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When all else around us fails, when the ground itself decides, too, to go away out from underneath us, there is nothing left to do but return to the one thing that will never go away. The One thing that watches us through it all, without judgment and with so much love. And that is, our primary relationship with this world.

This morning our elkhound is in a state of euphoria and reunion. He awoke to the ground lightly covered with two inches of snow.

In a few weeks I will step into my 49th year. For the past many months, perhaps even a few years, something has been stalking me. In the beginning it was subtle, faint. I would catch something out of the corner of my eye, then if I turned to look, it would be gone. I was filled with the sense of imminence. In the last two months I have felt the speed of this process increasing. It's not like these things happen without plenty of warning.

“If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.” David Wagoner Yesterday, for the first time, we harvested honey from our bees. This morning, having left this first harvest overnight so it could drip off the comb into a big bucket, I dip a stainless steel ladle into the golden pool and collect 1/3 of a cup of this elixir, pouring it into a squat mason jar. It sits on the counter glowing with sunlight, the brilliance of millions of years of Life extracting its own vitality and genius from its own making, over and over. Genius concentrate.

This morning I am sitting at the south end of the big farmhouse table in our kitchen, having my usual, mate tea. I am without human company. The EQM is in Italy and all our children are at their other homes. What a strange luxury that so many children in this country have two homes. A luxury I imagine many of them would have forgone if it meant they would keep their parents together.

When I was eight I experienced an unequivocal, felt sense of my place as a daughter of the earth, as one who was not only of the world but deeply loved by the world. Though I did not understand it in these terms until I was in my adolescence, this intimate connection with the world was made through my sexuality (the creative generative energy that is how you and I and everything else got here). It never occurred to me that this was not everyone’s experience because, in the magical thinking that is so particular to the 8 year old, I thought surely I must be just like everyone else.

For the next two weeks I'm in San Francisco, my favorite American city, co-teaching a group of 19 extraordinary individuals from four countries how to be sexological bodyworkers. It's a modality that is subversive and status-quo irreverent. And it’s the one modality that has infused my private practice with such luminous hope for the healing and wholing of our human community.

It's a good thing I didn't have any idea 'This Process of Aging' would strike such a chord. I would have been tempted to say everything I say here in this post, in that post, and it would have gotten so long that none of you would have had the time to read it. Worse, none of us would have heard all the glorious stories and experiences each of you shared. So, here is the next installment of my experience with this thing we call 'aging' which, as so many of you intrepid explorers have courageously learned, is as much a mind game as it is a fact of life. 

I am getting older. Of course, this is true for everyone, but it has arrived for me like an insistent house guest, and I find myself its ambivalent host. For a while, cruising through my late thirties and into my mid-forties, it felt like I was actually getting younger. Each year filled with a sense of youthfulness and discovery. I felt like an innocent, testing out the deep waters after decades of playing in the shallow end. And then it happened.