsletter real mystery letters in the mail. For now, these will be sent quarterly (every third month), at the portals to each new season. And, brilliantly, the seasonal thresholds this year happen to fall in rhythm with the dark moons. So I am calling this series the dark moon letters, because they are a continuance of my love story with Earth’s chthonic and cyclical mysteries.

The moon is my dearest muse in all matters of creative inquiry, and particularly the dark moon. Would you believe me if I told you that she is the one who sent me the letter in the dream? The dark moon is the unopened letter, the inky void, the mythic wellspring, the starry womb, the impossible imagination. The great mystery herself.

These letters will be written by candlelight, or from hidden wild places, or in the dusk tangles of my garden, and my suggestion is that you also read them by candlelight, or in wild places, or in your garden. The contents might be some combination of love letters, stories, poetry, inquiries, practices, recipes, and other things that will surely surprise even me. The letters may also occasionally contain small gifts, such as blank poetry postcards I’ve designed, for you to send real mystery mail to your own friends and loves.

At the end of this writing you will find logistical details for the dark moon letters. But mainly, current and new paid subscribers just need to send me a current mailing address (by the 15th, please). Receiving these letters in the mail is entirely optional. I have other offerings brewing in the cauldron.

I am so excited for this slow mystery mail experiment, to see what strange beauty is born from my sending, and your receiving. This is the dance of co-creative dreaming. It is a dance that I love.

Whether you choose to receive these letters, whether you are a free or paid supporter of my work, I cherish your presence, your readership and your willingness to receive what I share. I will continue to share writings here that are free to everyone, mostly on a monthly basis, and always with great tenderness when I hit that tremulous send button.

I have been thinking so much recently about how human attention has become nearly an endangered species. We live in an age of distraction, endlessly lured toward the next shiny thing. We are flooded with more input than we can possibly integrate in a lifetime.

Doesn’t this make our attention the most precious gift we can offer one another? Your presence here with my newsletters is a gift, in all forms, in all ways, in whatever measure of care and attention you offer. Thank you so much for being here with me.

Mostly I hope my recent dream of the mystery letter might inspire you to send someone a real letter in the mail. Maybe your letter just contains a haiku you wrote over coffee one morning, or a single pressed flower with a tiny love note, or a printed photo of something curious you saw on a forest wander. Maybe it’s just a strange open-ended question scrawled onto fallen birch paper or a dried leaf.

Here is an inquiry for all of us to wander with: In what ways can we feed the dream of the Earth, through our own slowing down, through our listening, through creating something strange and mysterious, through using our hands to turn dreams into form? Something within me trusts this is the path forward, in this aching world, to listen to our innermost longings and accept their strange invitations. To be guided forth by feeling, and the ever-phasing moon.

One of my own deepest longings is that we allow ourselves to make no sense at all— to loosen our grip on rational thinking, in order to become the wild visionaries humans truly are. To live for and from the boundless, mysterious heart, because we know that all life, and all beauty, is born there... effortlessly welling up to the surface, each night in our dreams.

with feral, holographic love letters delivered to you on hummingbird wings,

Kate

Subscribe now

moon listening — logistics for receiving the dark moon letters:

• If you are a paid supporter of this newsletter, or you become one, all you need to do is make sure I have your current mailing address on file. You can simply reply to this email with your mailing address, or email it to me directly: kategardinerclearlight@gmail.com

• The dark moon letters are sent quarterly, around each Solstice and each Equinox. For both existing and new paid subscribers: Please make sure I have your current mailing address by the 15th of those months (if your address has stayed the same, you don’t need to worry about this.)

• Each edition of these letters will be mailed only once, in one single printing.

• Before each printing, I will update the list of active subscriptions. You can, as always, discontinue your paid subscription whenever you want, just make sure that as long as it is active, I have an updated mailing address for you!

• These letters are printed with as much care for the trees and our waters as possible, using acid-free, chlorine-free recycled paper, from manufacturers who prioritize ecological stewardship.

• Please rest assured, I will never share your mailing address with anyone. Or show up at your house uninvited…

Please reach out to me with any questions or reflections, dear moon listeners.

We walk around drunk on flowering fruit trees. It seeps under doors and finds us in bed, filling bellies before breakfast with dreams of wild plum juice dripping from our lips.

It would be sacrilege to drive with the windows anything but all the way down, letting candied cherry perfume roll through the car in pregnant clouds. The whole body inhales, is taken.

There is no other word for it than intoxication, and there is nothing else to do than to be brought to your knees in supplication, in the throes of such unbearable, passionate, juice-lust. This time of year in northern New Mexico, we live with eyes glazed, full of simultaneous longing and satiation, all secretly sharing the same lover. But it’s no secret at all, the perfumed trees blooming madly from the roadsides.

And these things,
that live only in passing, they understand
that you praise them. Fleeting, they look to us,
the most fleeting, for help.
They hope that within our invisible hearts
we will change them entirely into—
oh endlessly—into us! Whoever we finally are.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Ninth Duino Elegy)

Isn’t this the story of all springtimes? And what more are we here to do than to be seized by this beauty, to be taken into the dark flowering mysteries of Earth, and to let ourselves be shaped by those creative hands. To let this mystery seep into us, fully.

To be so moved by it, we become permanently scented.

A few springs ago I was driving through Santa Fe, in the old part of town near Canyon road, where the fruit trees are ancient, twisting amongst cracked adobe walls. I drove slowly through narrow streets, breathing the flower-thick air, letting each single fruit tree take me into its blossoming world. The stately dream of apricot, the witchy apple, the impossible pink cloud of cherry.

And my very favorite of them all, the unruly and gnarled native wild plums, whose perfume is effervescent and more heavenly than anything I can imagine, who grow in ditches, feral, cut back every year and relentlessly emerging again as a billion world universe of stars, bearing fruit that drips like purple rubies raining onto every road. The most generous and beautiful god I’ve ever met, and my favorite scent on planet earth.

I continued on my impromptu driving tour, and suddenly came upon the most exquisite old cherry plum tree, in full flowering. I could not believe her beauty. She struck my heart like perfumed lightning. Her glory was lunar, laced with the faintest pink of glowing dawn. There was a car right behind me, so I resisted the urge to slam on the brakes, instead I shouted out the window, “You are SO BEAUTIFUL!!!” to the tree as I rolled by.

At that instant, I heard a little granny’s voice yell back, “Oh my heavens, thank you!”

I nearly choked in disbelief that the tree had spoken back to me. After all these years of talking to trees, had one finally spoken back to me in audible English?? I mean, this was literally my life’s wildest dream coming true.

But then I saw her, a very real woman, on the sidewalk right beneath that cherry plum tree. She was waving at me, and smiling. I had been so taken by the tree that I hadn’t seen this little old lady standing right next to it. From the sideview mirror, I saw her face was still beaming, eyes grinning under a lunar orb of curled white hair, having just received those loving words I had yelled to the tree. “You are so beautiful!” this woman heard me call to her as I drove by.

Realizing the uncanny mix up, I laughed out loud, I shook my head, tears sprang to my eyes. A million mysteries hung before me like ripe fruit in trees. I recalled the old woman’s moon-like orb of white hair, which mirrored perfectly the round million-petaled moon of the cherry plum tree.

I began to ask the sorts of questions that can only be spurred by our willingness to speak with trees in the first place. Did this woman exist at all? Was she an apparition of the cherry plum tree spirit? Could anyone else see her but me?

More likely, I decided, the woman was real, and the tree had orchestrated this exchange. Perhaps, the tree had made sure to catch my eye at that very instant, shining with extra brilliance, in order to help deliver a gift to this dear old lady— the blessing of being called beautiful by a stranger passing by.

After a moment of letting my mind flip through the possibilities that could have led to this impossibly timed exchange, both hilarious and also tender, I froze with a new understanding. Could it be possible that this was a precious gift the tree had also given to me? I became quite certain: the tree had orchestrated this loving connection between two humans, strangers, who each had something precious to offer the other.

After decades of speaking to trees, of loving them like family, writing poems to them, making offerings at their feet, I had always accepted their arboreal silence as their way of loving me back: But this particular tree had made sure I finally received an audible reply.

I saw the vision of that glorious flowering cherry tree flash before me again. I smiled through my tears, and whispered, Oh my heavens, thank you.

I’ll admit, it is possible that it was all a random coincidence, of a white-haired elder out for a walk, who just so happened to be passing under a flowering cherry plum at the very same instant I spoke to the tree. Perhaps, beyond anything else, this is just the sort of mischief that inevitably unfolds when humans start talking to trees.

I suppose all that matters is that the encounter moved me deeply, and that it touched this woman’s heart as well, and that the tree was part of our exchange of love. I think we largely underestimate the unstoppable benevolence radiating from the trees, and their sincere longing to see humans thrive.

What do you think?

The other morning at dawn, I went out to the forest with gifts clutched in my hand. Oats, homegrown rainbow corn, wild rose petals, and creosote from the Chihuahuan desert just south of here. A small offering for this immense mystery, so endless with pain and beauty. I sprinkled the herbs at the base of an old ponderosa. Thank you for my life were the only words that came out, followed by a gulp of tears.

Even through all of this heartache and genuine horror, even through the illusion and delusion of our systems of power and self-destructive human supremacy, through all of it, I am thankful to be here. Where else would I want to be? I belong to this beautiful mess, and I will not surrender my gratitude for anything. As Joanna Macy reminds us, gratitude is not about bypassing the reality of pain and suffering on Earth, rather, gratitude is a revolutionary and politically subversive act that honors the great gift of life. Gratitude is our foundational, instinctual yes to Earth. It is the universal starting place for all transformation.

Can you imagine the radical effect of the modernized human suddenly softening into our heart, and finally seeing the immensity of love and connection already surrounding us? True gratitude breaks the spell of late stage capitalism, allowing us to experience the precious interbeing that we already are. Gratitude makes us want to protect this place. This holy belonging.

And yet there in the morning light, I cried as I sprinkled my small gifts, feeling the enormity of global pain as insurmountable. I belong to this heartache. The hatred and brutal vilification of wolves and coyotes, who are my family. Entire forests and mountains, wild homes to countless beings, being decimated and mined to fill the bottomless void of our human material desires. Multimillion dollar nuclear bombs being manufactured as we speak, the life-desecrating effects of which will outlast us by hundreds of thousands of years — reminding us that our current human predicament, and its associated extinctions of other species and their habitats, is not just one of our lifetime, or even that of our great, great grandchildren’s — Our current way of existing has entered into the realm of altering deep time. A future so far from us, we cannot possibly grasp our effects upon it. And yet we remain inextricably connected to those future ones, through the way we choose to walk here now.

I looked down again at the herbs I had sprinkled at the base of the tree. It seemed so inconsequential that I almost felt embarrassed, but some fierce voice inside me shouted that this small act mattered. That in the face of this magnitude of human harm to each other and the land, perhaps the smallest, gentlest acts of care are the most appropriate antidote. And that the power of my small gift was not in the physical offering, but in the force that drew me to the forest at dawn to say thank you.

My power is in my knowing that our hearts are intertwined with Earth’s, forever.

Still kneeling on the ground, I lifted my gaze to the horizon. The mountains rose up around me like a crystal bowl, and I felt so held in their container that I heard myself sigh. I know all about deep time, the mountains said.

I trust you, I spoke back. And then I heard myself spontaneously address the mountains as the noble guardians that they truly are. Without thinking, as though the words arose from elsewhere, I called out to them,

good morning
great cradle of beauty,
rising up strong
for the sake of all life
on Earth!

I sighed again, this time feeling an upwelling of joy. I knew I had made an incredibly valuable offering, by speaking the mountain’s hidden name: cradle of beauty.

Do you know how good it feels to call the wild ones by their true names? To adorn this world with your creative voice and song? To see to the heart of Earth’s true, mythopoetic, miraculous nature, and to name it back to her? This is one of the greatest gifts humans can give this planet, and it happens to be a gift that is particular to our species. I realized that my offering of herbs had only been the beginning of the conversation, a mysterious gateway into this moment of authentic, holy communion.

I spoke the prayer again and landed on its final words: for the sake of all life on Earth. Built into the mountain’s mythopoetic name was her deepest purpose: to exist for the benefit of this world’s co-creative flourishing. To hold all of us. To be life-affirming. I had somehow experienced, in an embodied and vastly real sense, the mountain’s unique and precious way of supporting life on Earth.

I stood up and began to walk down the forest path, as though on a mission. Those words now echoed through me on repeat, life-affirming. Through my mind flashed news headlines, social media posts, everything that has us divided against one another and convinced us we are separate: Isn’t this the fundamental battle of the human moment, our collective disagreement over what is life-affirming and what is not?

This question is made of heated existential complexities, many of which center around the human refusal to regard other life forms as equally intelligent and valuable (including the untamable wisdom of the female body). But this is a question we each must sit with, stormy as it may be, and I want to invite the possibility that there might even be great joy in the unraveling of this fundamental inquiry.

the altar of Mystery

I recently met with one of my mentors, and I told her about a passageway I have been traveling through: Just a couple of months ago, I deleted my instagram account with what felt like a large following, an account that had basically served as a gallery of my life’s work. The identity formerly known as @plantfolk has been offered back to the dark mystery, where it came from to begin with. It had been ten years of wandering that path, of being fused to that highly visible persona.

I supposed I could have just left the account sitting there untouched forever, or deleted all the posts and started over, but I knew this calling was bigger than that. This is not the time for halfway offerings. After the past several years of slowly backing away from a platform that felt increasingly lifeless, I finally let go. I was disturbed by the relentless growth of the social media persona. It no longer felt life-affirming to me. In fact, I had gradually begun to suspect that it was holding me back from my true ecological belonging to Earth, my right to participate in the cycles of transformation, waxing as I please and then disappearing entirely like the moon. And so I placed that offering on the altar to Mystery, and in doing so said, I am listening for what’s next.

I am not going to pretend it was easy, or that my poor ego wasn’t horrified by this unruly agenda of soul. In the hours after my account was gone, I felt so irrelevant to the world that I thought I might dissolve entirely. It was viciously uncomfortable. Even though I had carefully chosen this path toward the abyss, approaching the edge was wretched. The amount of value I had invested into a mechanized representation of my gifts was shocking, and treacherous to confront.

If you, too, have walked away from a previous identity that you knew was far too small, I hope you know the magnitude of this offering. And I want to acknowledge tenderness of the loss. It takes profound courage to relinquish the building of a name, and instead agree to grow bravely downward, toward the silent starry sinews of Earth. Our longing for that mystery is what guides us forth.

I went for a walk at dusk after my account was offered back, still in a groundless whirlpool state. Who even was I, without that piece of my identity? I felt significant existential distress. And yet there was some movement there, something stirring from the depths. Suddenly that familiar fierce voice rang through me, the same one who brings gifts to the trees at dawn, and I heard myself speak clear, grounded words:

I don’t have to be that person anymore.

I stopped in my tracks and stared at the sand, frozen, hearing the most important declaration of my life. I screamed out loud in the arroyo, as Venus gleamed on the horizon. I had set myself free. Free to be vast and undefinable, mysterious even unto myself.

In a sudden whoosh like a flock of birds swooping close overhead, I felt those 140,000 loving hearts unlock themselves from the confines of a screen, and wash over me and the whole world like a waterfall of light. All the beauty I had shared there, that living digital art gallery I had created over a decade, all of it dissolved and became an invisible force of love that is no longer outside of me. And I vowed myself fully to this trusting of the love I cannot see.

My muse came and found me in that moment, flickering in the beloved faces of earthstar, moon, wild iris, gray wolf, viola, sandhill crane, and every single cloud. Oh, the immensity and the realness of this love.

When I explained all of this to my mentor, she got very serious. She nodded her head slowly, acknowledging the gravity of this offering. This is big, and here is the even bigger question, now that you’ve opened up this space, she said with a piercing glint in her eyes:

What are you saying Yes to?

The simplest question, when posed at just the right moment, becomes the perfect key. When she asked me this question, my heart reeled with equal parts not-knowing and exhilarated longing. Suddenly I felt ravenous, and spacious enough for everything. Brave enough for nothing. I am living with this open question, to which my response is ever-changing. What am I saying yes to, now? How do I want to affirm life, with the way I choose to move next?

Our Yes is a moment-to-moment birthing of new worlds, to move toward what nourishes us, to ask for what is needed now. This is particularly mandatory in a reality where the daily news brings tears of grief, rage, and streams of feral embodied No’s. I am tracking the currents of the Yes beneath the Yes, the river beneath the river, and the series of small life-affirming choices I can make that give way to the grand vision of collective flourishing I hold in my heart.

This is my Yes to Positive Disintegration, to letting go in order to feed the world soul. I am saying yes to curiously tracking the ways in which my own actions inadvertently feed the mechanization of the Self that is, without question, desecrating life on Earth. My yes is in the way I dissolve with the dark moon, and dedicate myself to the starry firmament of living soil. May my yes move me deeper toward that ungraspable mystery at the center of our common heart.

Here is a stream of questions to dream with, to scribe into the night sky: What are you saying yes to? What is your full-bodied way of saying yes to life on Earth? What is in the process of emerging?

What do you know is standing in the way of your heart’s larger conversation with the world? What is one thing, small or large, that you can place on the altar to mystery, in order to make space for the deeper yes within you?

I will leave you with a poem I wrote the other day, my yes to the deeper heart’s emergence. I am saying yes to poetry, and kindness, and moving toward what I love. Because I know that our love is the most life-affirming force on this planet.

One morning in early July, I went out to the garden at dawn.

Still early in the growing season, every day contains challenges and delights. After my morning tea, I like to go straight outside to greet the young growing plants. To check in with everyone, make sure the plants have what they need, and to look for new flowers opening. Every day in the garden is a new mystery.

I walked out to the dewy garden barefoot, in curiosity and gladness as the morning sun rose. But something felt off as I gazed across the expanse of adolescent green. At first I couldn’t quite place it. Then, my eyes fell like burning hot daggers onto a jasmine tobacco plant. Every single one of its flowers had vanished, the buds too, when just the day before the plant had been in full flowering. I took a small breath and walked, with forced calmness, through wet grass to the other side of the garden where I had planted a larger patch of jasmine tobacco. Now I gasped with unrestrained horror. All of those flowers had also vanished from the plants, eaten one by one, as though they were a rare delicacy.

With a slowly darkening heart, I toured the entire garden and found that the night predator had a very specific appetite — in a sea of plants, it had devoured only the flowers of jasmine tobacco. My very favorite flower in the garden, the most heavenly, perfumed, fragrant one— every single bloom gone.

But I collected myself and thought, I’m sure it was just random, those are poisonous plants anyway. Gardeners are used to these sorts of griefs, after all, and a poisonous flower was such a bizarre choice of snack that surely it wouldn’t happen again. But the next morning, it happened again. And then again. And each morning, the plants were chewed down more and more. By the fourth day, with the nicotiana plants all eaten down to their stalks and hanging onto life by a thread, I started to lose it.

Finally I stopped attempting to be optimistic and stormed inside in outrage. In my many years of growing jasmine tobacco, never once has anything eaten them. I knew it had to be the deer who were eating the flowers. No one else is tall enough to reach those high blooms, or to jump the five foot high garden fence for that matter.

I swear I am usually quite generous with the garden. I love wild animals so much it hurts. I consider the garden a refuge for all of us.

I have never attempted to remove or deter gophers, and let them do their underground tunneling work. I am certain it benefits the soil and therefore the rest of us. The resident barn skunks are free to come root around as much as they please. I have always been glad when the deer jump the fence in the fall and eat the last remaining vegetables during the early frosts. They leave their droppings throughout the garden which feels like a magical gift. The grasshoppers feast freely here, even when they descend upon it like apocalyptic locusts. All of it feels important to me, that we share the garden space and not mechanize or hyper-colonize it, to not banish the wild ones from their part in the feast. But deer in the summer, specifically decimating my favorite flower, this was an unprecedented, very mysterious, terrifying new issue. My generosity was being tested in the most uncomfortable way possible. I peered out the window at the garden, with a building sense of doom.

Out of curiosity and desperation, I typed into a web search “deer-proof flowers.” Can you guess what comes up on that list? Jasmine tobacco. There it was, at the top of the list of plants said to be toxic and known to be disliked by deer. What kind of sick cosmic joke was this??

This particular deer had a very particular palate for the most highly perfumed flowers in the whole garden.

The deer touched nothing else in a sea of tender and delicious plants. Spinach, beet greens, chard, kale, carrots, snap peas— all untouched. I had to admit that there was something perfect, peculiar, enchanting about this deer and I loving the exact same thing. It was simply too precise to be random. And I thought to myself, well, I would eat them too, if I hadn’t been told they were poisonous.

Nicotiana— jasmine tobacco— is the starry fragrant nightflower of my wildest dreams. It blooms at night, and by early evening lets out the most hypnotic fragrance to attract night pollinators— the hummingbird moths are particularly mad about it. The white blooms glow in moonlight, like stars scattered across the night garden. I always make sure to plant lots of them, even though it also wildly self-sows year after year. I am devoted to this plant, because it offers me reflections of my own deepest essence. Everything that happens between us is a beautiful mystery. Our love doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t need to.

All I know is that the presence and fragrance of this plant is a need for me.

I once heard that the ancestors, the hidden folk, the devas and earth spirits are not able to consume food due to not having physical bodies, but that they are able to receive love and sustenance through scent, light, color and sound. Somehow it made sense to me, and it always stuck with me, that sound, scent, color and light are of frequencies that easily reach between worlds. That these are the language of spirit. Why else are our altars covered in candles, incense, flowers, bells and chimes?

I grow nicotiana because her scent does something to me that goes far beyond sensorial pleasure. The fragrance of this plant provides me more nourishment than any of the vegetables I grow. It is spirit food, sacred offerings to the deepest heart essence. One morning in the garden I even pleaded out loud, please, eat the spinach, the beets, the snap peas!! Take all the food!! Just leave the fragrant flowers! I tried what I could to deter the deer, but as an animal lover, there were only so many options that felt kind. In any case, none of it remotely worked. What was left of the jasmine tobacco were leafless, nub-like little green sticks coming out of the ground, somehow continuing to bravely send out one new bloom each day. But none of their flowers survived the night.

I saw her one evening, lurking in the darkening forest just outside the garden fence, waiting for me to leave so that she could come in and begin her flower feast. She was staring directly at me, unafraid. This deer was determined, and her soul’s hunger for those flowers was unstoppable. As I glimpsed the soft fire in her eyes, I felt a sudden tenderness come over me. I deeply admired her courage and conviction, her fierce dedication to what she loved. Right then, I surrendered. I sent a silent invitation from my heart to hers: They’re all yours. I reminded myself that there would always be flowers next year. And I started sleeping soundly again.

Do you know what else happened then? I stopped being so precious and prohibitive with my own garden. I often can barely bring myself to even gather a bouquet, so devoted is my heart to leaving all the flowers for the pollinators. But this deer’s ravenous hunger for beauty ignited my own. I started gathering flowers for myself more freely. I began talking out loud to the flowers about how much they mattered to me, not taking one single second with them for granted. I also stopped taking myself for granted. I could finally see my own dedication, the enormous work of love I had created by tending this garden, feeling its beauty emanating from my bones. Who wouldn’t want a taste of this luminous nectar? I let go into my own flower rapture and spoke my love out loud.

This deer helped me see the feast for the soul I had prepared, in tending a space so flourishing with beauty.

Then suddenly, after those weeks of nightmarish nightly flower decimation, the deer just stopped coming. Upon my morning inspection, the garden shone eerily untouched in the morning light. The absence of the deer hung like mist in the air. Many days passed after that with no nighttime visitation, and the flowers began to grow back. As they always do.

Here is the thing that broke my heart: Every nicotiana plant that the deer had eaten began to bloom wildly, more abundantly than ever before.

In all my years of knowing this plant, I have never seen anything like this. There was one jasmine tobacco growing closer to my house that the deer was never able to access. That plant remained normal sized and with a normal amount of flowers. But the deer-pruned plants emerged giant, vibrant and exploding, dripping, singing with starry blooms.

I now felt the searing tenderness of the deer’s absence, the great gift she had left behind in exchange for the flowers she ate. What had seemed to me like reckless destruction was actually her own mysterious way of tending the flowers. Her way of giving a gift to me and all the pollinators. I marveled at how upset I had been. She left behind more nightflowers than I have ever seen in my life. And the night garden once again became its wild expanse of perfumed glittering stars, more luminous than ever before.

Around a month later I was turning into my driveway, and a deer slowly walked out in front of my car. I stopped and smiled, always delighted to see a deer, and let her pass by. And then I saw why she was moving so slowly. A perfect, tiny, wobbly newborn fawn emerged from the trees, her back speckled with luminous patches. I was flooded with this being’s preciousness. Her mother looked straight at me through my windshield, with eye contact that stopped my heart, and the two walked off gently into the forest. I remember thinking it was a peculiar time for a fawn to be born. And that something in the mother’s gaze felt so familiar.

I felt my eyes widen and spill over with wonder. Was it her? The flower tender. Was this why she had suddenly stopped coming — to give birth to her little fawn? Had she been pregnant that whole time, insatiably filling her belly with the most magical, fragrant nourishment she could find for her growing little one? I felt certain it was true, that I had been a witness to this story. And that I had been given the strange and miraculous gift of being part it.

I recalled the bright spots on the fawn’s back, and saw there the imprint of the starry nightflowers she was made from. That her mother had so carefully crafted her from, choosing only the most particular, special flowers to feed what was most precious to her. My very favorite flowers, now intricately connected to a fawn’s mysterious becoming.

As long as they are here, the animals, the keepers of the wild heart, will always tend this planet with their love. Everything in the wild world bestows a ripple of benefit to others, just through their way of existing— it is a wisdom and a way of being that flows forth freely from all life. The human heart belongs to that lineage. We are being called to remain fearlessly devoted to our heart’s vision, no matter what. To jump the high fence in the dark of night, to courageously taste what this world may have told you was poison, and discover it to be nectar. To follow our longing toward what our soul knows will benefit this great web of life. This is the mystery that calls us from the dark woods, the heart of the dark mother, the firmament of soil and stars. The path forward is guided by cloven hooves. By fang, claw, wet nose and wing. How much relief we will find if we remember how to trust them, and to protect them and their wild homes, as though our own lives depend upon it.

Deer mother, if you are listening, I have received your gift. It has fed me through the dark winter. I will keep planting scented nightflowers for you forever. I will grow enough for all of us. So that you can keep giving birth to many more fragrant new fawns, speckled with flowering starlight. Thank you for leaving your soft imprints of flourishing on my garden, my heart, our world.

I sat huddled between two tall ponderosa trees at dusk, wrapped in a thick wool shawl. It was the new moon, and I was alone on a wilderness hermitage. The forest howled in cold silence.

As the great darkness enclosed around me, I felt myself dissolving entirely into the mystery that is barely whispered. It had been many days since I had seen a human, so many I had lost count. Without the moon as my guide, the only language left to speak was that of starlight. Through the silhouettes of trees the horizon was soaked in inky blood, and I sank into that dark well until my eyes locked with hers: Venus. So luminous, so unapologetically intense that I was left hypnotized. I let her beauty, her ferocity, her howling sisterhood, leave me in ruins. Night after night, I let her destroy me all over again and transform me into something far more mysterious, burning with a fiercely feminine softness.

Our blazing evening star. Our planetary sister, wolf mother of the skies. She struck me again and again, like fangs to the heart. Have you noticed her, too, these past months? She has been so constantly brilliant at dusk that I now long for the day to end, just so that I can see her again. I feel her training me to hunt the light that lives inside my own bones. Like any mother wolf would do.

During those nights alone on the mountain, I felt her cast a golden-eyed spell on me. My dreams suddenly became so vivid that upon waking, I wrote pages upon pages in my journal, trying to recollect the cascade of intricate detail, images and information being delivered to me in the night. I found myself moving through time as slowly as I pleased, just like Venus whose sunrise and sunset each last 117 earth days. One long, slow, sensuous expanse of unraveling and becoming. I scribed poetry with a raven quill by candlelight, with walnut hull ink, getting lost in the rapture of each curling letter. Every moment became a curious expanse of my own softness.

With each dusk session I spent sitting and learning from Venus, being Seen by her, I began to remember a forgotten world. A world with infinite spaciousness for us to move through at whatever pace we need. One with softness and richness of color, of curious touch, fragrance of burning herbs, taste of nourishing stew. The delicious feast of this life, and that each of us is, when we allow ourselves to be held by something greater than us. The grandmothers are waiting with open arms.

When I emerged from my hermitage, I was literally shellshocked by the energetic climate of humanity. I have been going on wilderness solos for over a decade and usually find quite a bit of joy and comfort in returning to the human world, but this time was different. Everything felt so hardened and frantic, faster than any beating heart could ever keep up with. We don’t want this hardness, was the thought that had me in tears as I drove home.

We’ve forgotten there is another way. I found myself heartbroken by pavement, the anxiety-fueled small talk, the energy of humans driving cars as though competing against each other. It felt like everything was on hyperdrive, barreling forth in an impossibly unsustainable frenzy. No wonder we are hurting this planet. We are hurting, howling for shared tenderness, for heart speak around a fire, for soul’s slowness. For a relationship with Self and Earth that includes reverence for the death cycles, rather than denial in our relentless quest for growth.

What are you really ravenous for? Deep in your bones, you know.

My time on the mountain with Venus was a precious opening into what my heart always knew was possible. That we are, in reality, made of an expansive softness flickering with utmost care and intimacy. I had glimpsed the primordial feminine ground of being. With this remembrance, how could I possibly return to a world system crushing itself in the self-destructive machine of patriarchy? There is a hidden treasure available to us all. But it requires our courage and willingness to yield to mystery, and a lifetime of our reverence to reveal itself.

My first evening back in the human world, I went out at dusk to find Venus. I told her about my anguish for Earth, for the animals, for what humans are doing to our Moon, to Space, leaving our trash and debris floating in the starry void. I wept to her about the delusional plans in the news for humans to “occupy” Mars. She gazed back at me with a deathless brilliance that once again rendered me paralyzed by beauty. And then I heard a voice, like a siren or a serpent of light, a tendril of harp music seeped into my ears:

They’ll never be able to touch me, said Venus, shining.

I couldn’t sleep that night, and somewhere in the darkest hours, I finally opened my journal and wrote down what she’d told me.

Venus / sky wolf sister

I don’t care
how many billion dollar machines
they try to non-consensually insert
into the fertile wilderness of space—

They’ll never be able to touch Venus.

She’d eat them alive.
She told me herself.

They can extract all the jewels
try to kill all the wolves
try to own the female body
take over this world,
but they’ll never be able to possess
the most alluring beauty in the sky.

Venus, cauldron of lava,
mystery body, hottest planet of all.
Venus, who snows metal! rains acid!
she who turns in the
opposite direction
of every other planet in our solar system.

morning star, evening star,
radically defiant crone,
who luxuriates in her own turning,
who takes her sweet time.
who moves as slowly as she pleases
in sensuous
117 day long
sunrises and sunsets.

blazing white fire of brilliance
too hot to touch,
a terrifying star witch,
a sorceress of light.

Oh Gaia’s untamable sister,
dear planetary wolf mother,
wrathful protector goddess wielding
shining fangs and beauty daggers,
lend me the fierce heart,
sweet evening star,
to blaze more like you.

when the world seems too hard, too fast
too cold, vain, lost to see clearly:
be Venus.

As soon as I wrote it down, I felt a spacious relief open within me. We are never alone in our despair, as long as we remember to share it.

In my favorite movie of all time, Contact with Jodie Foster, she tells Matthew McConaughey’s character how she fell in love with astronomy: It was when she learned that humans named the planet Venus because it was so beautiful and glowing, before we had learned that Venus is actually full of deadly gases and sulfuric acid rain. Jodie Foster’s character was so delighted by this trick Venus had played on humans that she devoted her whole life to the stars. I think what allured her was this mischievous secret of the feminine soul. Ferocious volcanic mystery worlds made of constant death and resurrection. The cosmic Genetrix, womb of totality. This is the force that births all the beauty we see and are.

In my apprenticeship to Venus, she has shown me how my grief and anger at humanity are wildly beneficial forces of beauty. Venus helps us remember that she who destroys is also she who renews. She has encouraged me to be fierce and unstoppable in my loving, like a mother wolf, as the ultimate way of honoring Gaia. This ferocity is a protective force — it awakens within us the wisdom of how to care for what we love. This great beauty we call our home, a preciousness we must never take for granted.

Like the blazing gold in a mother wolf’s eyes, like a crimson flowering tree, like Venus, the heart radiates beneficial blessings as its original and only purpose. This is the primordial secret we are born with. And just like Venus radiating her brilliance, Earth, too, radiates light into the galaxy and out to the myriad of universes (our planetary light is called “earthlight”). Our light reaches Venus, too, and I am certain that these two worlds love each other dearly.

Here is a contemplation to share: I like to imagine that Gaia’s particular light is a green, verdant light, fragrant with rich soil and fruit and flowers, singing with birds and whales, coyote howls and human chants. I concentrate on Earth radiating its most flourishing, emerald heartsong out beyond anything we know. So that we may bless the many others who share the great Space with us, who may not know the immense blessing of the abundant, fragrant, flourishing life on our precious planet. I hold the vision of Earth’s radiance until I can feel it shining out through my own pores.

Sometimes I am too weary, too heartbroken to generate this practice on my own. So I sit with the sunset until the evening star appears, and I let myself be held fully in the embrace of this wise grandmother. In this allowing, I become restored by the matrilineal teachings of Venus, as she lends me her radiance until I glow, too.

What practices unlock doors to your own multi-versal heart? Remember to allow yourself to be held by the great forces when you begin to feel yourself dim. Let the ancient ones restore you, until your heart becomes brilliant enough to touch all the Others… in this world and beyond. This is how we offer ourselves to the great changes Gaia needs us to help guide her through. Venus is watching, and lending her song.

Hello dear readers out there — Here is a wander into our imaginative origins, as a wildly creative species on Earth. From the iridescent worlds in a dog’s eyelashes to the lineages of moons reflected in one moon’s face: Thank you for walking with me on the heart path… even when the path becomes a rabbit hole into the starry abyss.

A few months ago I was in a dark and creaky used book store in Albuquerque, the sort of place where mystical journeys begin. Tucked into the bottom shelf was a small book entitled “The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos” by cosmologist Brian Swimme. It was one of those fateful used book store moments that felt as though the entire universe had conspired to get this tattered little book into my hands. It cost $6.

In exploring Brian Swimme’s fascinating work on the origins of the universe, I discovered the word cosmopoetic (spelled “-poietic” in its Greek origins). I was instantly obsessed with the word. Cosmo- meaning world, universe, harmony. The mysterious order and harmony of the universe that allows it to function in the impossibly perfect way that it does. Poiesis- the process of bringing something into form. The emergence of something that did not previously exist. Of weaving the unseen into being, mystery into matter. Poetry.

Cosmopoetic: world-creating. To weave the world into being, through the creative microcosm of our own existence. Isn’t a new birth taking place anytime we cook a meal, say something utterly true, or greet a wild other with our curiosity? Otherworlds are all around us, and are brought to life through our deciphering of their messages. As poet David Whyte says, "treat everything as though it is about to reveal something to you.” This is how we become a walking ecological gift, nurturing more biodiversity expression on Earth through our embodied participation.

Humans, like soil, wolves and starlight, are cosmopoets. And there are many ways we can practice sharpening our cosmopoetic skills. Last year I was camping with a group in the high desert, and our guides gave us the invitation to more or less roll around in the grass for twenty minutes. Their instructions drew from that beloved Mary Oliver line, to go onto the land and “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It was a practice in deciphering the subtle, instinctual whispers of soul. And so the twelve of us slowly dispersed out into a tall grass meadow. One of the guides began to play a drum.

It was harder than it sounds to hear the deeper current of longing within me, beneath the rushing mind. Intellectually, I know exactly what I’m drawn to and the kinds of beauty I love. But we are far more mysterious than a list of likes and dislikes, far freer than our material possessions or our neatly composed personality. The more fixed we become to our identity, the less room we leave for the world to create through us— to change us into who we really are. I long to see humans remember ourselves as mystical cosmopoets in constant flux with the moon, the howling canyon winds, the old stones dissolving into soil. Even if it scares me, I give myself to this instinctual, messy, co-creative dance. Because the wild world keeps showing me that beauty is a force that moves.

In order to let my instinct guide me, my mind had to first surrender to the hidden part of me who, even after all these years, had refused to be domesticated, who was free and untamable, tidal and unstoppably phasing like the moon. It is there inside all of us, still alive and whispering incantations of our most feral dreams. It is soul.

And so there in the grassy meadow I found myself face down on the ground, studying exactly how each tuft of grass had risen from darkness and become bleached rays of light. I felt strangely at home down there, and in love with that warm, intricate world. Suddenly I felt a ravenous, inexplicable hunger to taste the sweet clay soil. Without thinking, I licked the ground. I smiled as though I had just been told the world’s best secret. It was delicious.

I learned something important about myself, about being alive. Something like, the part of me that is utterly curious and unpredictable is the part that brings me the most joy. An instinctual joy that reaches beyond any human definition of joy. It was the joy of belonging to Earth. In that moment in the tall grass, ripples upon ripples of tenderness flowed down into soil and out into the cosmos. A luminous new world was born from that simple embrace.

New worlds are constantly created through each choice we make. The concept of worlds within worlds became a compass I carry for when I get lost, and I often whisper the words out loud like a koan. From the starry firmament of dissolving dark soil beneath our feet to the mind-boggling vastness of space, everything is unfolding at once and the possibilities for our participation are endless. Nothing gets me out of personal and planetary despair as quickly as that thought. To contemplate the endless creativity of the universe is to become as creative as the stars themselves. Our imagination is the original genetrix of planetary flourishing. We are here to be curious.

How we interact with our own multitudes directly affects the further flourishing of biodiverse life expressions on Earth and beyond. We must be willing to examine the sort of worlds we are creating through each choice we make. It might sound like a heavy responsibility, to be so highly interconnected that our actions are constantly affecting others. But as I have learned from spending so much time with trees, rivers, the moon, and many different kinds of animals, this level of interdependence is what leads to the greatest joy and freedom that exists.

Our human lives are often built on hard definitions of self and other, and a whole pantheon of socially constructed rules about how we get to exist here. Some of it is necessary for survival, but much of it blocks us from true intimacy and connection with this world. How might we begin to stretch beyond these limitations, so that we can interact more freely with the otherworlds around us? The answer is simple, and it is also the task of a lifetime: we have to start breaking our own rules.

wolf kisses & breaking the rules: where the two worlds touch

even in captivity,
one can see in the eyes of a woman,
or a wolf,
the longing to run free,
and the determination
that should the opportunity arise,
whoosh,
they will be gone…

(Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves)

I have been camping alone in the wild, yes as a woman, for around twenty years now. It is not just that I enjoy it — it is an actual need within me. Like food and oxygen, my aliveness is sourced directly from the freedom I feel when alone on the land. Some people don’t understand it, and I am often asked incredulously, “Aren’t you scared??” or given the wary command “Be careful.” They say it from a place of genuine concern, but something about it ignites a particular burning glint in my eyes. I feel myself flex invisible claws most of the world cannot see.

I have certainly experienced fear while camping alone (mainly of the two-legged species). But being too careful in my life, too cautious, has gotten me into way more trouble than camping alone ever has. By trouble I mean it led to a version of me who was compliant, polite, and terrified of upsetting anyone. Domesticated, civilized, obedient. Over time we formulate a specific, self-designed set of rules for how to be loved and accepted by other humans. This habitual tampering of our deepest longings is how we gradually become utterly predictable, unsatisfied with our existence, and disconnected from the instinctual electric currents of our wild ecosystems.

The human hyper-domestication of Self feels a bit like our survival instincts gone haywire. Being utterly predictable is like holding yourself in captivity, and is also perhaps the surest way to get yourself eaten alive. In the wild, although there are constant patterns and cycles in place, everything is dependent on creative spontaneity in order to survive. In the case of humans, our level of complacency and curated sameness feels like having our souls devoured by a systemic denial of our instincts. This is why we feel so lonely and disconnected from each other and the wild lands. Our spontaneous, whole-bodied participation is needed in order to resurrect our ecological belonging.

A couple of weekends ago I drove across the desert to visit a wolf sanctuary. I camped alone in the forest nearby, and could hear the wolves and wolfdogs howling every hour or so all night long. While at the sanctuary, I got to meet dozens of the wild canids in residence there. The human who was introducing me to these beings was in intimate relationship with all of them, and was able to tell me their individual stories as well as describe each of their individual personalities.

The canids at the sanctuary are wolves as well as mid and high content wolfdogs — meaning they have mostly wolf DNA with a smaller percentage of domesticated dog genetics (…where the two worlds touch). I was surrounded by highly wolfy energy, saturated in a healing symphony of unbridled howls and growls. Golden eyes gleamed at me through chainlink fence. Sharp teeth collided with mine, as I received the unthinkable honor of wolf kisses (it is considered quite rude in wolf culture to not let someone lick your teeth).

Inside the enclosures with them was another world… one that belonged to them. Some bravely approached me only for a brief sniff before darting behind a tree to watch me. Some walked right up to me with laser beam eye contact and licked my face, or “scent rubbed” me, which is a wolf hug. There were some who had no desire for human affection (a trait difficult for humans to grasp). There were also quite a few I wasn’t able to meet inside their enclosures, and there was a reason for that.

“He’s unpredictable,” the caretaker told me, as a huge black wolf gazed at me through the fence.

He had no dog genetics at at all, only wolf, and looked as though he had just emerged from one of the packs in Yellowstone. I smiled at him gently and saw lightning flash across his eyes. He was intensely aware of every single thing around him, smelling and hearing layered intricacies of worlds imperceptible to me. His caretaker said quietly, “He has the most beautiful howl of all.”

The most beautiful howl. I felt tears in my eyes as I caught that glimmer of the black wolf’s soul.

The word unpredictable was used to describe many other wolfdogs at the sanctuary, and the most unpredictable ones were the pens I was not able to enter. But I learned that unpredictable does not necessarily mean they are dangerous or aggressive — the word simply explains how unlikely a wild animal is to conform to human social norms. And I love them madly for it.

I have a deep admiration for the unruly spirit, which might be why I gravitate toward wolves as well as stray and feral dogs. A friend once said to me, “Your dogs aren’t very obedient.” I don’t think she meant it as a compliment, but it made me feel as though I had wildly succeeded at being human. All animals, domesticated or not, are unbreakably interconnected with untamable worlds we cannot see, and deserve to be honored for that.

One beautiful wolf girl, who by DNA content was all wolf, came ecstatically bounding up to the fence to greet me, tail wagging and eyes beaming. I asked why we weren’t going inside the enclosure to meet her, since she was clearly so friendly, and I was told that she, too, was unpredictable, but in her own way: Her affection was so wild and boundless that it could be interpreted by humans as aggression. Wolf kisses are often peppered with toothy nips, wolf hugs can easily become a full body takedown. A more domesticated canid learns the rules of what is acceptable affection and what is not, but a very wild being will not simply “learn” to deny their instincts. This would be the denial of their own soul.

I was particularly delighted by this kind of unpredictability — a wolf-like rapture that makes us want to devour this world, because it is just that delicious. What kind of rules might you be willing to break, in order to let yourself express the fullness of your instinctual love for the world? Remembering: the most unpredictable wolf is the one with the most beautiful voice of all.

Perhaps that which we define as unpredictable or untamable is equal to that which has not yet severed its connection to the wild soul. We all contain remnants of DNA coded with that creative freedom. Mythopoetically, the wolf is the archetypal symbol of the wild feminine. The wolf represents the instinctual part of us that knows exactly how to take care of this planet, in a way that honors death and gives way to collective flourishing. The wolf’s cosmopoetic gift is known as the trophic cascade within ecosystems, wherein all worlds thrive by the grace of their presence (watch: How Wolves Change Rivers. I still cry every time).

When the US colonial settlers brutally exterminated the native gray wolf population alongside the horrific genocide of the indigenous humans, wasn’t this an attempt to eradicate the unpredictable, uncontainable wild soul emanating from Earth, and from ourselves? In a lecture I attended recently by wild canid advocate Dan Flores, he referred to this attempted erasure as the “colonial treatment.” It is the fear-based drive to claim power over what is mysterious and untamable inside us. This competitive, tyrannical force is very much alive in our world today, and is perpetuated by the way we engage with (or are taught to oppress) our own hearts.

The vilification of wolves continues in the US to this day. Wolves mirror to humans our inability to dominate the wild force of nature: they remind us of our fear of death, and we have persecuted them for it. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, all of these are byproducts of the human superiority complex, in an attempt to maintain the illusion of safety through domination and sameness. How we treat wolves, the human female body (and the feminine in us all), and indigenous and marginalized humans is equal to our level of willingness to protect and honor the land as a living being— A mother who gives birth to an endless diversity of life forms, and who gives death with an equal measure of care.

What kind of world do we want to help create? What do we long to fiercely protect. I dream of wolves being permanently relisted under the Endangered Species Act, after having been removed from protections in 2020. I dream of a world where we aren’t quite so terrified of freeing the feminine soul, where the hardened line between the wild world and the domesticated world becomes a little more permeable. In her book “Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World,” Linda Hogan writes that the Anishnabe people believe humans descended from wolves, that we once spoke the same language, and that to this day are longing to recover that missing wild wolf soul in ourselves:

All of us are intent on seeing the wolves, or hearing them wail the song our ancestors knew the words to. We are looking for the clue to a mystery, a relative inside our own blood, an animal so equal to us that it reflects back what we hate and love about ourselves.

We have followed the wolves and are trying to speak across the boundaries of ourselves.

Inside the creative universe a wolf’s eyes burns an active willingness to love wildly, and a clear glimmer of of devastation. They understand the price of their tenderness. Wolves live incredibly challenging lives and grieve deeply for lost pack members, just a much as we do. The humans who hunt wolves for sport do not understand this. But the wolves will never surrender their love, and are not able to — because loving fiercely is who they are. So the wolves have always created a world of more love, of more unpredictable delights, more flashes of lightning blazing with rapture for the land. This is the job of all apex predators, including us: to protect this world, to roam free, and to help the earth flourish.

I helped feed the sanctuary wolves their breakfast the morning before I left. This entailed hurling giant frozen blocks of raw animal parts over their 10 foot tall fences. Whole fish, chunks of flesh, fur, bone. Seventy wild voices growled in ravenous joy. I heard more voices from far overhead, and saw two dozen ravens circling in hunger, in that ancient co-creative dance between the worlds of sky and earth.

Wolves inspire me to walk through my own life as a cosmopoet, to meet the present moment with fullness of heart, and respond from that place. Like the wolf, we must remember our responsibility to be here in a way that creates more worlds, more biodiversity and more freedom for self and others. To investigate the ways in which our embodied instincts, the phasing moon, the coyotes and the ravens are calling to us. To trust that we have gifts to share with them, and that those gifts are deeply longed for.

This writing is dedicated to a very beautiful wolfdog named Zephyr, who I fell in love with. Her radiant spirit was the kind that instantly made me long to be close to her, but she was shy. She watched me from a distance inside her enclosure, and I could see her excitement to meet me and also the shyness that held her back. After a long while of sitting on the ground quietly with my eyes closed, I felt it: on the exposed skin of my lower back, a soft, wet nose gently touched. Then silently she flew off into the tall grass.

Do you dare to be mischievous in the name of love? Zephyr does. That bright ripple of her bravery changed my heart for life, in her willingness to enter my world for curiosity’s sake. What strange delight might you be willing to touch your nose to, in order to help a new world flourish? As we walk forth into the dark folds of autumn, may we take Zephyr’s invitation to courageously approach that luminous threshold where the two worlds touch. And may we endlessly surprise ourselves.

Someone asked me this the other day, as though it were a casual question.

I responded instantly, without thinking— For humans to fall madly in love with all the other species, to remember all forms as equally intelligent. For humans to suddenly care, so much, that we are moved to protect the beauty we love.

I said it so quickly that tears sprang to my eyes. The longing was so simple and true, as though scripted into my heart. There are many other changes I dream of… but it’s not really about the details of the change itself, so much as the magnitude of your care surrounding it. Our tenderness for one thing is a doorway to our care for everything.

Isn’t this world a co-creative, co-arising landscape? Isn’t this the great ecological gift of humanity, our power to imagine a new way, and to dream it into being? To transform our despair into active care, this is how we belong. The human heart is its own creative universe, an imaginative wellspring. We create our world by loving it.

What would you change? Listen to the first thought that comes. It is a golden thread to your irreplaceable beauty on this planet. Don’t ever underestimate the power of that thread.

The Way It Is by William Stafford

There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

I saw it in the clouds the other evening. At the flourishing heights of the great arc of summer, I glimpsed the other side— the inevitable descent, off in the distance but there it was. Just when I had begun to think that the flowering might unfold forever, a group of clouds passed overhead with messages of a great change coming.

The wild world has always reminded us not to get too attached to these physical forms. Last week I was reading about NASA’s imaging of white dwarf stars, which are dying suns that at one time are thought to have supported whole solar systems. After a star goes through its dying process, it continues to glow softly— for billions of years— despite being technically dead. For a long time astronomers speculated that planets could not survive the death of their parent star (yes, the sun is our “parent star” in space terms). But in newer images, dying stars have been found with a lone planet left still orbiting them, even as their sun slowly fades into darkness. The poetry of this image shattered my heart forever. Isn’t our whole universe made of these tender farewells, and the love that abides beyond form?

Every year when the first frost nears and the last hummingbird voice rings out in farewell, my heart winces with the thought, I hope I loved them well enough. And I mean all of them, the whole collective of summer people. Gone in a glimmer. As Jack Kornfield once said during a talk, Because in the end, what matters? Did I love well? What beauty do we leave behind? The beauty he was referring to is not a physical offering, but the lingering perfume of our presence. The same way a star continues to glow even after it has died.

Herein lies the great work of my life, of all life. To love this world well, now. To try not to miss the precious moments of tenderness and awe that flicker in between the busy stream of thoughts we call our lives. I am stalking, with fang-toothed focus, that subtle space between each thought, where the intelligence of the heart can speak.

[the luminous pause]

In receiving that news from the August clouds, I felt a flash of energy that felt equal parts terror and thrilling enchantment. The warm, bright flowering reality I had just begun to settle into was on its way to dissolving back into the dark firmament of soil. Our lives are made of these whirlpools of unraveling, in great losses like death as well as smaller, daily griefs. When we experience a loss of any kind, we enter uncharted territory of change. These transitory periods are a concept described in Vajrayana Buddhism as the bardos, a word that means “gap”. It denotes a transitional time, the open space that exists between known realities.

In its traditional definition, the bardos are a series of intermediate states that the consciousness passes through after death, but a teacher of mine recently used the word to describe any disorienting transition or upheaval in our lives. An experience of change that feels groundless, or losing grip on any prior definition of your identity, could be defined as a bardo. Our days are full of small transitory pauses, as we move from one thing to the next. Most importantly, these expansive gaps live in the space between each passing thought. It is just that we are often so caught up in our flow of thoughts that we don’t pay attention to that utterly subtle, vast open space between.

The most fascinating thing about these gaps is how wildly generative they are, despite how uncomfortable and empty the vastness can feel. If you’ve experienced the death of a loved one, then you know how groundless this space is. And yet all creative potentiality and heart intelligence is hiding in that space. That’s what I felt when I looked up at the peculiar slants of evening light against those prophetic clouds the other night— I felt the impending death of summer, and also a sudden rush of everything that becomes possible when we let go of what we thought we knew. Like opening a door and letting in a fresh, strangely familiar breeze of possibility.

[subtle teachings in the emerald leaves]

We spend so much time trying to become things, rather than admitting that our real gift is given when we finally come apart. Late summer gives us a special opportunity to practice being present with the undoing. To enter the stream of subtle sensations approaching us, that which is utterly true. And to do it now, while the world is still fragrant and flowering with ten thousand hidden messages being handed to you.

This is how we prepare our hearts for the elusive, formless dreamscapes of the unknown, by practicing being present with the subtleties now while they appear in bright form. The feelings of love and care you exchange with the world, this is what stays with you when all forms have dissolved. This is what we can study now.

A teacher of mine recently spoke of secret, ancient teachings being hidden in the fluttering leaves and the voices of the mountain streams. That our ancestors, the elemental spirits, Gaia herself, and even our own soul, have hidden messages in the land for us to discover. Like a treasure hunt. Oh, how delighted I was by this idea. Can we become still enough to receive these messages, engaged enough to go seek them out? This is what it means to tend to the subtle body of Self and Earth: to let the land help slow the stream of your mind, so that you can feel the creative luminosity that lives in the space between your own thoughts. Within that pregnant silence lives an endless stream of poetry and song.

Cultivating heartful presence is perhaps the greatest act of ecological restoration humans can participate in. To sit, breathe, and allow who we are and what we have to be enough. To watch the world approach us with gifts beyond form, to feel the creative intelligence of the wild world speak through us. The more we experience this, the more we will be able to gently dismantle the modern human definition of the word intelligence, which centers completely around human intellect and the success of our individual identities, and has led to the destruction of our ecosystems and each other. There is an older kind of intelligence here that generates all the beauty we see, the cycles of dissolving and the undying love. It is an utterly free and poetic intelligence, born from a small seed of creative possibility. Our heart is that seed.

To tend the subtle body is to become an apprentice to your own mysterious heart. Are we willing to become students of not-knowing, so that everything becomes possible? The space between is all about understanding our own love. Studying this space transforms everything into poetry.

[how to be a poet / attention + affection]

I don’t actually know how to be a poet, in the literary sense. “How to Be a Poet” is the name of one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems. It was the original inspiration for this newsletter, and I have shared it down below in closing. The wonderful thing is that there are as many different kinds of poets and poetry styles as there are species on this planet. And new ones continue to emerge.

Every day I wake up before dawn to drink tea by candlelight. I sit quietly and scribble things into my journal before pulling a random poetry book off the shelf. Adrienne Rich, Rainer Maria Rilke, Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, Hafiz, Diane di Prima, Louise Glück, William Stafford, Mirabai, I could list their names for pages and I love them like grandparents… I am so thankful to these dedicated students of the heart. That’s what a poet really is. All of them remind us, over and over, about the necessity of cultivating our attention. A poem is a pause, a whirling timeless moment, that just barely captures a glimpse of an uncapturable truth. Poets listen deeply enough to hear the subtle waves and whispers that the rest of the world is too busy to hear.

I have written at least a poem a day for over a decade, and 99% of those poems came from either sitting in silence or walking in quiet listening. I can’t say that I wrote any of the poems myself, because it always feels as though someone invisible handed them to me. There is a clear knowing that they do not come from my own mind. And even though I cherish the little poems that arrive, it really isn’t about the poems at all. It’s about their spacious origin, and the careful, honest attention that connects me to that heartspace.

This is not about how to write a poem, but how to be a poet. This is not about producing something, rather about embodying the Self who sees the entire world through the open lens of the heart. This means that anyone can do it. You don’t have to call yourself an artist, a writer, or anything at all — to simply be a human in relationship with the world is to be a creative force. It is purely about your way of being here. If you happen to end up with a poem or a piece of art, consider it a heavenly by-product of your heartfelt presence. If we get caught up in the product, we miss the next message flying toward us in the changing clouds. The point is to keep paying attention to the more subtle stream of happenings of right now.

Attention is the practice of seeing the suchness of things, to train yourself to witness the true nature of things from the perspective of your own heart. For any creative process, we must being by cultivating our attention and our comfort with quiet listening. When we witness the truth of things as they are, it is a natural progression for feelings of tenderness to arise. This tenderness has a name: it is affection. And affection tends to speak in poetry.

Both attention and affection are equally important states to practice, and they naturally give way to each other. In a world so saturated in separateness, mental distraction, dullness and apathy, I think cultivating these states is a special sort of kindling for the human heart. We have so much unexpressed love to give this planet, and we easily forget that our affectionate gaze is a profoundly healing balm for this world.

If you need a real life teacher of attention and affection, look to the wild lands and the animals. I recently saw a scientific study that aimed to prove whether or not dogs actually love their humans (as if this was ever remotely in question…). Ultimately the study found that, in terms of neurotransmitters, dogs regularly hug their humans with their eyes. When they look at us, it feels as good for them as a hug, and they are constantly sending us love just by looking at us. Isn’t this the essence of poetry, of art, of cultivating the creative landscape of the heart? To hug the world with your eyes.

If you have ever watched a dog sit quietly in a forest, you have seen what true attention looks like. They innately attune themselves to the most subtle nuances of scent and sound. This depth of listening and engagement with the world gives way to a natural expanse of loving. Let’s never forget that dogs are the creative gift that came out of the wolf’s love for humans. This is the ultimate example of how alchemical our own affection can be, creating a world of even tighter bonds of harmony and connection. Generating new dreams for the Earth.

To be affected means to be moved or touched by something, to let the world touch your heart, to be so inspired by it that you are moved to tell about it, or to create something. Isn’t this how we create the beauty of this world? By loving it? Affection for our world is the ultimate creative act — it turns everything into poetry.

And as it is with all sincere loving, there will be grief. Bringing our full attention to this world inevitably unearths all its most tender, blazing truths. Grief is one of the primary messengers of the creative heart, showing us exactly what we care about, and just how much. If you begin to practice presence and affection and are met with grief, know that you have opened the door to your own personal, wildly precious poetic expression.

This notion of affection found me several years ago, in this Wendell Berry poem “How to Be a Poet.” Under the title of the poem, Berry wrote in parentheses: to remind myself. I find this little note so reassuring, coming from such a great poet. We are all in this together, all equally practicing the art of being here. The question is how much are we willing to devote ourselves to tending these subtle states, to experiment with this kind of stillness and intimacy.

So here is the Wendell Berry poem for you. I have read it out loud with some guest appearances by hummingbird voices in the background, as well as typed it below. I hope you find it as nurturing as I do.

How to Be a Poet, by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon affection,
reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

You might experiment making a similar list to Berry’s, with your own personal directives for living heartfully. What small reminders might help you return to your heart’s conversation with everything? Maybe borrow Berry’s note at the top of the page, to remind myself.

Let’s keep tending the subtle heart, and resurrect co-creative joy with other species — let us dream of poetic ecosystems that include humans. I will continue to believe in our ability to reawaken an ecology of miracles, by way of our willingness to simply be present. Our attention gives way to flourishing.

thank you so much for being here,
to bear witness to what
my heart wants to say.

see you in the soft clouds and floating seeds,
Kate

the little space within the heart
is as great as the vast universe.
the heavens and the Earth are there,
and the sun and the moon and the stars.
fire and lightning and winds are there,
and all that is now,
and all that is not.

— the upanishads

[ the wild snapdragons ]

One evening last week as the waxing moon rose, I set out on foot to make my annual June pilgrimage to visit the most unfathomable flowering of the native wild snapdragons. It is a hidden spot, miles from my house and far away from any roads, and I cannot believe it exists. I can’t believe they exist. What kind of heaven would create such beauty?

I sat with the aromatic rising towers of shimmering pink fairy bubbles, gazing into their brilliant faces. Inhaling their intoxicating scent of something like strawberry candy handcrafted by pixies. And I was surrounded by the most ardent, devoted lovers of the wild snapdragons, the bumblebees and the hummingbird moths. Everything was warm, buzzing, humming, chanting yes, alive and vibrant, and as I sat there surrounded by effervescent perfumed blooms, I imagined myself a fellow pollinator. My pilgrimage on foot to visit these flowers was no different than the visitations of the bumblebees. I, too, had travelled there to receive the heavenly nectar of a most magnificent flower. I sat happily among my winged kin, my fellow pilgrims.

Then a hummingbird moth flew right up to my face, and softly touched the tip of my nose, tasting me with her long, spiraled proboscis— as though she fully expected to find nectar within me. Suddenly, in that timeless flash of a moment, I saw myself as indistinguishable from a flower. And not just any flower - the most fragrant, royal miracle of a wildflower.

In that moment, I was both the pollinator and the pollinated. I was the nectar, and the sipper of nectar. The infinity dance between the hummingbird moth and the wildflowers had invited me into a radiant, multilayered world in which we are all things at once. A continuance of poetic expression surrounded me and, in equal measure, emanated from me. A single chime in a vast sea of creative potentiality.

I wandered home through the forest in a trance, feeling altered and enchanted. I felt my own multiplicities, dissolving into oneness while also understanding the precious individuality of my own soul. Everything around me was threaded with love, and I was the golden needle. I felt a longing to sing.

How could all of this been stirred within me, just from a simple moment of sitting with the flowers? The answer was both elusive and clear. I was in the presence of the most pervading, life-giving force there is, the indwelling spark in every human heart, stone, flower, bird and mountain. Because I had offered a moment of my own loving presence to the flowers, in exchange I was given a profound gift: I had been touched by the devas.

[ the shining ones ]

Just tune into nature until you feel the love flow. That is your arrow into the deva world. It does not matter if there is a message or not, it is the state which counts. Always it is your state that nature responds to, not what you say, not what you do,
but what you are.

—The Devas, as spoken to Dorothy Maclean at the Findhorn Foundation

Deva is a Sanskrit word meaning shining one, and radiant, divine, celestial, heavenly presence or being of light. The pantheons of Hindu (and some Buddhist) deities are referred to as devas- the archetypal, mythical and highly intricate embodiments of the gods and goddesses. They are all considered emanations of one universal divine spark responsible for creating our world. References to the devas dates back to at least 1500 BCE in the collections of sacred Sanskrit scriptures and hymns known as the Vedas.

More recently, in the late 1800’s, members of the Theosophical society in Britain adopted this word, when they realized it explained the divine, conscious forces in the elemental nature spirits they revered. Their Celtic and Druidic ancestry was rooted in honoring the ancient stone people, the sacred holy wells, tree spirits, fairies, gnomes, selkies, dragons and leprechauns. All of these words simply acknowledge the consciousness, the presence, and the mystery in nature and all things.

The original founders of the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland were some of the first accounts of humans gardening in direct conversation with the devas. They started by attempting to grow vegetables on barren ground that was nearly pure sand, and it was such an impossible feat that they soon began asking the land itself for guidance. They consulted with the plant devas and elemental spirits before doing anything to the land, from pruning a bush to digging a new bed. Everything they did was in partnership with the land as a community of conscious forces. As a result, both the garden and the humans thrived in miraculous ways. It was a living experiment in co-creative stewardship between human and Gaian consciousness, and their garden was a wild success.

And so the Sanskrit word grew into somewhat of an occult “new age” term, used to explain this shimmering and conscious beneficent force — of divine intelligence and soul — present in every single aspect of life. Yes, including us.

The devas as nature spirits make up the collective of elemental beings, landscape angels, terrestrial keepers, the protective “landlords” of our planet, the wildly creative etheric architects of our Earth. Often called the hidden folk or the little people, they are the luminous forces responsible for creating, preserving, and animating this multilayered rainbow of worlds that are all around us, as well as within us.

Even though the devas create and oversee the structure of our world, they themselves are not bound by matter, rather they are the energy, the spirit, the dream that moves through each thing and ties us all together. They are creative consciousness itself, protecting the sanctity and beauty of our world with unstoppable love.

And they are our own force of unstoppable love — the most creative force on Earth.

[ an allurement to light ]

Why was I able to have such a profound mystical experience just from sitting with a flower? It is the same reason that I love the plants so much: the devic forces are particularly easy to witness in photosynthetic beings. Plants are literally made of cosmic light, and are tended by the elemental forces in very visible ways. The shining, radiant original force emanates profusely from the green and flowering ones, reflecting it right back at us. Placing literal seeds of cosmic creativity into the palms of our hands.

Some plants are even heliotropic, a word meaning “sun turn”, where a plant’s reproductive parts (the flower) will literally move to track the sun across the sky throughout the day. It is a mystical experience to witness a plant’s devotion to its source through this visible movement. Our most famous heliotrope is of course the great sunflower.

While not all plants are heliotropic, almost all of them are phototropic, meaning they orient their growth toward the source of light. Their connection with our holy star is so innate that they will literally turn, twist and stretch their bodies to find the sun. Isn’t this the same longing we are all born with? To return to that tiny, inner spark of light in the deepest core of our hearts. This is the devic gate, where all wisdom and inspiration flows through us, like a river of colored lights.

We are more plantlike than we think. Studies have found that the human retina has phototropic mechanisms — meaning, just like the plants, we biologically orient toward that which shines. I think this instinct goes far beyond the retina, and that there is something in our bones that, like a moth, is drawn to light. It brings to mind an image of ancestors gathered around one fire together, surrounded by the darkness of a world not yet lit by modern electricity. To gather around the fire was to collectively orient, from a cellular longing, toward the mysterious source of our own existence.

Our allurement to light is actually an inner aching for re-enchantment with the mystery we sense beyond our human form. To remove the veil of separation between us and the miraculous beauty of the land, to illuminate the unseen web connecting us to every single thing. To become plantlike, able to radiate the shining dream of the Earth just through our way of being here.

before dawn, an angel
(a mosquito)
flew straight into the flame
of my candle, and died there.

in returning to heaven,
she extinguished the flame,
and the room went dark
with her death.

then a strange scent rose
which smelled just like
my own hair burning.

but it was her wings.

which god was it anyway
who decided to make us all
out of this same exact
spirit matter,

and then invited us to appear
in an endless myriad of forms,
to puzzle us
into thinking
we are any different
from each other.

(“allurement to light”)

[ to protect the beauty we love ]

Where can we experience this luminary presence of the devas? How can we connect with the nature spirits and the elemental beings, on a planet that is so ripe with devastation and human suffering? Because the earth keepers abide by the foundational principle that their relationship to humans is interdependent, in order for us to “meet” them, we must first work to restore and revive our own interspecies relations.

Indigenous peoples of Earth had, and have, very clear practices for tending their relationships with the land spirits. Every single human on Earth comes from a lineage of people who made offerings and enacted rituals to honor the devas, as a mandatory exchange for the gift of life. Much of human activity causes disturbances to the same landscapes that the devas work so tirelessly to protect. Even the simple turning over of a stone can uproot an entire world that had been tended by the soil beings for centuries.

Our ancestors (and many indigenous people still today) understood the importance of continually renewing our vows to the land spirits. This is a relationship that must, must, be tended with care and respect. This is ultimately for our own benefit, as our awe and gratitude are the doorways into our own creative heart and ecological belonging.

To interact with Gaia as a conscious holy being, to make offerings to the mountains, sing songs to the river, write poetry, make art — especially in times of collective sorrow or suffering— is to engage in acts of ecological restorative justice. By acknowledging any harm our species may have done, by refusing to look the other way, by showing up with a reverent heart and asking how we might work together better, this is to ensure a flourishing future for humans as fellow caretakers of this planet.

Our relationship with the devas must begin with the re-enchantment of ourselves. So much of the ecological harm caused by humans has come from the denial and neglect of our imaginative hearts. The truth is that the land spirits tend our world in a state of wild creativity, and they are longing for us to join them in co-creative dreaming. The reconciliation, the great restoration we can offer Earth is to allow ourselves to use our imaginations in order to create something— anything. It is not about making a perfect offering, or striving to receive validation from other humans for it. True creativity is entirely about self-liberation and experimentation, and really has very little to do with making something to look at or to show others. It is in the actual experience of creating that our heart can finally speak, and from that place might receive a mysterious reply.

It is in the singing of a simple song that comes to you out of nowhere. Walking just a little bit more fluidly, more freely in a way that feels like you. Making a colorful salad made from locally grown vegetables, for the pure joy of it. In fact our food is one of the most ancient palettes for creative exploration and accessing gratitude. Creativity feels good. The devas are benevolent, generative forces, carrying out their work with supreme joy and care. What can you offer back to them with this very same spirit, which is also your true essence?

What if the most creative thing we can offer isn’t a “thing” at all? As my teacher Kat Harrison said once in a plant spirit class, “sometimes the greatest gift you can give a plant is a moment of your presence.” Your most divine offering is to generate a presence of care for this world. To grant agency to that which appears inanimate. To move through your day with the awareness that you are both the seer and the deeply seen. This is what I would call co-creative presence, wherein we cultivate a state of being that makes space for the miraculous. Space for the wind to whisper love spells into your ear, for birdsong to become hymns for transformation. The best part about this kind of presence is that it requires very little effort. Isn’t it true that the most beautiful poetry, the greatest revelations and inspirations are born from sitting still and doing absolutely nothing? Simply let the world do its holy work on your senses. A perfect summer assignment.

When we tend a place with our creative presence, over time, we help the land give birth to new depths of consciousness. Brand new landscape devas are born. This is why it matters to be devoted to one place, to return often to sit, sing or make offerings, to tend the relationship like you would a best friend or a great love. We are the dream of Gaia, dreaming Gaia awake. We protect this world by loving it.

In closing, in reverence for the origin of the Sanskrit word deva, I want to share my profound love and honoring of the Hindu deity, Sarasvati devi. A brilliant shining heart, she is the goddess of creativity, poetry, wisdom and music, of flowing rivers, of the clouds that swirl and turn to nourishing rain which brings all creative flourishing. Sarasvati is the deity of learning, of the longing of the soul for new and broader illuminations, of beautiful, true speech and creative flow. I call on her often, and see her presence everywhere in the great flowering song of summer.

Dear Readers,
Together we are braiding a living tapestry of interwoven love stories, between ourselves and coyote, between moon and river, soil and star, insect and plant, pine tree and chickadee, all arising from the vast fertile expanse of the human heart. May we all remember the power of our own human love, a force so great it is clearly here to heal this aching world.

Hello loving two-leggeds out there,

How does it feel to be a human being right now? What it is like to experience the world through the body of this particular species? I ask because lately, I have felt myself only part human. Two months ago my dog Gaia passed away, and I have sensed a part of me went with her — carried into the invisible spool of light that everything is woven from.

Death itself is the dark web that makes our world. The starry network of microorganisms beneath our feet, turning graves into birthing grounds with an unstoppable force of love. Death asks us to die to our own resistance to mattering, to surrender any conviction that we are here on some sort of insular, self-serving mission. When a loved one dies, suddenly we know what it feels like to love something we cannot see. To love it just as strongly, and often with even more force, than we were able to love them in physical form. Isn’t this the great mystery?

Even the word human begins to loosen its grip in the face of death. Everything becomes porous, stirred up, and strangely undefinable, as we unravel who we thought we were in order to participate in a new more-than-human, fully alive, ever-widening world lineage.

In being with Gaia through the last days of her life, I became closely aware of the thread that tied the two of our hearts together. I could literally feel this thread pulling my heart toward hers the closer she got to death — as though part of me was preparing to make the journey with her.

When someone we love dies, they carry our love with them into the formless, like a thread of spider silk. This thread does not ever break. As lonely and as disorienting as grief is, death actually makes us belong to the world more. Those of us left behind find ourselves connected to a strange new realm of unspeakable mystery, reorientation, and the stunning humility that is born from devastation. Heartbreak has always been the great teacher of falling apart in order to expand.

interspecies love as medicine for the Earth

One of the strangest parts about losing an animal companion is the assumption by other humans that it is somehow far less devastating than the death of a human. Many humans even feel offended by the suggestion that an animal life could be as valuable as their own. I experienced this phenomenon personally in Gaia’s passing, in some cases receiving condolences that felt shockingly casual. This is through no fault of the individual human, rather it is the result of a dire ecocultural fracturing amongst our kind.

I witnessed a widespread human forgetting of our birthright to engage in passionate, heartbreaking, life-altering interspecies love stories. We have so rigidly segregated our love to exclude those who are different from us, both human and otherwise. The reality is that we need the love and guidance of the other species to help us remember how to love ourselves and our own people. This truth feels like one important key to the current relational predicament between humans, the land, and the estimated 8.7 million+ other species (and uncounted and unidentified myriad of other conscious forces) who share this planet with us. Yes, we are just one of those species. Just one.

collective mattering

“There is no heirarchy in the realm of death.” One morning after Gaia passed away, these words echoed through me in the winter garden. I was flattened by grief, and it was a death festival out there in the garden, a tangled mess of seed heads and decomposing plant stalks. I felt how in death and grief, all is leveled to common ground, revealed as mattering equally. Sooner or later, we will all return to these shared origins, where all hierarchies and empires dissolve into dust. In the meantime, we have a lot of dreaming to do. And a lot of listening to trees and rocks.

as ten thousand things
rise and fall,
rise and fall,

just witness
their return
to the root.

(Lao Tzu, the Tao Te Ching)

The truth is that Gaia’s death broke my heart more than any human death ever has. She loved me with a ferocity and a freedom that feels nearly extinct to humanity. Animals are masters of love. They have not forgotten their place in Earth’s living web of kinship, and by connecting with them we begin to heal the self-exiled human heart. The innate mission of all other species is to balance the wild order of things, taking only what they need, and never holding back their love for this life. These are the lifeways, and love-ways, humans are starving for.

resurrecting our Gaian intelligence

I love humans so much. We are magnificently complex, wildly creative, hilarious, loving and intelligent beings. But unfortunately, we have also declared ourselves to be vastly more intelligent than literally every other species on the planet — except for those who are most similar to us, in which case we admit that they do have a level of cognitive merit. How can we feel like we truly belong from this posture of superiority?

The issue is that our definition of intelligence is based solely on what our own human intelligence looks like — anything different is automatically considered “less” intelligent. But as interspecies communicator Penelope Smith explains, we are all spirit animating a particular physical form. Our individual version of intelligence is expressed through whichever physicality we inhabit. I am expressing intelligence in the way that my human body allows me to. A songbird, in her exquisite winged body, expresses her intelligence in the ways her avian form knows well: in intricate song, in expert nest-building, in laser-beam insect hunting and her reading of migratory star maps.

Humans are measuring universal intelligence against the physical capabilities of our own species. As Penelope Smith says, if you or I had been born into a bird’s body, instead of designing and decorating our house, we would instead know how exactly to build a nest out of twigs, leaves and fur. It is by no means a matter of greater or lesser intelligence: it is simply a difference in physical form.

A basic definition of intelligence is the ability to observe our environment, and to then adapt based on our observations. But humans have largely stopped paying attention to the way the ecosystem of our body interacts with the ecosystem of our surroundings. In Penelope Smith’s discourse on interspecies intelligence, she says that a true sign of intelligence is a willingness to study the ways of others who are different than you, and to allow yourself to change in response.

Oh how I love this word, willingness. Willingness as an emblem of human intelligence, a willingness to be open to the wisdom of the Others. Are we willing? To listen? To be wrong? To let a bird teach us things? To fall madly in love with a tree? Are we willing to imagine an entirely different way? This is the intelligence the Earth dreams through us. It is the soft blazing yes at the core of your heart.

an ecological kinship

In a recent class, our teacher Judy said that the best barometer for our human work is to examine the outcome. In what ways is our work, our way of being in the world, creating a ripple of benefit to others? To truly be part of an ecological community means that your actions have a beneficial effect for not only yourself and your family, but for a myriad of other beings who share your ecosystem. This is of course where humans have diverted from the path of ecological belonging. Some of our ways are even causing great harm to landscapes, and the permanent extinction of other species.

It makes complete sense to me that we are walking around heartbroken — because in our bones, we remember exactly how much we love this planet. And human love, yours and mine, is one of the most powerful forces on planet Earth. We are all carriers of this gift.

I think the real task of human kinship is to restore the voices to as many different other-than-human beings as we possibly can. This will first require us to re-learn an intricacy of listening and sensitive presence that can only be taught to us by the other-than-human beings. This is the great work of our time, and though full of heartbreak and despair, it is also a wild delight to become an apprentice to this world’s beauty.

Perhaps the most loving, restorative, and radical act of human ecological participation is this: a willingness to simply be curious about the ways of the Others. To use our magical human imaginations to kindle love stories of interbeingness. It is so much easier than we think: say good morning to the Sun, and be curious about what happens next. Let birdsong echo through your bones. Sit with your cat in silence, just being. Listen to the wind, and really let it speak. Study the movements of squirrel and snail, and notice what it evokes in your own body. Visit with the stone people. When a child points at something in nature, stop everything and look at the miracle.

Become a witness to the unfathomable diversities that surround you, the worlds within worlds within worlds.

Your attention is the thread that weaves the moonlight to the midnight lake.

Your love is what brings this starry world to life.

Last summer I was camping alone in the mountains, as I often do. I go in solitude to meet myself in the bare truth, to study beauty and review everything I’ve been up to, and to renew my vows to what I love. I like to imagine I am a detective of my own becoming, hunting clues and tracking patterns, watching for hints of what might be next. The heart is our original map, full of all the directions we’ve been seeking… when we’re brave enough to follow. For me, it takes being alone to return to that map.

But as you may have experienced yourself, aloneness can be a sharp, disorienting place, even downright unbearable. I usually experience the first solitary day as a softening, an encounter with what feels like heaven — the joy to be back with myself and the Earth as interwoven beloveds. But by the next morning, I begin the inevitable descent into everything I’ve been ignoring in my heart. At least now, after many years of practice with hermitage and solitude in the wild, I know to expect this stage of wretched self-reconciliation.

And so day two came and there I was, surrounded by incredible beauty, in utter despair. Misery, even. I began writing in my journal about all my heartbreaks, my failures, the misguided diversions from my path, the floods of anger and the despair at having to be a human. I could call it wallowing, but it was an honoring of truth.

I sat there on a sun-warmed river rock, gratuitously stewing in my own wild mess. I studied the scribbled lines in my journal like animal tracks, re-reading the last few untamed sentences I had written. And then, there it was. The truth I never could have found without my own heartache as the only guide forward. In tears I scrawled new words onto a fresh blank page:

could it be possible…?
that every single failure
was a declaration of my bravest truth.
what if what I thought was a collapse
was in fact
just me, wilding succeeding
at loving myself.

Many years ago I told a similar story to a guide named Ray, sharing that I felt as though I was continually losing my way on my own path. I was positive that I was thoroughly “messing it up.” I will never forget the glint in Ray’s eyes as he said to me, “If this is failure, then, God… I hope we all fail. I hope we all get this lost. Because what I hear is the story of a beautiful unfolding.” He emphasized those last two words with so much sincerity, they still echo within me. A beautiful unfolding. A wild success.

This was the turning point, almost ten years ago, when I realized my strange and daunting new task, one that would surely take me the rest of my life to understand: To fall in love with the parts of me that seemed to be hopeless and lost. The parts that felt like misfits, who had no sensible plan whatsoever. I began to sense a deeper story living within me, a beautiful story that threaded me into a web of kinship with everything. The story of my own life.

What if the “wrong turns” in your life, the missed opportunities, the assumed failures in the eyes of self or others, were actually your most courageous declarations of truth? What if you are already enough? Often, the things we think we aren’t doing enough of also tend to be clues to what we care about most. There is a deep instinctual knowing there, holding the keys to what you are truly hungry for.

As one Hafiz translation says, “don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly — let it cut more deep!” Our clearest knowing is interwoven with the pains we know most intimately. At the raw, molten center of the heart is the part of you that knows what it came here to find. In a world obsessed with healing, wellness, and fixing ourselves, are we able to hear our hearts breaking? What if instead, we listened carefully for the howls and wails of the wild voice within, the one that is wounded beyond repair. To let that forgotten instinct-song be loud, and become our brave guide on the path ahead.

What if we dear, tender humans, in all our striving,
our imperfections, our apparent catastrophes,
deep in our bones
already know
exactly what we’re doing here?

what if your own life,
just as it is,
is a love story,
heartbreaking and magnificent,
a miracle of becoming.
a beautiful unfolding.

a wild success.

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The other morning I sat in the dark, studying the day’s softest moments with the dawn stars, the halfmoon overhead, and candlelight. I love these beings and felt so held by them, a gentle embrace I could only return with my heart. That’s so beautiful, I thought. But then a sudden discomfort stirred within me. The word “beautiful” felt almost gritty, and like a stranger. I gazed into a dark corner of the room and was eclipsed by a shattering thought.

I couldn’t remember what beauty means to me.

My eyes widened and stung with tears. How could I have not noticed sooner? Once obsessed with beauty, making certain my life was filled to the brim with “it”, even giving my apothecary business the tagline wild beauty, it was the force and emblem around which I had based my whole identity and my life’s work.

I felt the loss in my heart, so I reached in there, feeling around in its dark velvet caverns, seeing if I could locate that precious gem. But the beauty I known was gone, as though it had died. In that moment of despair, my mind turned to our aching world right now, our broken hearts, the great loss of human life including the uncounted lives of other species, the poisoning of soil by chemical weapons. Ecocide. A war on the Earth’s heart.

A devastation so great, surely we are all meant to emerge from this transformed, barely recognizable. And in this great unraveling and re-membering, we will be invited to collectively redefine beauty, to actively dream it into being, in the face of inner and outer landscapes that have been obliterated.

Suddenly, there in silent dark, I felt an inquiry begin to creak open like a door. I could now hunt a more blazing truth, to radically redefine one of my favorite words in human language. And as curiosity stirred within me, as I sat still and opened to the unknown, I felt it: a glimmer in my heart. It was beauty.

Beauty is a revelatory force. In allowing a new definition of the word to arise, I was actually offering myself up to beauty’s original cause. To let beauty redefine me, to rewrite me, to speak through me with her shining voice of truth. Beauty is not an inanimate, claimable thing; it is conscious and ephemeral, and appears only through our open-hearted engagement with the world. Relationship is the birthing ground for beauty. Your interaction with this world is what makes it so unbearably beautiful.

Contrary to what we often think, beauty is invisible. Of course our eyes are an open gate through which beauty can reach for us. But our sight is conditional; what we see is dependent on our state of mind. What about the beauty we feel when our eyes are closed? When the spring wind comes? When we are rendered ecstatic by the scent of a flower? Or when music moves us to tears, or to dance? Beauty sends its messengers through the doors of all the senses. It also awakens places within us that are beyond sensual.

Somehow the mainstream definition of beauty has turned into a disoriented obsession with visual aesthetics. This is especially obvious on social media. In our genuine quest for love and acceptance, we have accidentally generated an increasing field of curation, comparison, editing, and sameness. We become attached to the identities we project out through our screens, and we begin to believe it is who we are. I feel this is a container far too small for the human soul, in all its shapeshifting beauty and mystery, to possibly fit into.

It is as though our human individuality, our true beauty, is becoming endangered. We are as afraid of our raw, unedited selves as we are of wolves. I worry that our fixation on editing ourselves is leading to an eradication of wildness, a dangerous planetary numbness.

How can we feel the unique wonders arising in own hearts when we are constantly wondering if who we are is good or “likable” enough? To hold ourselves up against a million mirrors of comparison, especially comparison to former versions of self, is to let the heart slowly wither.

But the wings of the heart can forever be resurrected.

heavenly glimmers

A man named Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley was born in the town right next to the one I grew up in, over a hundred years before me. His story is magical: he is the human who first discovered that, out of their endless infinities, no two snowflakes are alike. An impossible revelation, his gift to the world. He studied snowflakes obsessively from age 15 until he died, photographing more than five thousand different snowflakes in his lifetime… during a time long before digital cameras or iPhones.

Born into a Vermont farming family in 1865, from a young age he found himself called to a very different path than the rest of his family: he fell in love with the intricate glittering faces that are snowflakes. The passion was so great that he began studying them using a small microscope, drawing each individual ice crystal by hand. But he longed to capture even more detail, and bought a camera at the age of 17 with help from his parents. For a poor young farmer in the 1800’s, a camera was a truly miraculous manifestation. And so he began his life’s work, doing something that no one could understand.

While many people in northern Vermont feel the hardship of the long cold winters, Bentley was enamored with the frigid months: it meant he could be with his beloveds, the snowflakes. He did all of his work in an unheated, freezing cold room, the only suitable environment for snow crystals. He was following the call of something that mystified and delighted him beyond all logical sense. Snowflakes were surely part of his mythos, his soul purpose, and every time I read his story I feel inspired to live my own life with his same tireless devotion to what I love.

It is important to note that Snowflake Bentley carried out his work with the snowflakes alone, unnoticed, and certainly not paid, for almost twenty years. He remained quietly devoted to his work, photographing snowflake after snowflake despite being ridiculed by family and neighbors. This is what true love does to us, it makes us brave.

Then one day, in a moment surely orchestrated by the snowflakes themselves, Harvard University discovered his project and purchased every single one of his photographs. Then National Geographic featured his work. Then the New York Times. And now here I am writing about him, to you.

Snowflake Bentley spent his life as a solitary man, but I believe that he experienced one of the greatest love stories possible for humankind.

I have my own particular affinity with snowflakes, though I have only gazed at them with a bare eye. My love for them is in the way they sparkle in the morning light. In a blank scape of pure white, the land becomes an ecstatic sea of rainbows. Sometimes I will just sit in one spot for a long while, gently swaying back and forth, watching the colors dance. Realizing they are dancing me.

There are specific hues in the snow rainbows that particularly delight and allure me. Indigo, fuchsia, blazing gold. Why these certain colors? Our attractions guide us to remember the lost fragments of ourselves. When we find beauty, we are being shown a glimmer of who we are here to become. Like Rilke, Mary Oliver, Rumi and countless other poets have been telling us, our attention to the details around us is the way we encounter our own beauty.

Please remember this the next time you are gazing at something you find beautiful: this is a being you share things in common with. This is a member of your heart’s wild family. Catching a glimpse of beauty is a homecoming, a retrieval of the mystical Self we have longed to know.

What do you love about snow, or the clouds? What is it about your favorite mountain that calls you? When we talk about what we love, we magnify these forces in the world, like snowflakes under a microscope. It invites us into a state of rapture, and we remember our gratitude to be in the presence of such majesties. I dream of a world where we all speak out loud regularly, and in detail, about all the things we love.

Beauty is a silken ribbon flowing through you, and it is a dagger to the heart. Exquisite and excruciating, it ask us to courageously feel our place in the world. To turn toward the things that make our heart tremble. And in order to do this, we must dedicate ourselves to remembering, over and over, that who we are right now is exactly who the world has always longed for. Perfect, prismatic, strange and shining. Forever more than enough.

I pray that we all keep stalking the scent trail of what we love. That we let beauty stalk us back and redefine us, rewrite us, and crack us open into truer and wilder expressions of self. We are the snowflakes, the heavenly glimmers of beauty, unique and ephemeral, touching the world for just a moment with the profound gift of our love.

Here is a curious invitation to try writing your own living definition of the word beauty. To let it speak through you in as many ways as it wants. What does the feeling of beauty evoke within you? What beauty do you long to see? Maybe your definition wants to be painted, or danced, or whichever language your heart speaks in. Let your definition be nonsensical and full of your own wildest dreams for this planet.

I know that in writing this, I have never felt more in love with beauty, more dedicated to her cause, and sure that it has always been this world’s salvation.

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P.S. This poem gave itself to me at dawn today, as a companion to this writing.

beauty’s language

I want to say
what is true
and wild within me.

whatever arrived with me here,
or has found me in between,
must be spoken now.

this is the only task—

to set free
each thing waiting earnestly
within you,

to let your longings be born
like children
with soft fur
and bright eyes,
their mission as clear
and ancient as your own

here, like you, to become
an effervescent
fearless messenger
of the beauty
we cannot see.

this is how
we make our world beautiful:
by freeing within us
every inclination of the heart
to speak.

Hello dear dreamers of Earth,

The night before my dog Gaia passed away, just a few days before the winter solstice, she came to me in a dream. I cannot think of a greater gift than this. In the dream, Gaia showed me a map, pointing to a thick red line that separates the wild world from the domesticated one. It was a clear message that she was returning to the wild side of the map, after her fifteen year, profoundly loving visitation to our human world. I will spend the rest of my life hunting this line.

In the line Gaia showed me, I remembered that our dreams are doors to the wild cosmos within us, a bridge to our untamable psychic mythology. When we fall asleep, we cross that line out of familiar territory and gain access to the wild unknown. You see, like Gaia, who was an incredibly sweet dog as well as a wild soul who did whatever she pleased, dreams are guides to the places within us that refuse to be domesticated. Dreams themselves are wild creatures, feral, beyond our control, entirely free. They open the bars to the cage we have been taught to keep our instinct trapped inside. If you have been ignoring your own instincts for too long, be prepared for them to roar forth, often with claws and fangs, in your sleep.

Seeing that line between worlds reminded me how important it is for us to pay close attention to our night dreams. While humans try to keep things tidy, planned and under control, dreams remain unruly, seeping with nuance and paradox. In dreams we are all feral shapeshifters, wielding daggers of truth, embodying multitudes that link us to our magical lineages. Dreams tell the stories of a strangely familiar world where everything bleeds into the next thing, opening the floodgates to an existence that is wholly animate and sacred.

As part of my own dedication to loving the Earth, I have made a vow to listen to my dreams, and to take radical action based on what they say. As you might imagine, this has led to strange and often inconvenient happenings in my life. Not long ago, I had a dream that contained one very clear, highly mysterious image. I did exactly what the dream seemed to be telling me, which required a drastic life decision that felt like a huge loss, throwing me terrifyingly off-track both personally and professionally. It felt like jumping into a dark abyss. But still, I listened to the dream image, and I followed its instructions despite that the whole thing very well could have been utter nonsense.

The thing is, I have fallen in love with nonsense, with the enigmas arising from Earth. I crave the thrilling freedom of changing my mind entirely. Of realizing I was wrong all along! More and more I find that listening to the apparently absurd seems to point me in the direction of magic. For those of us longing for a more poetic, earth-entwined life, to listen to our dreams is the very foundation for enacting our personal love story. Even a nightmare is woven from the tension between opposites, the very same force that all romance is kindled from.

Honestly, I believe the resurrection of our world depends on our willingness to engage with the wild and nonsensical images arising from our dreams. To pay attention to the realm on the other side of the line we have drawn. Humanity is in desperate need of more feral weirdness and freedom of heart, and the Earth tries, nightly, to give us what we’re missing. And what harm would it do, anyway, for us to all show a little more interest in the mysterious symbols and storylines living through us? Other than perhaps subverting the world as we know it…

west of the moon, east of the sun

We humans are mystical creatures to begin with, pulsing with dreams, creative inquiry, imagination and mythos. Dreams and myth are of the same language. As Joseph Campbell describes it, “the myth is the public domain, and the dream is the private myth.” Our night dreams are fragments of the world’s archetypal storylines, and to ignore them is to miss out on personalized clues for navigating our own magical life story.

But we do ignore our dreams, discounting them as random nonsense. As a species we are not the biggest fans of the metaphorical and the esoteric, preferring things to have a measurable value— a survival instinct gone a bit haywire, I think. Our black-and-white thinking eradicates our intuitive interconnectedness, and it is why humans are causing such great harm to our planet.

Because of our fixation on defining things, the world soul has to find subtle ways to bypass the human intellect in order to speak to us— these soul messages are delivered in the ancient languages of image and lore. They contain timeless truths, paradox, magic and doorways into our own wildly creative cosmic nature. Yes, these messages come through in our dreams, in myth, and in every fairytale and piece of folklore you’ve ever heard or read. The information that arrives through dreams and myth is not new or radical: they are wellsprings of ancient prophetic instruction, which P.L. Travers speaks of in her essay on myth, “The World of the Hero”:

And as to the meaning of myths, the more one studies them the more one sees that this heritage from archaic man— the rituals and concepts that guided his conscious life— miraculously survives and is ever-present in the subterranean layers of ourselves. It can be tapped as one taps the waters under the earth; it can be questioned as once our forefathers questioned the oracles, seeking an answer to what, in essence, is perhaps not so different from our own question.

We go to the myths not so much for what they mean as for our own meaning. Who am I? Why am I here? How can I live in accordance with reality?

Beneath the hardened exterior of our self-proclaimed identities and personas, there is a rich and fertile underworld jungle brewing inside us. This is the same realm that our dreams inhabit, like liquid moonlight living just beneath the lining of our our skin. It is in the body, a fluid and sensuous place, where we are attuned to our own love affair with the invisible moving web of life.

Within these soft depths is a universal longing for more aliveness, to know ourselves more intimately, to fall deliriously in love with the other species sharing our planet, to awaken to our fluency in Eros. We are made of such mystery, feeling, and wisdom that if we were able to catch even a glimpse of our own beauty, we would all fall instantaneously, wildly in love with who we really are.

the blank book / the wilderness of dreamwork

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Dear heartful humans, gentle listeners, brave seekers, bright friends on the path,

Into the dark reaches of January’s dream we seep, like crystal sap descending through roots down into Earth’s mysterious heart. It is a heart made of caves and graves, the underland of stones and bones, a vast tunneling terrain of the unknown. But when we close our eyes at night, we get a generous taste of the instinctual, wild magic brewing down there. In there. In us.

We are two days away from the dark moon, and last night it was 0° Fahrenheit here in northern New Mexico. The stars were so ecstatic they climbed in through windows, and the stillness of night froze the world into one glittering timeless moment. Maybe now more than ever, I crave this silence and dark, the depth of listening that becomes available in the generative landscape of winter. Strange as it may sound, all year I wait for January, longing for the soulful poetry of a cold moon, candlelight, and snow-mulched garden soil that has been frozen into a dreamtime slumber.

I fall in love, salivate even, as I imagine the holographic sea of dreams being born beneath the garden and the forest floor. For if you were able to dig down deep enough, you would find a world that is not at all frozen or asleep. It is a world that is warm, even, and every bit alive as you are right now.

the dream guardians

There is an invisible gatekeeper who appears in wintertime, a dark glittering threshold that guards the active dream of the Earth. It is the frost line, meaning the depth to which the cold air renders soil frozen and impenetrable. Below the frost line, the earth remains a steady mild temperature year-round. It is literally cozy down there, even in winter.

The closer to the poles, the deeper the frost line generally gets. And in the special areas of Earth called tundra, there is a magical being named Permafrost, an earth treasure cache who keeps the ground below surface everfrozen with ancient mysteries. Permafrost can be up to 5,000 feet deep… just imagine the constant dreamwork happening way down there! It is really no wonder that the myth of flying reindeer came from these lands, a legend that has enchanted much of the world. Cold dark places are deep dreaming places. I am positively enamored with this mysterious protective wall between the worlds — the frosts, the snows, the ice people, the winter forces of all forms and crystalline origins.

While humans and snow share somewhat of an affectionate understanding, frost is considerably less willing to negotiate. It is as though the frost line is an intentional impasse to not only stop us from disrupting the dream of the Earth, but to urge us to join in the dreaming. This message is particularly clear to me as a gardener, because it literally stops me from being able to work in the garden. A spade cannot break through this firm dream boundary. The land holds up her hand and says No, I am resting now — do join me. In this reminder I hear such loving tenderness arising from Earth, a fervent tendril of care trying to make its way through frozen crust into the human heart: Dear two-leggeds! Your imaginations are powerful, and beautiful, and direly needed. Please, help us brew the great flowering dream of this world. Please add your own wildly fragrant dreams to the cauldron of our shared becoming.

The winter earthbody goes into hushed torpor above ground, so as to allow a magnitude of imagining and concentration of creative force deep in the heart of Earth — and in our own bodies. If we let ourselves rest and unravel enough, if we experiment with quietness and not knowing, if we really pay attention to the images appearing in our dreams and imaginal fields, we might begin to hear the calls of the wild underworld feast taking place beneath our feet.

To me, this is the very point of winter, to listen and dream deeply enough that we remember our heartbreaking love for the world. No matter where we live, even the most subtle seasonal shift into dormancy is a clear invitation for us to tune into the starry screen of the collective dream. There is not much I find more thrilling than this vision. When I close my eyes in winter this is where I go, and even when what I see breaks my heart, it is also full of hope. What I feel in the Earth’s wildest dream is for humans to fall madly in love with this world, to love right through the heartache. The sadness and the beauty in unity are what make this world, and our own lives, glisten and sear with revelatory wonder.

as above, so below { as the soil, so the stars }

When the plants have given themselves back to the land, leaving behind only hollow stalks and lingering seeds as clues to their existence, when colorful flowers and emerald leaves feel like a distant memory from another planet entirely, we are left wandering through a gray and quiet world. And yet it is one of familiar vastness, nearly as blank and boundless as the sky. A snowy field on a gray day is an endless palette, a dreamscape of possibility. The polished night sky becomes a strangely alluring abyss. The winter world reveals itself as a wildly creative experiment, eternally beginning again, forever studying the ancient instructions arising from deep in the Earth and beaming down from the sky. Did it ever occur to us that Earth herself is an apprentice to her own becoming? A brave student, just like us.

Even as a plant lover and devotee of the flowers, I never find myself lonely in their absence. This is because the green ones live mostly in dreamtime, anyway. If you sit with a plant for long enough, you soon become aware that they live in a state of deep meditative love. Their individual medicines and personalities are part of a prismatic song of oneness. Plants are star walkers and underworld journeyers, in total service to the cosmic collective. Perhaps this is why they are largely unattached to their physical bodies, readily offering themselves up as food and medicine, with an ease and generosity unthinkable to most humans. Plants are the Earth’s original mystics.

Of course any being who can eat starlight is a mystic, and can travel through time and space. The blueprint of plant love is infinitely painted across our world. On a clear frigid night, I look into the sky and see a vast expanse of fertile soil, flowering with stars. I wave to them, and tearfully let them know I’m looking forward to their return to the meadows this spring.

the tallest mystics

There is a kind of plant mystic who stands alongside us through the depths of winter, loving us through it all. They are the towering timeless storytellers who breathe life and light into us all, the ones who tenderly remember the moment when you took your very first breath, and have loved you ever since. They are the deep-rooted, starry-leafed ones with trunks, hearts and crowns, whose love for our world is so palpable that I can’t seem to write about them without crying.

The trees. Oh my aching heart, the trees. The gentle, supremely loving wise giants of the plant family, a vertical axis of wisdom whose roots reach deep into the intermingling mysteries of Earth, beyond the frost line, whose crown stretches high into the glittering sky. They are the watchkeepers and bridges between the worlds. They tell the magical stories of death and the cycles of resurrection, and bring us the news of cosmic oneness, our starry origins beyond this physical form.

Imagine the form of a tree for a moment, from roots to trunk to branches. They are clear channels for consciousness to flow between the worlds. As Woman Stands Shining (Pat McCabe) says of the photosynthesizers, not only are trees and plants gathering starlight and carrying it down into Earth, they are also broadcasting information about our planet into the cosmos. Their conversations with our local star are reciprocal. What planetary news do you think the beloved trees are sharing with the sun?

If all plants are dreamers of love, just imagine the force of love generated by the trees. Many of them are hundreds or even thousands of years old, standing peacefully in their place of belonging, quietly witnessing us through it all. We would be lost without them. I am so thankful, in a world of increasing loss of beings of all species, including our own, that trees still stand among us. May we use our voices to speak for these huge-hearted ancient ones. May we spend more time listening to their stories of love and planetary togetherness.

invoking your treeness

I believe trees are the wise teachers many of us have been longing to apprentice with. Some of us spend a lifetime seeking the right human mentor, teacher or muse, meanwhile the trees have been patiently waiting right outside our doorsteps. We so often forget to include the other species in our quest for a spiritual teacher.

There is a dream waiting for us in the forest, one we are all born seeking: community. Down in the rich rhizomatic underworld, the trees are part of vast tapestries of mychorrizal kinship and connection. Oh, to be so woven into a vibrant, living ecosystem — to be witnessed and celebrated in our individuality by a community of wise elders and friends. To irrefutably belong, beyond all human ideas of loneliness and separation.

What we know about trees is that they provide nutrients and medicine not just to fellow trees of their same species, but to the entire forest — tree and otherwise. Their gifts are for everyone. These are caretakers who do not discriminate, they do not withhold love from anyone. Trees teach us to participate in a love that includes the whole world.

Forest, woodland, glade, alpine meadow, these are sanctuaries of beingness, or as Zen master Dōgen called it, “treeness” — the best word ever — where the hardened parts of our identities dissolve in a way that allows us to interlace with the world, like tree branches and roots. Trees are the guardians of our interrelational mythos, our deepest heart essence and offering to the world.

When I first read the word treeness, it immediately felt like a collective soul image for our planet. Poet David Whyte speaks of soul as being the “largest conversation you are individually capable of having with the world.” The William Stafford poem I opened with touches a similar thread— the muse, the mysterious glimmer of inspiration that calls you to soul-centric living, is your own particular way of seeing the world. Your particular presence is a vital missing nutrient the Earth has dreamt of. Soul is the knowing that, like roots and mychorrizae, you are already made of a million intimate relationships, within you and around you. This is your treeness.

Treeness means letting your heart’s deepest longings have a voice, against all better judgment. It means fearlessly engaging with your own dreams, night and waking, tracking them, drawing them, dancing with the images, speaking these wild stories out loud as you walk. Living them. Yes, it is edgy, and can tend to lead us “astray” from the more practical path we were following. That’s the point of treeness: to be fully, unapologetically alive. Our treeness is how we feed the world, and it is how we are fed and loved in return. There is a friendliness to it, and so much poetry.

{ an invitation } dreaming with the trees

Like roots, our hearts are already braided into the heart of Earth. By following these roots down into the dreamtime underworld, we can access the collective heartache of the world. We can also receive information for how to move forward in a way that brings comfort and active care to the planetary community. The trees are doing this all the time.

For mysterious reasons related to soul, we tend to find a curious resonance with very specific nature beings. If you and I were to take a walk in the forest together, we might find the same tree beautiful, but we would each experience its allurement in very personal ways. That particular intimacy is the key to your own deepest heart. The way you see and feel the tree is entirely unique to you, and it is your gift.

Here is an invitation to find your own allurement to a certain tree, and to enter into a friendship, apprenticeship, or even romance with this one. It doesn’t matter whether the tree is in a wild place, your backyard or a public park. Whichever tree you find, they have most likely been dreaming of your company for a very long time.

As beings who spend their lives mostly in meditative stillness, trees have active inner lives. They help us to awaken these imaginal and visionary capabilities in ourselves. Go to the tree with the intention to sit, listen, and dream with this being for at least twenty minutes. You can lean against the trunk of the tree, or sit a few yards away so that you can see each other. Wear extra warm clothing if it’s cold out. Some people strongly believe in asking the tree’s permission before entering into any kind of conversation or touch — I trust that you will know what to do. The only instructions here are to be present with the tree, and to practice, as William Stafford said, “your own way of looking at things.”

Allow the relationship to unfold naturally, but do remember to tend it as you would any friendship. Bring songs, share tea, stories, poetry, write a love letter and read it out loud to the tree. Visit the tree in your daydreams. Be curious about the creative gifts you feel stirring within you. There is no need to hold back with the trees — let yourself fall in love.

The trees have been waiting for us. Let’s go and sit with them, and become walking tree people, living the wild poetry of our own unstoppable love.

The Quiet Listeners, by Laura Foley

Go into the woods
and tell your story
to the trees.
They are wise
standing in their folds of silence
among white crystals of rock
and dying limbs.
And they have time.
Time for the swaying of leaves,
the floating down,
the dust.
They have time for gathering
and holding the earth about their feet.
Do this.
It is something I have learned.
How they will bend down to you
so softly.
They will bend down to you
and listen.

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let yourself descend
and rest now
deep in the heart of Earth,
below the starry dangling roots of trees

where the Stone Mother lives.

there is something that happens
here in the soft hues of dusk light
something like a quartz mist,
the same ethereal windbreath
as your dreams.

something of a radiant origin,
held safe and timeless
in hidden micaceous caverns
of your heart’s potentiality.

how can darkness be woven
from filaments of light?

how can the sea of your dreams
have no end?

what is it that makes you
capable of loving
beyond death, beyond all sense,
beyond the cool pearl moon’s
passing time

here in the heart cave
we bravely tend the fire
of our wretched, luminous lament
that is kindled entirely
from the invincible force of love
we were born from.

Hello dear friends across time and space,

Here we find ourselves again, bravely walking into the dark heart of winter. I am writing this from the desk in my studio, which faces a window into a thick juniper and piñon forest. There are songbirds everywhere, their voices so bright I can hear them through the glass. In this forest, there is an abundance of light and life force in an otherwise cold and dark cycle of the world.

I hang feeders from the trees in winter, and fill them with organic sunflower seeds. To offer the birds seeds in the heart of darkness is to offer the alchemical emblem of the fire element, of warmth and memory. Of the ancient stories of starlight and resurrection that seeds have always carried. Every single seed contains the dream of the entire Earth.

Oh, all these visitations from our old dreamtime friends— the darkness, candlelight, woodsmoke, tea, evergreens, rainbow snow sparkles, and the songbirds who journey here from the distant north. In the fall, just after the hummingbirds depart on their long travels south, just as my heart is breaking from that autumnal farewell, the forest comes to life with new arrivals on the wind. Suddenly, the treetops become fluttering worlds of song and stories from afar. I love that this snowy high desert forest is a winter sanctuary for winged ones from the far north. I wait for their return, and love being part of their family. Or rather, I love considering them part of mine.

Songbirds, candlelight, darkness, woodsmoke, clear winter starlight. These all feel like family to me, a kindred gathering of messengers from the rich, imaginal heart of Gaia. Who are your winter companions, the north stars guiding you through the darkest of days? More than ever, we must invite them to walk with us. I have said this many times and will continue repeating it forever: Humans were never meant to do this alone. We are here to ask for help, particularly from the ones who appear to be the most different from us. Perhaps even the ones who are entirely invisible. Our belonging has forever been braided into our engagement with the wild and unseen Others. And as Rumi says, “If you want to be held, hold out your hands.” In this tender heart of darkness, both in the Earth’s cycles as well as in the current unraveling of the human heart, I have some small offerings to place in your outstretched palms. Here are some tiny, glinting treasures for the dark days we find ourselves slowly, gently, inevitably sinking into. And for all the mystery yet to find us.

the candlelight oracle: flame alchemy & the practice of reading candle wax

I should begin by mentioning that I am madly in love with beeswax candles. To me, they are direct agents of soul, and they are my friends. I burn them daily, I dip them by hand, I spend days on end without using any electric lights, whatever it takes for my life to be illuminated by these nectar-scented golden guides. But beeswax is a luminous substance entirely unto itself. For this sharing, my focus is on candlelight and wax of any kind. Long before my soulful infatuation with beeswax took hold, I had already been introduced to something called “candle practice” by a beloved teacher. And my life was forever transformed by it. What I will share with you now is a very special ritual that can be practiced and enacted in addition to simply filling your evenings and early mornings with candlelight.

Years ago, I traveled to Ecuador to study with a wise elder named Rocío. I was in the early stages of what would prove to be a nearly decade long “dark night of the soul,” and in a manner that only soul could orchestrate, I ended up on a strange and mystical journey straight into the heart of the Earth… to the Equator itself.

The plane landed in the middle of the night, at 3 am, and I was brought by taxi to a nunnery in the outskirts of Quito. Even in the darkness, through the cold stone walls of the convent, I knew there were flowers everywhere. The next morning at the breakfast table, Rocío told us that later that day we would be learning how to work with candles for healing. I began to feel strange. The nuns floated through the halls, murmuring in Spanish and laughing softly with each other. Birds sang endlessly through windows that never closed. I felt high, dazed, surely in a dream. I had entered another world entirely. And it was a world where absolutely everything was sacred.

In the afternoon, we gathered in the cloisters in the convent garden, each of us with a small ceramic dish Rocío had asked us to bring from home. It was a particularly mysterious item from the packing list she had sent. We sat in a circle amongst peculiar flowers and mossy stone walls, and our teacher began to speak to us in her hushed and solemn way. When Rocío speaks, even in casual conversation, it always feels as though she is divulging a holy and ancient secret. She is a wellspring of wisdom passed down to her through lineages of grandmothers, and I always find myself leaning in close. As she began to share about the practice of healing with candlelight, clutching a single white candle in her hand, my eyes grew wide and teary. Rocío’s sincerity permeated my bones. Suddenly I felt like the luckiest person alive, realizing I was receiving a teaching I would carry with me forever.

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Listen. Can you remember the sound? That spontaneous cry of delight you didn’t hold back. Can you recall your own buoyant, silken gasp of awe? Or the soulful wail of grief that poured out of you like a wave, like a blue whale’s ethereal moan, touching every creature in the world with feeling.

Maybe there has been a wild shriek of wrath that escaped you in outrage, a fiery sword-like truth. What about a curious, tentative electric tendril you send into the ethers, right now… a brave experiment. The tender dream of your own sound being met by the world: to be truly heard, beyond the duality of words, confirmed in your own precious mattering. And to feel your voice resounding back, like an endless echo of your own holographic kinship with everything.

this is a love letter to the human howl,
to the earthbound cry of the heart,
and how much it matters.

The truth is that I can’t find anything else to write about, in a time of such suffering in the human family. This great loss of life over the past months, witnessing the genocide continue in Gaza, the depth of division within the human heart, it has changed me forever. This tidal wave of collective grief has made me question literally everything, including my own spiritual practices and ways of being in the world. What is our spiritual practice for, anyway? Aren’t these the times we’ve been practicing for?

I have been waking up in the middle of the night, to sit with the texture of the darkness. I light one candle. In that mysterious womb of softness and potentiality, where all things are held safe beyond form and time, what I hear weaving itself through the silence is the unstoppable hum of the world heart. And rising in me, I feel a response— the cry of truth that my ancestors weren’t able to express. I feel a longing to make myself a living howl for every being who has had their voice ignored or silenced. I want to add my voice to this great co-arising chant of love for this life. And just as much, I want to listen. I long to hear the hidden truth in every single other voice, too, human and beyond, and let it crack me open into presence and understanding.

I believe that humans do care, and that we are witnessing a great and immeasurably painful remembering of our tenderness and our longing to help others. Throughout these months of heartache, I have spent a lot of time with the darkness in quiet listening. Sitting in stillness births a mysteriously animate world: suddenly I become highly aware of the myriad of previously inaudible sounds around me, emanating from every single thing. Even the windows. Even the rocks. And our own hearts beating in time with the drum of the moon. Our bodies are born chanting this one original song.

One day at dawn, in a primordial chime of clarity, I remembered our right and responsibility to make sound. I mean truly human sound that comes straight through the sensory doorway of the body, and reverberates through the bones and out into the stars. The sound that bravely speaks our authentic experience of the world, and embroiders our unique note into the great tapestry of belonging. Rumi reminds us about this importance in many different poems and translations, such as this one by Coleman Barks:

Remember the lips where wind-breath
originated,

and let your note be clear.
Don't try to end it.

Be your note.

I'll show you how it's enough.
Go up on the roof at night
in this city of the soul.
Let everyone climb on their roofs
and sing their notes.

Sing loud!

Our species has become rather noisy compared to the other species, a loudness that feels like a byproduct of our rushed psyches and under-tended hearts. With constant outward grasping and distraction from feeling, we are unable to hear our own soulful stirrings within. We need to visit the soft, fertile birthing ground of stillness. And also, as reminded by my teacher Polly, we have the opportunity to hear every single human noise as another emanation of the great song of Gaia. It doesn’t serve us to keep removing our own activity from the whole of Earth, or keep waiting for that perfect quiet moment to enact our spiritual practice. The time to practice is right now, and it begins with the drumbeat in your chest.

Even stars have a measurable, pulsing heartbeat. Humans have captured audio recordings of the sun, and even the songs of black holes! We are made of sound. It is the instinctual resonance that chants unstoppably through the singing bowl of earth’s body, and yours. The wild creatures of the earth are master musicians and sound healers. If you have ever been in a summer forest at dawn, or a tropical jungle, the cacophony of birds, crickets and cicadas can be gloriously deafening. Coyote howl, chipmunk chatter, mouse squeak, raven caw. It is how we tell the world that we are still here. It is how we belong.

A monsoon rain can swallow every single other sound. Wind is known to howl and wail. A fire can hiss. The ocean roars. We have assigned many human sounds to the elemental forces, and I do not believe this is a blind act of anthropomorphism: I believe it comes from our inner knowing that, just like us, the elements of nature are creating our world by speaking about it.

silence & stillness

The open space between the sounds is where revelatory magic is born. Have you noticed how wild animals are skilled experts of quiet? Like two balanced wings, they understand the value of both their sound and their silence, highly aware of how and when to use each precious tool.

Interestingly, I find that the quiet ones are actually some of the greatest teachers of the power of voice. The stones are the ancient masters of silence and listening. In a rock’s presence, any word we utter becomes a booming incantation. If you sit still long enough, you might begin to hear the deep solemn chants of the moon, or the murmurs of a mountain. To hear the silent (or silenced) ones, we can practice being as quiet and still as they seem to be. To practice becoming, as Mary Oliver said, “a silence in which another voice may speak.” One mantra Richard Rudd suggests to cultivate this space of attentive listening: quiet the mind, soften the heart. Also, sometimes stillness isn’t the right medicine at all. Sometimes to hear the truth, we need to dance and shout, like songbirds after a dark freezing night.

In the forest, every single sound is part of a luminous and highly intentional weaving of aliveness. Each chirp, fluttering leaf, pawstep and howl is part of some great prayer of primordial interdependence, everything proclaiming their unique place in the whole, and the wholeness that hums back in reply. But without an intimacy with quiet and stillness, sound loses its power. Perhaps this is why true sound emanating from humans seems rare in daily life. Like the wild ones, we can apprentice to quiet, and to practice being close companions with it. The deepest cry of the heart echoes forth from these inner caverns, with patient listening for what is real within us.

{ who is listening? } the ones who hear the cries of the world

When we are alone, or feel lost in despair, who is there to hear our cries? I have often talked about speaking out loud to nature, and feeling heard by the wisdom beings around me. Truly listening to others is an act of great compassion, which the trees, stones, clouds, rivers and moon offer to us endlessly. Our stories are always held by them, and carried on to create the world.

Among the myriad of earth forces that are here to listen and offer support, there are also so many deities we can call upon in times of need. Deities are human archetypes of the divine nature within us, and typically have origin stories that are mysterious legends rather than factual biographies. They exist in the human imaginal realm, the same realm as the ancestors, the earth spirits, and the force of love. I will share two deities who are particularly meaningful to me, who have offered me endless support along my own heart path. I encourage you to find your own resonances within the invisible realms, if it calls to you. Also, this is a very, very brief introduction to these many-layered and highly revered deities.

Kuan Yin (also Guanyin, Kannon, Kanzeon) and Green Tara (also Jetsun Pagma Drölma) each have many different stories, names, and lineages within Buddhism, but it is often believed that these two goddesses are emanations of each other. It is said that both were born from the tears of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. One of my favorite parts of this deity lineage is that the gender of Avalokiteshvara is fluid. It changes from tale to tale. Kuan Yin, Tara and Avalokiteshvara all represent the same force: fierce, unconditional mercy and compassion for every single being on the planet. Because this is the archetypal force of loving kindness, the deity shows up in every form that we see existing here on planet Earth.

Green Tara, whose name means both “tear” and “star”, is the gentle but fiercely determined and protective goddess who brings swift liberation from suffering. Green Tara sits cross-legged, with one leg extended in front of her: ready to leap to the aid of anyone who needs her. Her teaching is clear, that the awakening of our hearts arises from reaching out to help those in need. Kuan Yin is “she who hears the cries of the world”, the goddess of boundless mercy who appears at the side of anyone who is sick or suffering. Both goddesses bring similar but specific medicines. I personally see Green Tara as a spirit of Gaia, and I hold Kuan Yin as an emanation of the moon and the sea. They both represent the human heart that has fully awakened to its radiant co-arising with all other beings as one. The main message within both of them is one of active compassion.

In the myth of Kuan Yin’s awakening as shared by my teacher Valerie, Kuan Yin was alone on an island listening to the wild sounds of the sea. Suddenly, a giant wave roared and crashed at her feet. She was so wholly permeated by the sound of the wave that any sense of separation from the world dissolved. Suddenly she heard the cries of every single being on earth, and in those cries she recognized the sound of her very own voice. So she became she who hears the world’s cries as her own, who turns toward the world’s suffering with boundless compassion.

These deities are not about religious dogma or even the worshipping of external figures: they are freely available to anyone, and are an archetypal representation of our own most loving, fully-resourced true nature. When I call on Kuan Yin or Green Tara, I am praying to awaken the part of me that is already as fiercely compassionate as they are. The prayer is for my own embodiment of them, that I might bring that depth of unstoppable care and tenderness to the world. That I might listen deeply enough to hear another’s cry as my own. Perhaps especially the cries I might adamantly disagree with. Kuan Yin and Tara have this in common: They do not give up on anyone.

In this present collective experience of such great sorrow and division in the human family, watching so many people go through levels of physical and emotional pain that I can’t even fully conceive, I have sat with a feeling of dire helplessness. Of desperately longing to do something that actually allows my depth of care to be heard and felt, to be able to reach out my hand and offer one moment of comfort to someone in pain. But then I think of Kuan Yin, Green Tara, the moon, the waters, the stones and the trees, and I remember that every cry of the world is heard. So what do we do when we feel helpless or hopeless in the face of suffering?

We love more.
We add our own voice to the cry of the heart.

{ doors to the instinctual heart } howling practice

I have spent years attempting to compassionately dismantle my compulsion to curate my own truth. Much of my life has been spent in chronic confusion and attempts to remain likable and polite, in a system-wide disconnection from my body’s instinctual power and intuitive connection with the earth. As a white woman living on unceded land in the US, this particular version of silencing has been passed to me through lineages.

At some point during my early years of working with the plants (or rather, letting the plants work on me), I became passionate about plant conservation and was studying those that were at risk or had gone extinct. One evening during my research, I was suddenly flooded by an irreversible understanding of the oppression and harm that so many other humans, animals, and lands have been enduring for centuries. An excruciating experience of world grief and outrage began to rise inside me, at the recognition of so many precious voices who had been taken from the great song of the world. Through that hearing of the earth’s cry, I began to hear my own small voice rising like an ember in the ashes. The plants have always helped us understand that our belonging comes directly from our connection to the earth and each other. This kind of power is indestructible.

Beneath all patriarchal programming, beyond our ideas of personal identity, there is a volcanic wellspring of power and care in all of us. What is the doorway through the silenced heart? The door I keep finding is the ferocity of love I feel for our planet. I am willing to have my heart irreparably broken for this love. I am willing to learn, and re-learn, how to be brave enough speak for that love, which includes every single being here with us, and particularly those whose voices have been ignored, devalued, or misunderstood. I know that you care deeply, too.

In a class with poet David Whyte, he said that to write a good poem, you really only need one word. One living, resonant word as a doorway, a guide, a spark, and the rest ignites from there. I have found this to be true for the poetry of life itself. It often just takes caring about one thing to open the floodgates of caring about the whole world.

One heartbreaking word, sentence, or image. One sudden waft of understanding. Find the moment that cracks you open, and fasten your heart to it. As a mentor of mine says, “hitch yourself to the world.” Ask your friends and family what is breaking their hearts, and really listen. Begin the practice of speaking more about what you care about, and why. Become a walking love story. You already are.

When it comes to both literal and metaphorical howling, it takes practice, and you don’t have to do it alone. Just ask the coyote pups, whose mother and aunties diligently teach them to hunt and howl. Hunting is how they eat to survive, but howling is how they belong to the world. It is a common misconception that when you hear bands of coyotes howling, yipping, cackling in the night, they are celebrating a kill. It is indeed a bone-chilling sound, but typically, these wild screams are simply their communication with each other and other nearby packs. They howl to each other in the dark, bouncing their messages off the canyon walls, to speak their place into the world. Coyotes are also called “song dogs,” and I love them to the point of heartache. They are dear teachers of wild belonging.

When words utterly fail us, as they often do in matters of the heart, maybe we ought to start practicing our howl. The world I long to live in is one where we listen to the cries of our aching world and, like coyote, howl back in reply. I know there is a wild joy waiting for us, in that remembering of our own kinship with everything.

love like a plant

Finding the cry of the heart takes courage, and it doesn’t have to be a wild coyote scream. This is simply an invitation for us to become curious about our relationship with sound, with truth, with what freedom feels like in our bones. Some of the clearest, most moving voices I know come from quiet, watchful beings. Plants, trees, clouds, stones, the moon. As Terence McKenna said, “follow plants, not gurus.” The best thing we can do is to practice loving the world through our way of being here, like the plants do. There are a million different ways to add your note to what poet Pattiann Rogers calls “the song of the world becoming.” You are already doing it right now. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us how the plants speak through the language of pure beingness:

What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge?
What if you had no language at all,
and yet there was something you needed to say?
Wouldn't you dance it? Wouldn't you act it out?
Wouldn't your every movement tell the story?
In time you would be so eloquent
that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all.
And so it is with these silent green lives.

{ an invitation } humming hymns, a force of love

This is a gentle doorway to the heart. It might perhaps sound trivial or even ridiculous right now, and it is no way meant to be the only actionable step we take. But we have to keep tending to our own hearts in order for the world to change. Humming is an opening into truthful, tender feeling and expression. It weaves a luminous thread through space. Often, the moment I start humming I burst into tears. It is a call to the heart to remember. There is something extra comforting and magical about humming, because the sound is held almost completely inside the body, and literally resounds and vibrates through your heart and mind. It is a hymn to the bones.

For humming practice, begin gently. Start by focusing inward, imagining the sound of humming turning into light (maybe even rainbow light…) throughout the body. I like to keep my eyes closed in the beginning, to focus on the literal vibration of the humming through the body. Do this as long as you need. It can help to find a gentle sway. Then when you feel ready, turn the energy outward, and imagine that light emanating out to all beings. You can imagine specific loved ones, those you know who are suffering, and the entire planet as a whole. If you feel like it, you can then open your mouth and let the humming become other sounds or songs. Maybe it wants to become a howl. Or a spoken declaration of love. Also, this is an incredibly healing practice to try with a friend or a group of friends.

Because sound is an ancient language of creation and imagination, it speaks to every single thing around you. I think one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard was when a teacher of mine said to always sing to the world: because you never know when your heartsong will wake up the hearts of those around you. That they will hear your voice, and remember their own.

All of this to say, however the sound wants to come through us, let us keep on moving. Wings sprout from our hearts when we speak of what’s real inside us. The birds have been teaching us this forever.

Let yourself be stirred by the world. Transform your despair into active care. Call your representatives. Call out to a cloud. Sit with the stone people. Cry out to the moon until you hear your voice echo back. Listen to your dreams. Talk about what you love and what’s breaking your heart. Tend your pain with song and dance.

Shake up the world inside you.

in closing, here is a poem I wrote in June, after a night spent alone in the wild surrounded by howling coyotes. I woke up the next morning forever altered by their fiercely loving cries for this life. The same cry echoing through me, and everything. The next morning at sunrise, I found the very first wild roses of the season had just begun to open.

the cry of the heart

suppose that
there is no differentiation
between the sounds of coyote
shrieking murderously in the night
and the delicate rapture
of wild roses
on the first day they open.

could it be possible
if you were to lower your ear
to those tender pink petals
and pollen-crowned anthers
that you might begin to perceive
a small, but sure voice
wailing
her own proclamations?

we might begin to notice
that the electric cries of coyote
can help attune our hearing to
the equally ardent voices
of those seemingly silent
otherworlds around us.

one might wonder
if there simply is no separation
between the ten thousand cries
of the heart

that we are all simply
born chanting
this one brave affirmation
of beingness —

one searing,
willing bid
for absolute
aliveness

one piercing measure
of an infinite,
resounding
yes.

subscribe to the heart of gaia

one moment of beauty
can eclipse all time.

let it wax,
widen
and lather itself
across the glistening shores
of your soul.

Hello my friends,

This is a spoken audio message from me, including a short story from a recent week spent in solo forest hermitage. After this message, I also include a meditative contemplation on refuge and sanctuary, which was shared with me by a dear teacher. The contemplation itself has become a treasure on my path. I also include a full moon poem, which was written in hermitage two moons ago. The audio story is about 20 minutes long and I invite you to find a cozy seat inside or out, brew a cup of your favorite tea, and join me in the tender heart temple.

This message began as a thank you to my cherished kindred spirits, AKA paid subscribers, and it mysteriously took on its own flow as a personal sharing. Thank you so, so much for being here with me. For listening with an open heart to each chime echoing in the wind.

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Once upon a dark and misty morning, there was a layer of fog so thick that only the voices of seagulls hinted I was near the sea. The little stone village was eerily empty, with no cars on the road, on that Sunday morning shrouded in a cloak of fog. I was alone, wandering through a strange and suddenly human-less world.

The scent of woodsmoke filled the air, and a looming silence seemed to murmur in a dreamlike, foreign tongue; it was a decidedly non-human dialect, whispered through the swirling tendrils of salty mist. My eyes widened as I realized I was hearing the hushed incantations of the mist herself — she was singing ever so softly, about something only my bones could understand.

Suddenly I knew why all the other humans had stayed inside that morning: I was submerged in a dark cauldron of the otherworldly unknown. This was the same sort of fog notorious in fairytales, the kind that humans have been known to vanish into, never to be seen again. I felt the haunting force of the Others at work all around me, and though it was chilling, I also felt a thrilling, curious kinship. I was right where I had always longed to be, where the two worlds touch.

Sometimes, if you are lucky, in the subtle light of dawn or dusk, you might hear the faint whispers of the twilight language. You might, in that very moment, feel a soft breeze brush across your cheek… a touch that feels strangely like the caress of a grandmother’s hand. We forget that we are the grandchildren of many, many lineages. How many magic spells were uttered in order for you to be here now?

We often speak about this time of year as having a “thin veil” between the realms of form and spirit. But to me the veil is not something that separates worlds, but more of a spiderweb or a mycelial network that links us and all our ecological lineages together. I like to think of Gaia wearing a shimmering shawl that covers all of earth. The veil is woven from threads of energy, and the needle has been passing back and forth between the seen and unseen worlds since the beginning of time. The only distance to reach the other side of the veil is in how long it takes you to remember you are already a thread woven into it. To know the veil is to remember who you really are.

Perhaps one of our greatest heartaches as a species is in our utter certainty that we are purebred, full-blooded humans. What a lonely thing to be so very sure of. The human origin story is a whirling rainbow of interrelatedness, an ecology of storied miracles. When did humans begin to draw such hard lines between ourselves and the Others? Could a lake have her own grandchildren? Can a flower cast a spell? Does a stone have song? The gnomes are chanting from down in the roots and soil: Yes.

Introducing our magical ancestors: the gnomes & fairies

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