We are in a special week.

We are halfway through the Fall Cycle of Soul School.

We are halfway to the Winter Solstice.

We are in between, yet again.

In between the beginning,

And in between the end.

The balance of the season’s light and dark has passed,

And soon the long nights of solstice will be here.

We are in between.

We live in between.

We live in pilgrimage.

We live in transit.

From one place

To another.

From one understanding

To another.

From one phase

To another.

Nature teaches us,

Guides us,

Shows us,

The indomitable truth of change

Transformation

Metamorphose

Initiation

Becoming

And nothing is spared.

Not the tallest mountain.

Not the deepest sea.

All the all is in a pilgrimage of their own.

The mountain is on its way to beach-fine sand

And that sand will eventually mix with clays and nutrients and make

Soil.

And from that soil containing mountain tops will sprout beach grasses.

And the white-tailed deer will come through with tongue and tooth and turn that mountain, turned soil, into sinew and strength and stealth.

Until the bobcat, lying in wait, leaps the back of the buck and finds his neck, eventually ingesting mountains, and beaches, and grasses, and sinew and strength and stealth

To sleep satisfied in her shallow cave.

While the eagle’s fishing holes grow thin, he takes to the air and spots the wild cat

And in a flurry or fur, feather and fury

Mountain, then soil, then grass, then buck, then cat, has been transformed into eyesight and highflight and feathers black and white.

And a few more solstices come and go for the eagle until he too takes his last breath, and his body is given back to the earth for the wild to reclaim all the many magical lives he’s been braided with.

Here, he too, becomes something else, something more.

Here, after his feathers have been plucked, organs consumed and skeleton remain, we come back into connection with the great mountain.

The calcium and phosphate of that mountain turned into beach-fine sand, now transformed into bone and given back to the lowlands.

Are we much different?

Are we as fixed as we think?

Have we allowed ourselves to be transformed as much as our lives are asking us to?

Are we partnering with the transformative forces our Soul is bringing into our lives?

Or are we resisting?

Resisting becoming?

Resisting dissolving?

Resisting becoming unrecognizable?

To self? To others?

But not to the Soul.

Your soul knows your true shape, true name, true essence and knows it can take on as many forms as it needs to to show you who you are: lifeforce! Love! Energy! The Source of all animacy!

We are walking through a constant symphony of life ever mixing, ever changing, ever roiling and boiling and bubbling, surging and slacking, phasing and amazing.

Our bodies are firing stars fueled by our consumption.

Our bodies are made of sunlight and water and the sweat of farmers.

Our bodies are made of the sunlight and the rain and the nutrients of the grass that fed the cattle that put on the weight that we may consume them and live our lives on and on.

Am I as solid and static and rooted and fixed as I think I am?

Or am I an ever exploding star of energy and light?

If I am an ever exploding star of energy and light, my shape always changing, my brightness always modulating, my flares are alive and animated by a process I am not in control of.

Then why the holding on?

Why the clinging?

Why resist being the thing I am?

An ever evolving, exploding star of light and energy whose characteristics are always changing?

Here we are.

Halfway through.

Can we let go even more?

Our ancient ancestors did.

They knew and understood the ways of nature.

And when their time came

They gave themselves over to the mystery.

Because,

They had been practicing their entire lives.

Practicing letting go.

Practicing partnering with change.

As they heard the symphony all around them

Rise and swell and fall with the music of transformation.

They practiced.

Take our cultural fear of death.

Our waging war against its grip on us, our society, our healthcare system

Is rooted in our inability to trust the transformation process.

Our ancient, well and wise, ancestors

Knew a transformation is coming for us all.

One of great mystery.

So, they practiced.

Many times

In their lives.

Just as we are,

Just as we get to.

We are all preparing to become eyesight, highflight and feathers black and white.

We are all preparing to give our bodies more fully into this great tapestry.

And we get to practice daily.

As the circumstances of our lives change and shift around us,

As we leave our beloved homes to move across the country and join in and create new families,

As our babies don’t make it to term,

As we bury our beloved dogs’ bodies,

As we fall off of roofs and break bones in our feet and ankles,

As our fiancés tell us they cannot marry us,

As our back’s break, our left feet cannot lift off the ground, and the fear turns to terror,

As we mourn and grieve choosing to end the life of that little baby when we were too young to step into that great and powerful mystery of responsibility,

As the core religious messaging of who we are, at birth, and what we must do and believe in order to be saved from our sinful and lost souls comes crashing down around us

This is all practice.

Each one of us has practiced.

Practiced great loss.

Great pain.

Great transformation.

I love that we are in the time of the year when it only gets darker!

How can I say YES to even this?

Makes me think of Wendell Berry’s words set to tune:

To go in the dark with the light is know the light

To know the dark, go dark

Go without sight

And find that the dark too blooms and sings

And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings

Am I resisting the dark?

Am I padding up and down my body for where my flashlight, phone, headlamp are?

Or am I allowing myself to experience the dark?

To know the dark?

To hear the sounds of the dark feet and the dark wings?

To let my eyes and ears adjust?

To feel the cool of the night move through my clothes?

To see and feel the weight of the darkness at its heaviest just before the dawn breaks and the morning star rises?

I love that every year it gets dark and darker and darker and darker still

And when it starts to get lighter,

There is no immediate relief (at least not for me).

The days might be getting longer by 50 seconds a day, but the weather only gets colder.

And the climb from Solstice to Spring is up scree and talus and sleet and driving rain.

I love that every year I get gentled.

I love that every year I lose to the power of the winter.

That every year it asks me to accept its power and its presence and its reality more and more.

I love that right now in my life I am being asked to GROW.

And I love all the little ways I try to avoid it, get out of it, sidestep it, stay under the covers instead of peeling them back and just feeling the cold on my toes and my bare chest and to step into this ever expansive day.

The day that is asking me to grow.

To expand.

To become something unfamiliar.

To myself.

And maybe to others.

To become.

Yet again.

Where are you clinging?

Where are you shining a headlamp into the darkness?

Where are you letting go, allowing, and becoming?

And please just know, it's all perfect.

My struggling against my own becoming,

That’s perfect.

My avoiding the growth and expansion that is knocking on my door,

Perfect.

All of it, food.

All of it, waking me up.

In its own sweet way, in its own sweet time.

Waking me up to the inevitability of the truth of who I am:

source, life, love, energy, the sparkling stuff of animacy.

A wild collection of energy moving through a wild collection of cells, animated and inspired by the stuff of sequoias and blue whales and pitcher plants and peregrines, lava flows, the dolphin’s bottlenose, and ever little moss and lichen and bacterial colony on the way to only God Knows.

Life!

Just life!

Just pure, unadulterated, life!

I’m made of it.

And the ingredients that make me up are elemental, ancient and have been flowing like a river to the ocean for as long as life has lived.

And I’m no exceptional case either.

You too are life.

You too are ancient and elemental, moving and transforming, and what animates you is what animates the riches rainforests, the most vibrant reefs, the most stunning auroras: LIFE.

Life.

Life

Life.

My prayer for you is my prayer for me.

That we trust life more and more and partner with its queer plans for us.

Into the dark. Into the unknown. Into the mystery.

Into life.