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In mid-Spring of this year, I found myself driving home with a 6 week old female wolf hybrid. The runt of the litter. Part of a private rescue which required that 19 puppies belonging to three litters of various percentages wolf, be wisely placed in Boulder homes. This little creature, this impossible treasure, who would become to us Ruby Dragon Chickadee, was shaking and silent as she huddled in her new Auntie Alyssa’s lap. Ruby’s litter was the youngest of the three and the highest wolf content – likely 75% gray wolf DNA running through this little one’s tiny pulsing veins and ancient intelligent spirit.

This morning I am full of the most welcomed heartbreak. It’s a heartbreak that, as recently as last year, I thought I might not experience in this life time: the mother’s heartbreak of sending her oldest son off into the world to make his way, find his own brilliance and bring it forward. As recently as 12 months ago, I was trying to reconcile what it might be like to attend my son’s funeral, or visit him in jail…very different reasons for leaving home than the remarkably normal process of a young man fledging himself robustly, brilliantly into the world. 

As a people, those in industrialized culture, we no longer know how to listen for the larger story going on all around us and within us; the story whose substance is what allows us to be here, that when translated back into its original language, sounds like the hum of the land and the song of the chickadees. Rather we listen to the stories of lack or the distraction stories of ‘doing’ or ‘victim’. We worry that we have not paid our taxes, that the car needs an oil change, that we are strangely ‘depressed’, don’t seem to be able to sustain meaningful relationships or haven’t really experienced this thing we call ‘happy’.

This was an extraordinary year. That must always be true, but some years seem to require a more pumped-up celebration at the end, to have me truly feel like something remarkable and complete has wrapped itself up, right at the moment that something else, new and unknown, is sprouting up from its ashes. This year is one of those that needs no extra hype. It has been one hell of a glorious, treacherous, heartbreaking, exalted ass-kicking of a year. As a result, the dark days between the Solstice and New Year’s were a tremendous, big deal.

I wrote the poem, below, four years ago this week as I (and my then husband) plowed through the heartbreaking and arduous task of packing up two or three generations of a wealthy family's collected condensed belongings. My mother was the last of her family still alive, all three sisters and both parents having died long ago. This 3000 square foot house, a gorgeous showcase built to be just that, filled with silver, paintings, sculptures, rugs, furniture, bedding, and books. The books. Each item bringing with it a panic in my solar plexus, an immediate non-conscious increase in my heartbeat.

As a people, in industrialized culture, we have lost our fundamental human capacity to be present in our lives; alive and engaged in this moment, in relationship with ourselves, each other and The World (the Earth, the Animals, the Wild) in the place where ceremony, ritual and prayer naturally arise from the bones of us as we go. We no longer inhabit the intelligent human place where our lives are living-in-motion ceremony, prayer and rituals of first-and-foremost, gratitude and appreciation and then of reflection and witness of ‘I see what’s going on here,' ‘I see this glory of which I am an inextricable moving part.'

Each morning I walk down the hall out into the open room facing South/West with its 10’ wide glass doors framing the fields and the front range of the continental divide. And each morning I gasp, dumbfounded, grab my camera and often run outside mostly naked(in this below-zero weather I put on my giant raspberry parka and ugg boots) and race out into the first field with the horses-who-have-not-frozen, the horses-who-got-fuzzy-overnight, and I take a picture.

We are taught some dangerous mis-truths about our sexuality. And when I say ‘taught’ I certainly don’t mean literally. For no one ever actually sits down with us and teaches us about this energy or how to touch ourselves when we are children and we are learning. The touch we find our way into as children, as babies, is intelligent. Playful. Far-reaching. It’s whimsical and circular. We move here and then there. The touch we find our way into as we become more aware of ourselves and our sex is the touch we are ‘taught’ by a culture fundamentally structured by shame of our humanity, that teaches us to want and need the most superficial of things in an erroneous effort to receive the most (unspoken) essential things. 

This morning, once again, there are two roan geldings in the first field. Young, playful, manes and tails full of burs. They canter back and forth with each other, kicking, swishing their bur-filled tails, tossing their heads down and their hind hooves high in the air. They are delighted. They spend hours standing under the giant old apple tree, eating fallen apples and the tender green shoots of grass that grow up around the rotting fruit.

Tonight I am aware of something, as the mornings get colder and colder upon my waking, watching the elkhound race out to the first field, leaving footprints in the frosty alfalfa shoots, who might imagine they still have a chance this year. I’m aware of how much I am in relationship with this house and this land I am so fortunate to live in and on. This cottage, this unassuming place that looks like one thing from the street and then, upon walking up the path to its front door, begins to let you in on some of its secrets.