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This morning I am in love. I have been given a gift. Like a sip of water in the midst of a necessary desert crossing. My dayworld mind (the one that was trained by my isolationist culture) continues to tell me I’ll do this journey without provisions - alone. But that’s not true, and this morning, once again, I’m reminded.

An offering to this night.....

It is a crystal clear morning. The sun has made the flatirons brilliant pink. Glorious clarity of a new day abounds. And I, and the elkhound, are out marveling. Though the larger journey of this dismemberment follows me like an accomplished stalker. Never more than ten feet behind me, my new and unshakable friend, seems a little less present in this moment.

When all else around us fails, when the ground itself decides, too, to go away out from underneath us, there is nothing left to do but return to the one thing that will never go away. The One thing that watches us through it all, without judgment and with so much love. And that is, our primary relationship with this world.

This morning our elkhound is in a state of euphoria and reunion. He awoke to the ground lightly covered with two inches of snow.

In a few weeks I will step into my 49th year. For the past many months, perhaps even a few years, something has been stalking me. In the beginning it was subtle, faint. I would catch something out of the corner of my eye, then if I turned to look, it would be gone. I was filled with the sense of imminence. In the last two months I have felt the speed of this process increasing. It's not like these things happen without plenty of warning.

“If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.” David Wagoner Yesterday, for the first time, we harvested honey from our bees. This morning, having left this first harvest overnight so it could drip off the comb into a big bucket, I dip a stainless steel ladle into the golden pool and collect 1/3 of a cup of this elixir, pouring it into a squat mason jar. It sits on the counter glowing with sunlight, the brilliance of millions of years of Life extracting its own vitality and genius from its own making, over and over. Genius concentrate.

This morning I am sitting at the south end of the big farmhouse table in our kitchen, having my usual, mate tea. I am without human company. The EQM is in Italy and all our children are at their other homes. What a strange luxury that so many children in this country have two homes. A luxury I imagine many of them would have forgone if it meant they would keep their parents together.

When I was eight I experienced an unequivocal, felt sense of my place as a daughter of the earth, as one who was not only of the world but deeply loved by the world. Though I did not understand it in these terms until I was in my adolescence, this intimate connection with the world was made through my sexuality (the creative generative energy that is how you and I and everything else got here). It never occurred to me that this was not everyone’s experience because, in the magical thinking that is so particular to the 8 year old, I thought surely I must be just like everyone else.