Marching Toward Spring

Happy March, my friends.

I want to let you know that on February 27th, I released my monastic vows in a short, private ceremony with Shugen Roshi at Zen Mountain Monastery. I will never be able to sufficiently express my gratitude to him, the monastics and the entire community for all that I received in my 15 years of practice and training there.

My current spiritual explorations are leading me to forms and archetypes that are non-hierarchical, rooted in the feminine, and that understand that everything is political. Here’s to manifesting my deepest desires for a more just, loving and joyful world as a layperson!

In other news: my friend Bethany Senkyu Saltman’s book Strange Situation: A Mother’s Journey Into the Science of Attachment is coming out on April 21st, but it’s available now for pre-order. (Pre-orders are good for writers! They signal to stores/reviewers that this is a book of interest.) Strange Situation is the alchemy that happens when a person draws on their deepest magic—Bethany’s relentless curiosity, intellectual rigor and storytelling—to grapple with the fundamental matter—how we love. But don’t take my word for it! Sharon Salzberg said this: “A beautifully written account of the courage, luminosity and sheer audacity of loving someone.”

Lastly, a resident at Zen Mountain Monastery interviewed me last September about Zen and feminism; the interview starts on page 4.

I hope you’re finding your inspiration as we bring this winter in for a landing and march toward spring. Thanks to all of you who continue to support my work!

What’s Inspiring Me Now

• Carol Kyoryu Dysinger—a person I actually know—WON AN OSCAR for her documentary Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl). Here’s to women who’ve been at what they do for decades getting some well-deserved recognition.
• What Creative Type Are You? quiz from Adobe Create. Fun!
• Carl Grauer is a fine artist portrait painter that I knew back in my Brooklyn days. He was an amazing artist then, and fourteen years later, he’s just keeps getting better and better. He works and lives in the Hudson Valley.
• ***clears throat*** I’m just going to leave this right here.

What’s Inspiring You Now

• Thank you to Jordan for turning me on to the Design Matters podcast—amazing! Some of my favorite episodes so far: Aminatou Sow, Roxane Gay, Chani Nicholas, Esther Perel, and Brene Brown.
• Thanks Mary B for sending around this great interview with Sonny Rollins.

What’s inspiring you now? I would love to hear about it and include it in my next newsletter…

[caption id align="alignnone" width="2375"]

Phases, 2020 . 30” x 20” Acrylic on watercolor paper. [/caption]

New in the Shop

On Friday, February 7th, I picked up my paintbrush again. Or, more accurately, my wooden skewer, which is what I used to create my latest painting (above). It’d been a couple months since I’d made a painting, and I was starting to feel a little concerned about it. But then all of a sudden, painting called out to me and we ran into each others’ open arms.

It was such a joy to create. I love listening to podcasts while I work—it babysits my thinking mind so that what needs to get created gets created. And I get to learn about all sorts of things and people. On a snow day mid-month, my beloved friend, housemate and filmmaker Mary B made a short film of me working on this new painting.

[caption id align="alignnone" width="2448"]

Five of Cups from  The Wild Unknown Tarot Deck  [/caption]

Card of the Month: Five of Cups

Known as the “grief card,” its meaning is apparent no matter what deck you’re looking at. This is the beauty and power of the tarot—the way it signals to the deepest part of ourselves, through visual imagery, the truth that this, too, is part of life.

In a culture with only a few emotional speeds, the tarot shows us 78 subtle flavors of our experience, including grief. But who of us wants to delve into grief? It’s like we’re allergic to it. And this allergy can manifest either as “loving-and-light-ing” our way to an emotional and spiritual bypass, or as setting up camp on the edge of our deepest wounds and traumas.

Grief is both a journey we take and a place where we do the work of transmuting the pain of loss into a humbling appreciation for the mystery of life. Ancient mythologies called this the Underworld. It’s a liminal space where the familiar becomes strange and the deep, scouring pain of our grief can illuminate the everyday in surprising ways.

I remember a moment last summer—a most sparkling, clear day—when I was trudging up the gravel road to my a-frame, carrying too many things, numb with grief. I looked up at the green-gold latticework that the sun and sky make with the green, fluttering leaves of the treetops, and I dropped to my knees (literally) and wept for the beauty of it. Grief can do that, too. (To be clear: it also made me thin and weak with malnourishment, it made me dark and heavy with isolation. Grief has many faces.)

The ruling planet and sign of the Five of Cups is Mars in Scorpio. The God of War and the emotional intensity of the fixed water sign. It’s a good shorthand map, of sorts, for navigating grief. Don’t we usually fight it at first? I sure do! If it turns out we’re up for the journey, we surrender our (illusion of) control and submit to the intensity of grief’s mysteries, letting it initiate us into a new understanding of who we are and what our life is about.

The grief that accompanies loss brings us to a crossroads—a place of great power. One road has us folding our current loss into the familiar story of who we are and how life works: “No one is ever there for me. I can never get what I need. I am not enough. I am not okay.” The other road is one we have to cut through ourselves. To take this journey, we have to be willing to not know who we are, at least for a time. We have to be willing to descend into the muck of where our stories first got written into our bodies and nervous systems and dig around with our fingers in the fetid mess to pull out the pearl. Just willing; that’s all we have to be.

While we do much of this work alone, the journey becomes a healing when we allow others to support and nourish us along the way—friends, community, nature, 12-step recovery, therapists, healers. While it’s some of the hardest work we’ll ever do, we get to make a new map and a new story to navigate this new territory.

I’m beginning to think that the larger good of going through a thorough and honest grieving is not personal. I mean, surely it is; it transforms us. But I think the larger purpose of that journey is to make us ready and willing to move this work out into the collective. To let our personal process sharpen our tools for navigating grief so that we can help each other through the communal grieving that we need to do.

Our country is deeply haunted by settler colonialism, Indigenous genocide, racial capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. There is so much grieving to do that I think it’s helpful to shift from thinking about it in terms of clock time to thinking about it in terms of mythic time, or kairos. This is not something we’re ever going to check off our to-do list.

I’m in the midst of taking an online class called Before We Were White, for people who identify as white. We’re exploring ancestral recovery in terms of our country’s history, our ancestors’ history, harm caused, harm received, and resistance. Several times in this class, I have felt my body bloom in surging activation as I approach the edge of what feels like a bottomless grief. The loss of connection to land, to nature and natural cycles, to the body, emotion and feeling, to communal living, work, rest and celebration. And as a white person, I have to reckon both with the grief over my losses and those of my ancestors, and also the grief over the harm I and my ancestors caused as white people living in a white supremacist culture.

Individualism is a poisonous storyline. It leaves us thinking that we have to do everything by ourselves, that we are responsible for all of our problems and feelings, that if we’re struggling it’s because we’re not doing enough or trying hard enough. There is medicine for this disease. We are each others’ medicine. We are not only not alone, but we are deeply connected to each other through the mysterious and magical root systems of our ancestors, our stories, our hopes, fears, and dreams. Our healing can only happen together.

If we shifted our gaze to see how the systems we live under are actually impacting our everyday lives, we might not stand for it. Which is why working through our personal grief and trauma becomes so important to preparing us for deep collective grief-work. Our personal work hones our chops for the larger work. We learn to be vulnerable, humble, patient. To surrender and trust. To reach out and receive love and care. To let that love and care shatter our illusion of isolation so that we know that this is what our life is about—offering ourselves and each other love and care. And we don’t have to wait until we have our personal grief tied up neat and tidy, because that’s probably not going to happen. Now is always a good time to start.

Want more? For a profound dive into the Five of Cups, including the neurology, poetic expression, and rituals/rites of grief and mourning, check out the newest episode of the Between the Worlds podcast.

Find out more about my tarot work, or schedule a tarot session.
I pull a Card of the Day and write about it on Instagram and facebook.

WHAT’S INSPIRING YOU NOW?