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For the next two weeks I'm in San Francisco, my favorite American city, co-teaching a group of 19 extraordinary individuals from four countries how to be sexological bodyworkers. It's a modality that is subversive and status-quo irreverent. And it’s the one modality that has infused my private practice with such luminous hope for the healing and wholing of our human community.

It's a good thing I didn't have any idea 'This Process of Aging' would strike such a chord. I would have been tempted to say everything I say here in this post, in that post, and it would have gotten so long that none of you would have had the time to read it. Worse, none of us would have heard all the glorious stories and experiences each of you shared. So, here is the next installment of my experience with this thing we call 'aging' which, as so many of you intrepid explorers have courageously learned, is as much a mind game as it is a fact of life. 

I am getting older. Of course, this is true for everyone, but it has arrived for me like an insistent house guest, and I find myself its ambivalent host. For a while, cruising through my late thirties and into my mid-forties, it felt like I was actually getting younger. Each year filled with a sense of youthfulness and discovery. I felt like an innocent, testing out the deep waters after decades of playing in the shallow end. And then it happened.

Synesis: is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term derived from Greek σύνεσις (originally meaning "unification, meeting, sense, conscience, insight, realization, mind, reason") This morning it is cold frigid air has cast a spell and from where I stand in my parka and boots warm on the inside of the door nothing moves out there

A few years back, while in the beginning stages of weaving a cross-cultural story gathering technique for The Global Culture of Women, I had the honor of sitting with a group of Lakota Sioux women in South Dakota. In that fierce circle of mostly elders, I was given one of the more profound gifts of my life. I was in the midst of reassembling my life after divorcing the father of my children, a man who was, hands-down, one of my dearest closest friends in the world.

Tonight (and for several days now) I am sitting with the awareness of the truth that we (those of us who make our living sitting with others, guiding, offering wisdom, tools etc) can be so eminently helpful, wise-seeming, perhaps even perfect in our tidiness, all the while we are spinning in our own lives. I fit this category at the moment. Right now. It is humbling. Oh, is it ever humbling. It is so tempting to imagine I'm a fake.

Don't take up the fight without first falling in love. It is a dangerous and slippery thing to imagine nobility in the fight against. We must learn how to fight for, which isn't fighting at all. It's loving. Do not believe the ones who tell you "We must do the things we least want to do!""Now! There is work to be done!""We must get strong! We must fight!" These are tempting invitations for a world filled with heartbreak that, in its ensalvement, can only express itself as rage.

So I want to talk about something that is as precious to me as the beat in my children's hearts, the breath in the Earthquake Man's lungs and the sound of the chickadee's song outside my window this warm winter morning. The wild and necessary primary partnership of Life/Death. Warning: if you err on the side of the linear, empirical and non-mythic this post IS absolutely for you. A few years ago, after a vision fast brought the name of 'Night Mare' into my life, as I was coming alive to so many things, I was awoken in the middle of the night by a presence. In the dark of my bedroom I felt a cold, fierce energy standing next to my bed. The fear I had was deeper than merely for my own safety and the effect this fear had was to call me to attention rather than to flee. I sat up, wrapped my blankets around me, grabbed my notebook and pen and carefully asked "who is here?"

(In honor of my mother, Ruth Shenstone Harris Pelmas, who died suddenly in the shower just after her 75th birthday)

This morning I have a bold proposition for you. But let me back up. We hear so much bad news. We see such incomprehensible violence, against self, against other, violence as entertainment, violence against Life. I don’t know about you but it is possible for me to feel despair and hopelessness. But let me tell you what I think I’ve learned after 47 years. Despair and hopelessness are ego. They are not soul. They are not feelings. They are imposed states of mind. In order for us to feel despairing or hopeless we must make judgments about the way things are. About the way we are. Once we start down this road, we often lose our capacity to hear what it is we are here to do.