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We are taught some dangerous mis-truths about our sexuality. And when I say ‘taught’ I certainly don’t mean literally. For no one ever actually sits down with us and teaches us about this energy or how to touch ourselves when we are children and we are learning. The touch we find our way into as children, as babies, is intelligent. Playful. Far-reaching. It’s whimsical and circular. We move here and then there. The touch we find our way into as we become more aware of ourselves and our sex is the touch we are ‘taught’ by a culture fundamentally structured by shame of our humanity, that teaches us to want and need the most superficial of things in an erroneous effort to receive the most (unspoken) essential things. 

This morning, once again, there are two roan geldings in the first field. Young, playful, manes and tails full of burs. They canter back and forth with each other, kicking, swishing their bur-filled tails, tossing their heads down and their hind hooves high in the air. They are delighted. They spend hours standing under the giant old apple tree, eating fallen apples and the tender green shoots of grass that grow up around the rotting fruit.

Tonight I am aware of something, as the mornings get colder and colder upon my waking, watching the elkhound race out to the first field, leaving footprints in the frosty alfalfa shoots, who might imagine they still have a chance this year. I’m aware of how much I am in relationship with this house and this land I am so fortunate to live in and on. This cottage, this unassuming place that looks like one thing from the street and then, upon walking up the path to its front door, begins to let you in on some of its secrets.

I do not know how to describe these moments, this time. This is a place of absolute Death and such utter aliveness. Such rightness and certainty of my own worth, my work, my devotion accompanies a heartbreak I cannot fathom. I am now in a practice of, perhaps ... just perhaps ... imagining ... surely my Death and my Life must go hand-in-hand? My true marriage; that of My Death and My Life.

Oh my goodness......people......here in the Northern Hemisphere the days are getting shorter. This last week, these mornings having my tea out on the deck requires slippers and a shawl. The color on the flatirons, in the cottonwood canopies, long across the meadows, is shifting, different; a flatter, golden, pale offering.

This morning is more than you will imagine; the way YOU affect me who affects the Cottonwoods and their canopy of shade-giving, life-dwelling branches, harboring Those who head out into the two Fields each day, which are the ground, the floor, the solace of green expanse for the grieving Hawk whose piercing cry affects the Elkhound who affects Me who affects You, and that’s just the small story. There is so, so, so much more.

This morning I am feeling fierce, protective, stirred and.....yes....I am feeling angry. Like a mother bear feels anger. It’s not your average anger. If you are still caught within the grasp of this business of domestication that is our species greatest catastrophe, you might not bother to read on.

 On this morning, when there are those of us arguing over which dead humans get to be Official Deadhumans in Gaza; while billions of dollars have been spent getting Rosetta within 60 miles of comet C-G, both of whom are now traveling at 35,000 miles per hour to engage in a deep space dance of never-before-achieved research of this comet's frozen layers of ice, dust and rock – particle leftovers from the formation of this solar system within which we float, of which we are an inextricable part; when famous interpretive ramen master Ivan Orkin has opened a long-awaited restaurant on the Lower East Side serving, yes, ramen...

I have been wanting to tell you about this winter, about the process of wrestling my body and heart out of a marriage I thought would last until I was ready to leave this life. I have wanted to make sure no one imagines me as anything other than human. Vulnerable. Messy. Lost.

It is one of our most impossible human gestures to lean in – to trust, to love, without conditions, without knowing the outcome. This is especially impossible when there is already a story of fear rooted in our minds. One of the oldest, most primal instincts in us is to grasp. And yet nearly everything that matters comes out of these incredible, sometimes impossible, human gestures that require surrender.