It is the driest November that I have experienced. As I started out this little walk around the neighborhood to feel the lifeworld of the darkening sky and the (maybe) return of a long-overdue winter, the rain began: sacred moisture. Rain here means snow a little higher; by morning, the ground will be white here too.

I walked back in, got my raincoat, and came back out.

The light is almost gone. I can still see well enough to keep the flashlight in my pocket. There's an internal switch/compass/calculus---no words really name it---a something which I am being mentored by as I try to reignite the fire of creativity in words. This is almost like code switching or task switching or hat switching.

So much of the last two weeks I have been taking in and feeling peace, engaging contemplative practices away from screens and immersed in some wild earthen water and land---the soundscape of the ocean and wind a lullaby of renewal and a full-bodied cleansing.

Yet, I'm a budding writer, and so something in there somewhere---some place, some reservoir, some hidden couloir---that has been getting filled is readying to make the turn and reengage with offered written reflections.

Of all that is writing, I think that's probably the hardest task: the turn from incoming to outpouring.

Sometimes I lean on a book or a poem or a song or something that has recently touched me deeply. Then I unpack that. Other times I just start from the blank page, the inner stillness, a place that while seemingly silent and quiet is really filled with the sound of the wind in this moment, the darkness of these woods I am walking through, the wetness upon my cheeks, or the deep imaginal space of the Yoga Neidra we just awoke from…

Really, writing is always all of it; only the angle changes.

I am so grateful to be alive. It is certainly not guaranteed. And it was almost not something that I could say here today, nearly 20 years after a suicide attempt. Yet I am just so profoundly grateful to be alive, to have made it through that dark night of my soul and into this life of depth, fertile darkness, creativity, fecund wildness, and deep intimacy with Collfeatherz.

Some small part of me feels heroic or brave that I made it through. Then, immediately and at the same time, another part of me crumbles in the face of it, recognizing now---without knowing the rite of passage language then---that what I really needed and was within was a metaphorical death. And yet, no matter the language or processing, what I saw out there on that liminal edge between this world and the next was so painful---a mirror of my own confusion reflected back to me on that most precious of precipices---that the return was anything but glorious, transformative, enlightening, or easy.

And yet….

I'm here...

I'm here and parts of me have been tempered and humbled and softened by the ceremonies that I have had the privilege of being a part of, and the emergent ones that wouldn't stay trapped inside me---the great un-becomings, deconstructions, indelicate dynamics...

And yet, even now, parts of me are still fragile and insecure, and there is an inner bully that I have yet to truly befriend, be-love.

And yet, I do still shy away from conflict or confusion or conversations that are unmapped, as if having a mapped way through would actually really get me anywhere to begin with---attachment traumas that still play through in my male fragility, defensiveness, confusion…

And even more yet, I am beginning to hold such reflections in the heart, learning to hold these nuances of paradox as invitations into meaning, purpose, and authenticity.

The wind is howling now, and the rain is quite cold. I can see the cars on the highway have slowed down because of the severity. The predicted storm is arriving, is here, and probably no one in this valley has any complaints about the second-order effects of that storm: driving slower, building a fire, adding a sweater and coat, and minding their steps on the ice and snow in the morning…

Why, then, was the storm of awakening so uninvited by me when the great unraveling demanded me into the ceremony of purpose? Why, then, do so many of us have to unlearn so much just to feel safe in our own bodies, our own bones, our own way/s of being?

I can only say at this point that, for me, the unraveling was the catalyzst past the invisible lie of duality that built this civilization and into an apprenticeship with uncertainty, paradox, impermanence, and the ineffable… ongoingly….

in kindness and gratitude

tbird