I am walking on this high road, landscape falling away below me on either side by thousands of feet. Colleen is miles ahead, in flight, embracing her wild aliveness. The fog is one with the cloud line, and we are enveloped. We are in the desert and yet the rainfall and moisture of the past few days and this morning are unmistakably transformative. I am so profoundly moved by the brilliance of the lifeworld, the merging of the clouds, desert, rock, and movement.

I remember thinking last night that I would listen to podcasts, books, and maybe some articles on this day-long endeavor we have set off on. Yet now, high on this wild morning highway, all I can do is dance with the rhythms of music. Not one time when entering a long-distance running event have I not had an overwhelming and transpersonal experience of joy and gratitude somewhere along this course, a shattering of my everyday egoic state of mind into something vast, wide, open, fluid, permeable, transpersonal, oneness. This morning is no different.

For over forty years I have been a student of music, of the language of rhythm, movement, harmony, and silence. In some ways, given the social struggles which showed up in my life a few years after I began formal training, music became my primary language. On the land in ceremony a few years ago, I realized that I also experience synthesia with the plants moving in the wind---an experience where my subconscious translates visual cues with sounds. Alas, I deeply moved by sound, by music, by the cascade of emotions which emerge as I become entrained to the wild otherness of song.

I began writing last week on shatter zones and got lost in the implications. Margaret MacMillan (2025) explained that shatter zones are the interactive (geopolitical) regions where zones of influence meet. Historically, these places are where conflicts emerge, and her central argument in her potent Atlantic article is that we are returning to such a model of geopolitical order (away from the post-WWII international order and into a regional one). The critical element of this evocative term is that such regions become increasingly unstable. This we can see, she argued, happening across the world in increasing numbers of situations. I would argue that we can also see this happening in the fracturing of national identity within our vast country into regional affiliations, where being able to talk things out is increasingly no longer possible.

The erosion of the United States as a centralizing aspect of the international order---a country who deeply embodied checks and balances and essential democratic values for the last seven decades---is having leveraged impacts across the globe. I feel great grief about this within me, and a powerlessness which invites me deep into my practice.

How can we see this as a process, an invitation, a collective request for reconsidering our way of being not just as humans but as LIFE living amidst the interwoven, interconnected, and deeply participatory intercorporeality that is this planetary LIFEWORLD?

In 2010, I was beginning to find ground after nearly a decade of living within the midst and confusion of bipolar schizoaffective symptoms. I am so grateful that the dedicated healers I was amidst during those days did not see brokenness in me (or shattering) but rather my struggle (and symptoms) as processes. Somewhere during those days, on some scrap of paper I only barely managed to save by accident, I scrawled this poem. Fifteen years later, I still don't quite grok where it came from, for certainly it doesn't feel like my own (though it is):

S T O M P 

one - why

for to be for no breaks 

for now and now-ism:

all to safe the corporate creed,

all to save my trees,

be off that alone way

live out my stray's dream.

two - I capture

I endured present passion

for price to follow features.

is it not again that hourly rate,

haven't you been banished?

not the simplest sorts she gives,

not the simple earth.

cast stride away; foreget sorrow from frame.

three - be

shadows sort mention.

the question holds power, 

never the answer.

it is what to why

that is not why to how.

we live philosophy, but we breath element.        

Deep in the midst of ongoing unfolding

tbird

References

MacMillan, M. (2025, April 30). This is the way a world order ends. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/04/world-order-europe-trump/682639/