It’s my birthday today!
It’s my birthday today. I’m getting a massage, friends are making me dinner, and my bestie is coming for a two day visit. My mood is grateful and reflective.
Much has transpired since my last newsletter/blog. People I care about have moved on and moved away…
A beloved Buddhist teacher, Tory, died (she chose medically assisted dying due to advanced ALS.) Tory was a mighty woman who died with courage and grace, and she made a beautiful short film called Only The Mountain Remains (free on Vimeo) about her diagnosis and death. It’s evocative and inspiring, and well worth a watch.
My dear friend (a mentor of mine for the last decade) and her partner, who I wholeheartedly adore, moved away from Santa Cruz and back to the east coast last week. I feel sad to have lost the immediate proximity of two people who feel like family.
Leela Grace, my pup, turned 4 in mid-December. We have gone back to training because she is convinced that she is in charge. A 15 pound alpha! The gratitude I feel for her is immense. As Tory would say, I love her more than birds fly.
I continue to grieve the historic rise of antisemitism. I have wondered often about how people can advocate fervently for peace and justice, but only peace and justice for a select some… selective outrage, selective compassion, selective justice, selective peace. I continue to be impacted by the silence of friends - friends who say they are allies but never follow up, who say they will read resources I send out but never do, who don’t check in or ask questions when I share my experience. I am listening to an audio book called “People Love Dead Jews” and I have to pause it often to sob. The tears are primal, ancestral - a wordless wound.
I continue to ponder prophecies and end times, Islam defeating Christendom, the Jewish Messiach, Armageddon and resurrection and judgment, Condor and Eagle, and Kogi prophecies about the end falling into the beginning… I wonder daily about what is happening in the collective psyche, and the planetary bodies, and about the universal principle of “as above and so below.”
I read an article yesterday - the kind that impacted me like a grand piece of classical music, that rendered me reverent, silent, conquered, in the presence of something I would call Holy…. The author described himself in these terms (below) and it resonated so deeply… I felt a sense of kinship, communion.
“I am an animist in an age of machines; a poet-of-sorts in a dictatorship of merchants; a believer in a culture of cynics. Either I’m mad, or the world is… My most strongly-held belief is this: that our modern crisis is not economic, political, scientific or technological, and that no ‘answers’ to it will be found in those spheres. I believe that we are living through a deep spiritual crisis; perhaps even a spiritual war. My interest these days is what this means.” -Paul Kingsnorth
Like Paul, my interest these days is what this means.
