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It took me a moment or two before I realized I was hearing something I’d never heard before. Standing in the still-slumbering garden of my suburban home, I listened, mesmerized, to the unrecognizable sound of silence.

A few years ago, after being told I would be arrested if I ventured out into the fields one more time, I was so filled with rebellious anger I continued to take the dogs out there, only after sunset, keeping to the edges. But these fields are some of the last remaining coyote hunting and living territory in this part of Boulder…

This time of late Autumn is the time of Ancestral celebration and remembrance. It is a time when, across many cultures, it is said 'the veils between the Worlds are thin' – that our departed family can venture across the threshold to be with us, tell us stories, help us remember integral pieces of our own belonging and wellness…

Western Industrial Culture does not prepare us for the tremendous losses that have always been a natural part of being human. But worse, it cannot afford to prepare us for the impossible losses that have now become ubiquitous.

When I was 11, by some fortuity that happened over and over in my childhood, I discovered permission in the form of words (words that served to weave spells of wild rebellion rather than domestication). Margaret Atwood told me….I had a power heretofore unknown to me…

Diane di Prima, beat poet and activist, says, “the only war that matters is the war against the imagination”. This morning I am alive with the truth of this statement. And, I am filled with grief and rage. 

…I was having a gentle conversation with an ancient aunt who turned to me at one point and said, “sweetheart, you’re fucked. Just live.”

“…we were in the midst of two black bears busily filling their bellies with plums and apples in anticipation of their imminent long Winter’s nap. What a gift of a reminder of what is actually going on here: Celebrate! Eat! Get your fill! For tomorrow it will be quiet, cold and dark…for a good long while…”

My younger son turns 21 today. And OH what a morning it is! Already, the chickadees are bombadeering around the yard, rabbits are munching on fallen apples and the fish are voraciously feeding in the cattail grasses, their bright orange tail fins waving above the water like airfield navigation flags for the dragon flies who maneuver in formation above the pond like pilots in an airshow competition. And, as if this weren’t enough, the squash leaves are as high as an elephant’s eye, and it looks like they’re climbing clear up to the sky……It’s that kind of morning.