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I do not know how to describe these moments, this time. This is a place of absolute Death and such utter aliveness. Such rightness and certainty of my own worth, my work, my devotion accompanies a heartbreak I cannot fathom. I am now in a practice of, perhaps ... just perhaps ... imagining ... surely my Death and my Life must go hand-in-hand? My true marriage; that of My Death and My Life.

Oh my goodness......people......here in the Northern Hemisphere the days are getting shorter. This last week, these mornings having my tea out on the deck requires slippers and a shawl. The color on the flatirons, in the cottonwood canopies, long across the meadows, is shifting, different; a flatter, golden, pale offering.

This morning is more than you will imagine; the way YOU affect me who affects the Cottonwoods and their canopy of shade-giving, life-dwelling branches, harboring Those who head out into the two Fields each day, which are the ground, the floor, the solace of green expanse for the grieving Hawk whose piercing cry affects the Elkhound who affects Me who affects You, and that’s just the small story. There is so, so, so much more.

This morning I am feeling fierce, protective, stirred and.....yes....I am feeling angry. Like a mother bear feels anger. It’s not your average anger. If you are still caught within the grasp of this business of domestication that is our species greatest catastrophe, you might not bother to read on.

 On this morning, when there are those of us arguing over which dead humans get to be Official Deadhumans in Gaza; while billions of dollars have been spent getting Rosetta within 60 miles of comet C-G, both of whom are now traveling at 35,000 miles per hour to engage in a deep space dance of never-before-achieved research of this comet's frozen layers of ice, dust and rock – particle leftovers from the formation of this solar system within which we float, of which we are an inextricable part; when famous interpretive ramen master Ivan Orkin has opened a long-awaited restaurant on the Lower East Side serving, yes, ramen...

I have been wanting to tell you about this winter, about the process of wrestling my body and heart out of a marriage I thought would last until I was ready to leave this life. I have wanted to make sure no one imagines me as anything other than human. Vulnerable. Messy. Lost.

It is one of our most impossible human gestures to lean in – to trust, to love, without conditions, without knowing the outcome. This is especially impossible when there is already a story of fear rooted in our minds. One of the oldest, most primal instincts in us is to grasp. And yet nearly everything that matters comes out of these incredible, sometimes impossible, human gestures that require surrender.

Yesterday as I drove in slow motion through the Dayworld on a road where the speed limit is only 30 mph, I passed a hulking hunkering dark brown vulture,   perched on a fallen tree trunk just over the still body of one who would now become supper for hundreds of others. In the way these things happen, and no doubt because of where I am in this particular moment, I slipped between the worlds and saw my own body, or more precisely, the body of the one of me who had been married to the Earthquake Man, lying prone beneath the barbed talons and perfectly bare beak of this glorious terrifying death eater.

I am in the midst of a great dying. A dying to the way I thought, was taught, I would be held by this world. The way I imagined my children would be held in this world. And in this place there is so little that goes unquestioned. In this place, so much needs to be remembered. In this place, making love is the most critical practice. Several weeks ago, one night, in the wake of my oldest son finding his way back into a deeper more intimate and dangerous relationship with heroin, this practice looked like being held, loved, cracked open, witnessed and pushed to the far end of ecstasy by a man whose purpose was to assist me to do, exactly and only, that.

What has you come alive. What has  *YOU* come alive? If you do not know this, stop everything to listen. Let your ears rummage through the chatter, for the voice that is saying the things which terrify you the most. “What am I listening to Christiane?” you ask. You’re listening to your soul. The voice that is telling you the things which terrify your ego the most is your soul.