As many of my regular readers know, I’m just back from a total darkness retreat, a visit to the womb cave of the Great Mother, Earth, the gestational darkness that is the genesis of all of life. The creatrix.

Well, first, here’s what I’ve learned about my inner landscape over 3 decades of going on monastic, silent, plant-medicine, and now total-darkness retreats. My emotions are like a series of nesting baskets. The larger ones are more comfortable than the smaller ones that fit inside them. As I drop down, each emotion is more concentrated and difficult than the last. Retreats are about remaining still in difficult emotions rather than protecting them.

My biggest basket is anger, my happy place. For some, anger is the last, most avoided basket, but not for me. From irritation to annoyance to full-on furious rage, I feel powerful when I’m angry. All the other baskets fit into this one. Almost everything in the world, for that matter, fits into the anger basket. There’s just so much injustice.

After that, the next basket contains the spectrum of fears. Though smaller, this is also an enormous basket. Safety is my driving force because I grew up in domestic violence. I’ve gone to great lengths to secure my personal safety even though I know that safety is an illusion. There’s no such thing. I, or a loved one, could get a diagnosis tomorrow, or some other seemingly random-ass thing can knock your legs out from under you. We’re all going to die. So, I’ve spent much of my life chasing an illusion, like most of us.

After that comes despair and self-loathing, the what’s-the-use, and the I-wish-I-was-dead. The black slate of refusal-to-feel is filled with death thoughts. Though despair is terrible, it’s not the end.

My smallest basket, cramped and claustrophobic, is helplessness. After that, there’s only death. That’s what I’m helpless about. You can’t bargain with it, you can’t change it, and you absolutely don’t want to do it. For most of my life, I’d almost rather die than be in helplessness, which is rather ironic, so it’s the place I had to go whenever I really wanted to grow or change. I used to think that sucked. All those retreats put me in harm’s way of my greatest fear - lather, rinse, repeat.

When whatever retreat was about 60% done, the projection machine simply stopped, hahaha, or it broke, and I was free. Stillness. No grasping toward me or pushing away from me. Calm.

And… blink, blink, the stillness was full of love, or joy, or some other quality of the divine nature. This time, it was gratitude. Volcanic gratitude, an I-can’t-stop-crying gratitude. Yes, it was too beautiful to bear.

Of course, helplessness doesn’t resolve into power, or strength, or force, or even right action, as I thought it would. That was an impotent fantasy, rather like the one our warmongers are trapped in. Isn’t it amazing that helplessness resolves into gratitude rather than into the power to make things happen? Now, that shows the Divine Whatever has a sense of humor.

The first, and biggest gratitude, was for all the unanswered prayers that protected me from myself. It’s hard to imagine now, but there could come a time we are all kinda grateful for all the shitty things our MAGA and religious right have revealed to us… about us. I can see it coming down the road. Honestly, I live for the moment.

Projection is this outgoing flow of ego that superimposes a worldview upon reality and causes people to experience and commit atrocities. We take our negative and positive qualities and project them away from us, causing all kinds of unnecessary suffering.

For an example of positive projection causing suffering, just look at all the people who are convinced that Trump is sent by some god to save them. Or our worship of celebrity. Or, for most of us, falling in love. Then, when we are getting divorced, we take back our positive projections. “I thought you were so kind, but you’re just…”

The idea that there is a big Daddy God who wants men to be in charge is also a projection. The divine isn’t like that at all. The true believers of the Dominionist Project are all projecting their craziness onto the culture. The be-all-that-you-can-be war project, the profit-from-war shareholder project, and the maintain male power project are all the same. None of it is true. Take a look at the safety project, which is Zionism. Notice how investing in the projection actually makes you less safe? These are all dangerous projections, beliefs with consequences.

When projection stops, there’s an ebb tide, which is what retreats are for me. Stillness. Then, I can see reality. Turns out, the conjunctio oppositorum to helplessness is gratitude. My apologies to all you non-Jungians for the Alchemical Latin. It just means the opposites that have to be joined as one because they are really a spectrum.

Gratitude! I never imagined that. Shows what I don’t know.

When I first turned out the lights, I had an experience of my death boundary. I felt the darkness pressing on me, like an enormous cat that smells milk on a baby. Darkness was alive and wanted to smother me. It had such heft and fur, molded to my skin, stretched across my face, my nose, my mouth. I can’t breathe!

So, I let it have me. There was no point in trying to fortify the barrier that was my skin, a semi-permeable membrane at best. I relaxed, accepted that the darkness was heavy, and that it wanted IN.

And it resolved into peace. This whole experience lasted about 45 seconds, because I didn’t run from the horrible monster: Helplessness. After that, the darkness was my friend and teacher. More on that in another post. This one is about projection.

Let me just say, it was deep and beautiful, and I’m not ready to write too much about it yet. Maybe next time. Soon come. I’m still integrating. But one thing I saw was that my projection machine was only a personal version of the big, cultural projection machine that keeps us all from reality. And the mechanism, the way it works, is the same way it does in an individual. It’s good that it’s so simple. Please note, I did not say easy. I said simple.

We are so afraid of ourselves. Before I left, people told me over and over that they could never… We think we would lose our minds. Barring execution, what’s our worst punishment? Solitary confinement. In the dark.

But you only lose your false mind, that crazy, blithering, projection machine of opinions, which only has one purpose: protecting you from reality. Let that in for a moment, because it’s protecting you from love.

Yes, the craziness bubbles up and out from the deep insanity aquifers of our culture. The stories of why, who hurt me, and whatever I think is to blame for the whole human catastrophe. Yes. Let it run until the river of the psyche is clear. Why not? You don’t have to merge with it. You don’t have to get wet. You can let it flow by without touching it.

But say you do merge with it, and totally soaked, you believe you are that person? Also, no problem. Just as identifying with the characters in a movie is no problem. We can laugh and cry. When the movie is over, you know you were never that character.

So, I had a little snap the other day, when I saw that misogyny is self-loathing projected, because extremely fortified people still have tender emotions, they just hate them. It’s a sign of weakness in a culture of domination where no vulnerability is allowed. So the mechanism, the projector, pushes it away, outward onto women, en masse. It’s our job.

There are other projections about race, the terrors done in the name of whiteness, but today I’m talking about misogyny. Besides, there are better people than I to talk about race projections, for example.

People in power are telling young women that they can only be happy if they are submissive childbearers being taken care of by a daddy-husband. That’s because they really believe that men can only be happy in domination - of women, of working people, of each other, of the earth itself. But that’s a projection that is actually making them miserable. I can remember my father yelling at my prone mother, who was covering her head in anticipation of the next blow: Why do you make me do this?

Now, that’s a projection. According to him, her life would be a whole lot easier and better if she would just stop fighting him. Surrender.

But real surrender isn’t submission. It’s stillness.

Here’s the truth: under the projections, men really love us, and that’s the part they are terrified of the most. They fear they would be obliterated, annihilated. Poof! They would explode into postcoital shards of light and cease to exist. Back in the old days, men called orgasm le petit morte, and called out, “I die! I die!” And there is a grain of truth in every lie. The false part of their minds would die, just like that. It’s happened to me several times.

So, women (and anyone who doesn’t fit the strict gender binary) must be sacrificed, over and over, until the dominators are on their deathbeds, and finally, there is nothing left to gain. That’s the greatest gift of Death. There is nothing that can fix it, no cure that money can buy, no elixir that can turn back the clock and make them young again. That’s when they turn, weeping, and say: I’m so sorry.

Those were practically my eldest brother’s last words, spoken to his only daughter, his favorite child, to whom he had refused to speak for the previous 16 years over her accusing him of being an alcoholic when she was a teenager. “I’m so sorry.”

You’ll never guess what he died of. That’s right: alcoholism.

And the deathbed patriarchs want us to answer that confession with a tearful, I’m sorry, too, and I’ve always loved you, which my niece did. We are supposed to make the loss of their entire lives meaningful because in the end… they finally saw: only love matters. Wahaa! Redemption. And it’s a deeply poignant moment, the pinnacle of a lifetime, the point.

But here’s the thing. No one has to wait until they are dying to have that moment. We can die right now. In fact, politically, we are dying right now. Self-loathing is being projected onto the world in unnecessary suffering as big as the sky, but this is not who we are. The opposite of suffering is joy. Joy is my sky.

The value in doing something like a dark retreat, for me at least, is the opportunity to step out of aculturated thinking. Once you do that, it’s easy to see both the screen and the projector, that mechanism of mind which takes the undesirable and unworthy inside us and sends it away from the vulnerable self, onto women as “other.”

Women do this the same way that men do when we accept the role, when we alter ourselves for the male gaze, when we play along with self-loathing because we don’t look like Barbie, or we don’t fantasize about Ken, or we tell ourselves some overarching story about our submission being what some god wants because, maybe he, like a powerful husband or father, will finally love us, then protect us, or let us into his Heaven.

If the unraveling of my personal trauma has taught me anything, it’s that we must face our own terrible demise. Just stop projecting. Then, perhaps, all these wars can stop. The Dark Feminine will show us her other face, the creatrix. For how could the creator be anything other than the feminine who is in love with the masculine?

Both are inside each of us, longing for the resolution of duality, a kiss, then making love, followed by gestation and a birth. Can we tolerate the long months of darkness required for gestation in the womb cave? We are in that work now. Can we breathe through the travail that follows?

The good news is we do not have a choice. As Sylvia Plath said, in Metaphors, this is a train on a track, headed to a destination. What we need now is not an engineer, but a very good midwife.

Because the genie is out of the bottle and she’s not going back. All these young women who are being convinced right now that they can be loved by men if they become trad wives will wake up as surely as reality created middle age. And I, for one, will embrace them with a soft “Welcome home. You have always been divine. It’s you, not he, who gives birth to the world anew.”

Yesterday, when I responded to ’s brilliant piece, Operation Mother Fury, about the possible draft for the travesty that is the Iran War, with a memory of Vietnam, she made me promise I’d write about it.

For me, the ugliest story in our mythological canon, the one I can’t get over, is the one where Abraham is so willing to sacrifice his son, Isaac. God revealed himself to me then, in all his horror. Though I was only fifteen, I saw his true nature, the one that underpins the whole patriarchal project: YOU MUST OBEY THE FATHER.

You know that moment, when you’re dating someone, and they do that thing, whatever it is, and you see them? I mean, really see them? Then you override your alarm and go forward with the relationship anyway. Years later, when you’re breaking up, you point to that moment and say to yourself: I knew it way back then. This is what the father-sacrificing-his-son story was for me, the moment when I understood who God was, though it would take decades for me to let the horror fully land.

This is how I remember it.

My eldest brother, Peter, turned 19 in 1972, during the draft for the Vietnam War, which was run as a lottery, a Hunger Games spectacle that was televised.

During this time, there were constant battles in the culture over the length of men’s hair. It was generational, but also ideological. My father sported a Marine crew cut, silently taking his stand. That style choice was as obvious as any MAGA hat. He had his three sons buzzed for as long as he had control over them. They hated this, but he didn’t care.

In defiance of my father, Peter had become a long-haired hippy freak. He looked like Rob Reiner in All in the Family. We, like everyone else, watched every week and debated the issues the show raised. For example, what would you do if you were on the gurney, all prepped for surgery, only to find out the surgeon was a woman? Would you hop off the table? Or what if you needed a heart transplant to live, and the only donor was a Black man? Would your body reject that heart? My father came down on the wrong side of many of these questions. We called the chair he sat in “his Archie,” because he was so like the main character, Archie Bunker.

Enter the draft.

Well, it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for? Don’t ask me I don’t give a damn. The next stop is Vietnam. Country Joe and the Fish.

Are you a man? Or a pussy?

For the weeks leading up to the draft, my parents argued. My brother was mostly silent, as was his way, but I could tell he had strong opinions boiling under there.

Mom said, “He’s going to Canada.” Even though it meant she’d hardly ever see him, even for a visit. She’d give up being a real part of his daily life, or his children’s lives, once he had them. But he would live. It was a sacrifice she was willing to make.

My father said, “If you are called, you must answer.” It was a matter of honor, of patriotism, of defending the homeland so communism would never come to the U. S. of A. My country, right or wrong. My son will not be a draft dodger.

All I knew was that I loved my brother and didn’t want him to go to either Vietnam or Canada. Oh, and if he went to Canada, he could never come back. Ever. For as long as he lived.

The diet of fear we were fed by our government then was all this bullshit about the balance of power between the free world and the communist world. Somehow, magically and logically (for men are never irrational), if we let communism flourish unchecked in Southeast Asia, they’d be banging on our front doors next. We had to go do this thing. No choice.

By 1972, 58,000 U.S. personnel and 2.5 million Vietnamese had already died. We had an obligation to finish it. As my friend, Mr. Vonnegut says, “And so it goes.”

It sobered my parents, that draft. Before that, their brawls were all about the balance of power in our home - domestic violence. Who would prevail? Who would be shamed into submission? Would my father resort to violence to win as he so often did? Or would he crumble into a sobbing shame heap when my mother humiliated him with her scathing accusation: Big Man. Stay tuned for the nightly drama, just add alcohol.

But this domestic violence was external, from the country, not the home. This was war. Now their fights were whispered.

Deep down and close to the surface, my brother only wanted my father to love him - to be proud of him, and maybe, dare I say it: to protect him. But he didn’t want to go. He didn’t believe we belonged in Vietnam, and he didn’t want to be maimed or die in an unjust war. But he had dropped out of college and lost the privilege deferment. He didn’t have bone spurs and wasn’t willing to shoot himself in the leg, so…

The six of us gathered in front of the TV. The way I remember it, they used lottery ping-pong balls in the air-popper machine, but that could be a conflation on my part. I’m not going to look it up. The balls had birth dates on them. My father sat in his Archie, my mother on the couch, the rest of us fitting in where we may. I sat next to Peter, arm touching arm, as was my right as his only sister and his favorite. They picked and picked. Three dates in March, close, but not April. A January, a December. Tense, tense, tense. Peter didn’t hold my hand, though I wanted him to. August. Then the tenth and final draw. April. Spines straightened. The 29th. Phew. Not the 22nd. That was a close one.

Not Peter. Not Peter. Not Peter.

As was typical of my family, we didn’t talk about this afterward. There was no celebration. My mother probably cried quietly. I don’t remember what came next. We all retreated to our own resentments. We never had to find out what Peter would have done. But estimates suggest as many as 125k men and their significant others fled to Canada, accepting that they could never return. No one knew a pardon would come. Many of them remained even after it did. I guess they had the proof they needed about our national Big Man.

My brother still wanted my father’s approval, and he still withheld it. My mother moved on to what she thought were bigger grievances with my dad than his willingness to sacrifice Peter to Vietnam. I couldn’t do it. Just couldn’t.

I had seen the face of God in my father, and it was terrible. He, like Abraham, had put obedience before his son’s life, and I was disgusted. What god wants that? How is that love? What the fuck is wrong with God, and for that matter, my father?

And I can tell you this: If they draft my son to fight in an unjust war, there is no limit to what I will do to keep him safe. I’m a woman, a mother, fierce and furious. That war god cannot demand the sacrifice of my son. We will not comply. Instead, we could stop venerating the god that drafts the whole culture into war after endless war since the whole fucking patriarchal project began.

I’d love to know what you think. Please comment, it’s my favorite part of Substacklandia, the comments.

If you read to the end - please leave a comment to let me know you did. I count them, you know… those hearts.

Another note about comments: Tomorrorw, I’m leaving at the crack-o-dawn to enter the darkness at Sky Cave Retreats. Six days - three days, and four nights of that in total darkness, where I expect to meet myself and kill the Buddha - full stop. I won’t be responding to comments, obviously. I’m completely unplugging from everything. The day after my return is Easter, and I’m spending that quietly with my family. I’m not going to look at Substack until after that. But I hope I find you here when I return. You are what makes Substackland my favorite place, all you super smart smarties, and super deep feely feelers. I look forward to connecting with you again… after.

Oh, my gods… what was I thinking?

It’s time to stop and tell the truth.

The patriarchal system delivers the same result over and over: war, oppression, abuse, exploitation, suffering. It turns out that if you hire patriarchal warlords and their jealous, angry god to run your culture, you’re going to be in endless wars, cultural and worldwide, public and private, no matter how much you insist you don’t want that. MAGA thought they were buying America first. No more foreign wars; no more regime change. It didn’t work out.

It’s all noise.

Human beings merge with stories to our detriment, in agreement or opposition, and the patriarchal project exploits that. Stories don’t affect reality at all, just our experience of it. They have created so much noise, so many stories, so much chaos, that both sides find themselves in a new war before they can even say no. Because their patriarchal dominion project is overseen by a war god.

Lately, I’ve become increasingly aware of these belts around the circumference of the globe, made of noise, the oppressive business of everyone’s thoughts and opinions. The president who is a traitor… and war… Iran, Venezuela, Gaza, Ukraine… And more. There’s been a new genocide every 1.4 years since 1956. The depth of our rape culture that still allows the Epstein trafficking and blackmail ring to remain unresolved, though all we have to do is follow the money. Plans for how we are going to overcome them, and the abdication of responsibility that claims we are already defeated. The climate is already past the point…

And we know the stories aren’t true, sometimes even as we repeat them. Her fault; his fault; fucking billionaires. All the mythologies of the one god, the true prophet, the rightness of male domination, and even the hope for a return to an earlier female-centered egalitarian culture are all just stories.

Since my personal noise is mostly quiet, I sit with the cacophony, which never escapes Earth’s atmosphere because of an ozone layer of suffering. Every species that isn’t already extinct, the flora and fauna on land and in fish and plants in the oceans, are releasing depth charges of suffering, which we ignore, refuse, and push away with more noise. Pass the ketchup.

There are two other options.

Option 1: Withdrawal

Refuse to participate. Join a monastery. Become a hermit. This is a very attractive archetype for people like me. It’s my Plan B. “If things get too bad,” my fantasy says, “I’ll go up to Nova Scotia and join Pema Chödrön at Gampo Abbey.” I’m no Buddhist, mind you. But as a patriarchal mythology, they are one of the least offensive and most beautiful. Patriarchies exist on a spectrum. They aren’t all as horrible as our own.

A less drastic version of Plan B is the fantasy of the isolated hermit house in the woods with a productive garden, some animals, and complete self-sufficiency. That’s the ideal. For a while, it was a tiny house. Or I could create self-sufficiency here in the middle of busy Los Angeles, grow my vegetables and flowers, trade with neighbors in the gift economy, sing in a Threshold Choir, and participate in the noise as little as possible. You can see from my busy Substack that I’m not yet the hermit I aspire to be. Age will catch up with me, though, and complete the process. By the time most of us die, everything that still belongs to us fits into one brown paper bag.

Option 2: Attachment

When my spiritual chips fell, I realized that Buddhist mythology was wrong about attachment, or they weren’t giving the full picture. The lack of secure attachment is a patriarchal approach - diagnosable. Sidhartha Gautama was a noble son.

But you can attach firmly if you are willing to grieve when that attachment is inevitably broken. That’s all that’s required. Willingness to feel grief. So, I attached to my family, my kids in my high school classroom, my community, and my commitment to truth. The prayer was simple: Show me who I am in Truth. That prayer marshals the universe, the invisible and the visible. Once the process begins, the prayer becomes: I’m willing to feel this. There’s no need to untie the Gordian knot; love melts the illusion of rope.

Here’s another truth: We never needed patriarchy to create art, science, literature, architecture, medicine, or any of the beautiful disciplines. In fact, all those beauties were held back by the exclusion of women and racial minorities - held back by a lack of perspective so stunning it thought the Birka warrior was a man for over 130 years. And, refused to see until 2013, that 75% of ancient cave paintings were done by women. In fact, some scholars still insist that the woman’s prints must have been made by adolescent boys, because women just couldn’t have…

Bla, bla, bla. It’s pathological in its underlying terror of women. That terror projected is mysogyny.

But ancient egalitarian cultures weren’t gender obsessed like we are. They didn’t use gender as a marker. Modern mythologists have a really hard time imagining a world that isn’t structured by gender hierarchies. They simply can’t. But that doesn’t mean our ancestors didn’t. Proof exists in our eldest indigenous cultures, which are alive and thriving today, but racism won’t let us see it. Because primitive…

All patriarchy gave us that we couldn’t have accomplished better and sooner as an egalitarian culture was an insistence that women start moving in with their husband’s family, take their husbands’ names, and pass their property to his sons. See, women, by now, no longer control their bodies or their children. Though it was completely unnatural, power over those things transferred to men. That’s why they needed violence. Then, thousands of years later, they plan to use that seismic shift from how everything always was to take away our vote. Because your name will now have to match your birth certificate. Sneaky bastardos.

Way back when I was seeking enlightenment, I used to think the world was lost - too violent, too complicated. Saving it was an impossible project. Better to transcend it. But it was always myself I was seeing, not the world. Now that I’m past the cult of my own personality, I see that all those arguments about things being too complicated are the excuses I’d used so I could put off the inevitable death of my own false self and all the ways, subtle and gross, I kept it alive. Cultures do that, too.

Most of the true spiritual teachers I’ve sat with avoid politics as the messy entrapment it is. Most people can’t talk about it without losing themselves to a story, a trance as vivid and true to life as the best movie. We just have this tendency to merge with stories, which is why I call us homo mythologica, for clearly we don’t live up to the name sapiens. So, while I was waking up from my personal victim story, if I became entranced, my teacher would call me back to reality. “Not that,” she would say. “Not that.” I haven’t seen my teacher in over 20 years, but I can still hear her voice sometimes. “Not that.”

I wanted to be at war with my parents over my childhood, especially that dead parent, my father, who didn’t make it out of our story alive. And I was right about them, and wrong about what mattered because I was at war. Winning was what mattered to me then. If patriarchy has taught us anything of value, it’s that you can prevail, you can win the war, and lose something more important. That’s why I’m not at war with men or patriarchy. Instead, I tell the truth.

And speaking of spiritual traditions, so many patriarchal mythologies, even the more benign ones, have painted this world as bad, as something to overcome - as fallen - because of a woman in most but not all cases. But that woman-blaming creation myth was only a projection of the mind. The beautiful world, the garden, is still reality. What descended was a projection of our collective mind - the fall from grace was mental. Grace hasn’t moved. It’s time to withdraw that projection and see the world without it.

We do that by stopping.

It’s simple. Center into your heart. Listen. It says yes to this, and no to that. Listen as an individual who is waking up from layers and layers of ancient trauma, stored in the DNA. Be brave when your heart says yes or no. The heart is right in the long run, even though it seems that you will lose everything. That’s why you must be brave, because the mind does not stop telling stories of doom simply because you have stopped acting them out. Let them play. Like a movie, it’s a light show. You can’t stop them anyway, and who is the person trying to stop them? The problem, that’s who. Just stop.

Can we do this as a culture? Can we collectively wake up and usher the world into a golden age of egalitarianism, where the answer to our problems is diffused through every part of our culture, readily available if we are only willing to listen to and share power with everyone?

Of course, we can.

It only seems complicated because we are afraid and don’t want to. But this is what the world is asking of us in the collapse of all our systems, our bottom, speaking in recovery terms. And I do speak in recovery terms, because patriarchy is addicted to the power accumulated through the compulsion to dominate. Money is just the mind’s system of keeping score. Our culture has all the money we need to take care of everybody. And that’s what money is for. Taking care.

What’s the answer to every addiction? First, you must stop the self-indulgence that perpetuates harm. Just stop.

Then the heart will urge you to do what you have been refusing to do. You must admit what you have been refusing to admit. Take care of what you have been refusing to tend to. Tell the truth where you have been lying. For example, we must tell the truth about the Epstein ring of abuse and international blackmail. Tell the truth about our rape culture that sees living, breathing girls and women as consumables - disposable. The culture that sees black and indigenous people as consumable - disposable. That sees workers as consumable - disposable.

That’s women and men. Lots of us. We must tell the truth about male suffering under patriarchy and about the many women who perpetuate this system, too. Listen, we’ve all done terrible things. That’s the nature of it.

Let the chips fall where they may. Don’t touch. Don’t fix. Don’t move. Stop. In the clarity after stopping, do what is simply obvious. Do that. The antidote to war is love. The answer to patriarchy is community. Loving, caring community. An egalitarian community that supports everyone.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Or just say hello. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Usually, I respond pretty quickly to almost every comment, but next week I’m taking option A: Withdrawal, because the options aren’t binary. We can do both! I’m immersing myself in a darkness retreat, turning to face my Self. Three days and four nights of total darkness inside our Mother Earth, so I might be a little slow in responding to comments. Please comment anyway. I’ll be back, perhaps with a little more clarity to share, at least that’s the plan…

Our dominance mythology just started another war.

This month, which we aren’t even halfway through, saw over 200 complaints from our service members to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, alleging that their commanders have framed the strikes in Iran as a biblically sanctioned holy war meant to trigger the return of Jesus.

As if Jesus were the one who needed this.

Since their god is supposed to be the three omnis (omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent), that triggers a few questions about their mythology:

• Why does Christ require a trigger?

• What kind of god wants a holy war?

Of course, they’d blame the victim - us. Jesus “can’t” return because of our unworthiness, creating their call to action: Jesus needs purity. But why does an all-powerful god need anything? Can’t he just melt our cruel, cruel hearts with love? That’s what I’d do, and for thinking like that, I guess I’ll be accused of being a demon.

The 7 Mountain Mandate, also called 7 Mountain Dominionism, believes that their mythology should take dominion, as in power over, the seven mountains

1. Government 2. Religion 3. Family 4. Education 5. Media 6. Arts and Entertainment 7. Business

   

In their myth, they are facilitating the end times through the epic battle of good vs evil, culminating in the Battle of Armageddon in the Middle East, which will usher in Christ’s 1000-year reign of peace. In this story, they are the “us,” and the rest of us are the “them,” the demonic forces that oppose them. Since everyone who opposes them is a demon, they have no problem killing us in our own cities. It’s part of God’s plan.

This version of end-times mythology began in 1975 with an “identical vision” shared by two leader-men, in which God gave each a list of spheres he needed them to dominate. Of course, it’s God (whom their own Bible famously says “is love”) who wants them to take dominion. That’s not a projection at all. It never is.

Now, I’ve been part of a church that visions, and I can tell you how easily the whole place can come into entrainment with any psychological projection that tells people that God wants what they secretly want. It sparkles with a numinosity you can definitely feel. This dangerous inflation is what fuels every street-corner preacher, where you drive by and think poor bastard, except the Christian Zionist mythological story comes with white power respectability and money.

So if the world is so terrible, why can’t God just HELP? Is he powerless? Why doesn’t Christ just appear, so full of love that we put our weapons down? Is it because he is sticking to some rule about free will that necessitates all this murder? But isn’t the omniscient god aware that there is an easier and much more loving and peaceful way?

Nope. This god is a war god.

When they claim they have a mandate from God to reclaim our government from demonic control, they remind me of our Puritan fathers adjudicating murder at our colonial witch trials, where up to 400 people were accused, often of demonic possession, resulting in 50 recorded executions, if we include colonies outside Salem - and we must. And that’s just what was recorded. They were also famously horrible at record-keeping and protecting the records they did keep from fire, flood, and rodents.

It’s interesting that our textbooks really only teach us about Salem, as if that were some one-off “outbreak of hysteria.” The youngest accused was a four-year-old girl, Dorothy Good, who was held in jail for almost 8 months. When I think of her now, she’s wearing a blue bunny hat, and she’s an ancestor of Renee Good.

Just over 78% of the accused were women, which tracks with the European witch trials, where an estimated 80% were women. That’s misogyny for you.

Saner people can agree that all those accused were not demonically possessed witches who threatened the lives of their good neighbors. Their real problem was the mythological story about who their god was and what he wanted in the context of the battle between God and Satan. You know, the war. Apparently, they never paused to ask the obvious question: Since we are the ones killing people, might we be the ones possessed?

These are just some of the wages of sin that come from dominion theology. For example, I’m not even talking about climate collapse or extraction capitalism yet, but I could easily tie them in.

When religious people commit such abuses of power as the Puritan fathers did, we shake our heads and call it “hysteria.” But we should call it psychological projection, because that’s what it is/

And 7MM are in control of our government all the way up to the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and backed by Russell Vought and the Heritage Foundation with their little book. Their mythology needs a war in the Middle East to start a world war and bring back Jesus because demons got the upper hand when we empowered women and minorities.

Ever wonder how those holier-than-thou can tolerate Trump’s obvious corruption, and even the taint of systemic pedophilia for profit? For them, God is using a rough instrument to get the job done. Trump is their Cyrus, a non-believer who gave them the mountain of government. Therefore, every criticism of him is demonic pushback, which is proof that demons are using humans to slander the “saints,” which is exactly what our Puritan fathers called themselves, too. Saints. Justification trumps introspection because ending projection is terrifying.

In many cultures, there is a mythology regarding the end of the world, which scholars call escatology. But most non-Abrahamic mythologies are cyclical. After death comes rebirth. Christians, however, have always been a this-world-is-bad doomsday cult.

For the first 100 years of Christianity, people expected Jesus to return immediately and usher in 1000 years of peace. The Gospel of Matthew says, “This generation will certainly not pass away,” before Jesus returns. When the last apostle died without a trace of Jesus, it triggered a major crisis of identity, causing them to pivot to creating institutions of power designed to last centuries.

Then came the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 AD. So many people expected Jesus to descend immediately that disappointment triggered a crisis of daily life. People stopped working. Then Paul weighed in with his Thief in the Night Theory, predicting that believers would be “caught up in the clouds.” We’re still waiting for that rapture.

In The Great Disappointment of the 2nd century, Christians faced such fierce mockery over Christ’s failure to return that 2 Peter 3 was written to address it. Enter the theory that to the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, an idea borrowed from other traditions. Then they decided the date was 1000 AD. Of course! People were so sure that they abandoned their work, their farms. and their daily responsibilities because there was no point. But the force of all that fervent belief didn’t make it happen.

I could go on through the millennia, but let’s jump to our modern mythology.

The next date we are all supposed to die is November 13, 2026, or 2028, because Israel has an anniversary, or April 13, 2029. Our Doomsday Clock is set at 85 seconds to midnight, and of course, we are all set to perish in 2033, the 2000-year anniversary of Jesus’ ministry, because that’s how he’s going to celebrate. Except Jesus won’t come these times either.

I just want to add here that the book of Revelation was one of the most disputed books in the history of the canon. By every measure they used to determine authenticity, that book was doubtful. It almost wasn’t included in the canon. When Trump invaded Iran, I fantasized about a world where that myth did not make the cut.

Just a word here, about anti-Christs. That title has been laid on: Nero, Attila, Gengis Kahn, Merlin, Frederick II, Napoleon, several popes, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler, and still the world has not ended. Surely, though, all of those were anti-Christs, in the sense of being the opposite of the mythological Jesus’ model of love and self-sacrifice so others might live, which also predates Jesus, who was only one in a long line of mythological saviors.

Does it make sense to you that the savior of the world would want a world war because he can’t make people behave?

These stories, like all stories, keep people from the truth. As all those New Agey people say, thoughts become things. I would just add: Because of projection. And thoughts about gods become gods. So, the doomsday Christians are hell-bent on bringing about doomsday. Myths are self-fulfilling prophecies in that way.

The doom is the fact that each of us has to die. That’s why they invented heaven. They invented hell as a means to control us. Because this world is evil, sex is evil, and women are evil. Fallen into sin. Ruled by demonic forces. It’s a short step from there to thinking that the original sin is being born here at all.

But let’s question the base assumption: Is the world fallen into sin, or is that a projection of existential terror, because a world where everything dies must be evil?

True evil is the force created by the indulgence in stories of cruelty, domination, and subjugation, the willingness to profit from other people’s suffering. Evil is the annihilation terror, which is fascinated with death, and kills over and over because of that fascination. It likes cruelty.

These doomsday cults, like 7 Mountains Dominion, pray for the world to go through a cataclysm so they can take dominion. But the evil they speak of is in the mirror. That taste for the mass spilling of blood? That’s evil.

Where does the fire come from that spits sermons from their mouths? Madness. Their god is a fabrication. If there were a god that wants this wholesale slaughter, including millions of children in Iran, Ukraine, and Gaza, he’d be a demon.

The need for dominion comes from a narcissistic self-importance that superimposes their world order upon the natural order. The natural world ceases to matter, and a mental schema becomes the only thing they can see. That doesn’t mean the natural world has ceased to exist, only that climate collapse has become a hoax, much like the crises of daily life that drove the ancients to leave their farms. It just doesn’t matter because the world is going to end.

There are signs all around them that their worldview is incorrect, and moments of revelation in which the Epstein files reveal the depravity and corruption behind what they are doing. So, they tell themselves a story about the bigger picture, using mythology to justify the means because the end is 1000 years of peace. But war has never created peace. Just as dominion does not create control, and subjugation does not lead to love. Not even for gods.

Every story is a mirror held up to the nose, showing you what you think the world is. Your mythology. If the 7MM cult became willing, they would see themselves in all their murderous, terrified, and ruthless intent. They are terrified of annihilation, which is what they fear would happen if they lost power. Death. They are terrified by what they imagine, which has been an illusion all along, their version of The Great Replacement Theory.

But losing power won’t kill them. Instead, it would raise them from the dead. Ask anyone who has left a cult and healed that trauma. Space. Freedom. Joy. Becoming a living embodiment of true purpose. There are many of us now, and that could just tip the scales.

But does it ever occur to them to surrender their cherished outcome? Dominion. That’s what I had to do, over and over. And my point of view, my story, and all the ways I projected that upon the world.

See for yourself. If you turn and face the fear, at first, it grows louder. You’ll have to tolerate some difficult emotions. Most people are not willing to sit still for that. They project. So, instead of resolving, the fear gains gravitas, and avoidance becomes a life-or-death necessity. You have to become willing to die. Then you’ll see what dies and what doesn’t. It’s preparation for the ultimate death, and shows us why death is really a friend.

Other cultures have known this world as sacred and could teach us how to remain still while existential terror passes. It’s possible. Then the story resolves rather than projecting conflicts outward. From petty fights to world wars, it’s the same reflex. Here’s the good news. Life does not end when your story ends; it changes form.

How many of you have had to admit that the story you were running wasn’t true? It feels like death, but it’s actually rebirth. That’s the irony. The truth is 180 degrees from the lie. We can turn and face ourselves. I know because I have done it, and I know many others who have as well. What we can do as individuals, we can do as a culture.

Imagine no religion. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky. John Lennon

We should know by now. We’ve had enough experience with wars to end all wars. The force that has to be used to dominate actually shatters the soul, causing insanity, and that causes more war and terror, shattering more souls.

And so it goes, as Vonnegut so succinctly said.

The answer is simple. Worship life rather than the fear of death. Step out of the story of domination.

We can have an egalitarian culture that supports all people, but we have to give up domination theology. I argue that this would be a matri-focal culture that supports mothers. Because everyone is a mother’s child, that’s a culture that supports everyone, whether or not you are a woman, and whether or not you ever want to raise a family. Everyone. That means self-realized women make decisions, especially about the distribution of wealth, the structure of society, and whether we go to war, since to them, it’s children and grandchildren that are at stake, not some old man’s power and privilege.

We could provide for people’s physical needs, you know, the obvious ones that life requires. Become good stewards of our local environments without an eye toward the powerful’s right to make a profit that the middle class and the poor pay for. Companies could exist to add benefit to the lives of their employees and the people who need their services, rather than to serve the parasitic class of shareholders. People can be supported for simply being alive. We have a responsibility to them because they are here and precious as a newborn.

Listen, it’s simple. Spend the trillions in war taxes on helping people, and the need for war will disappear. Spend our life energy on the living rather than on killing. We only worship death because we fear it. Instead, we could face our fears. If we did, we’d find that death is a friend, informing us, teaching us how to live. If we learn one thing from the Jesus story, it’s that we can become willing to die so others can live. What dies is our egoic certainty that we even know what the world is and how best to live in it. Let that die, and then see what survives death.

What arises when we surrender our worldview?

Love. Reverence. The willingness to serve life. Remember how quickly the world began to heal and regenerate during the pandemic? Recovery means we have to stop drinking the neurotoxin, the lie, and see for ourselves how quickly the hangover heals.

It’s as Ram Das said: We are all just walking each other home.

We can create a post-mythology culture, one that transcends and includes the best parts of mythological metaphors, recognizing that no story is true. Then see what the answer is to the foundational question of self-inquiry: Who am I?

When I saw the answer to that question, all the structures inside my mind fell away. I experienced that as standing in a room where the four walls fell back, the floor vanished, and the ceiling blew away. Space. Sky. And of course, that’s another metaphor, but that’s no problem if you are the sky. And what was that sky? Everything and nothing, which I experience as joy. For others, it’s love or beauty or peace, any of the divine attributes. That’s what we are without a story. It’s the end of the projection mechanism, which takes a story from inside and superimposes it between us and reality. We are better off without that story.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Friends, fellow members of the genus and species, Homo mythologica, we are trapped in a story, a mythic archetype so potent, so ancient, it’s bigger than all the players. Especially those arrogant ones who think they rule. In this story, the seemingly powerful are taken through the unavoidable process of death and rebirth.

Back in November ‘24, when Trump was elected, I predicted our culture would die; I saw no way, mythologically, psychologically, or archetypally, to avoid it. I shuddered to think on this, because whatever was going to happen to put the STOP on our empire, it was going to have to be as big as a world war, something to cause a deafening silence in everyone’s mind.

I wrote a 13-part series on mythic death-and-rebirth narratives, speculating then that we were about halfway through our descent to the Underworld, which we would finally enter, “naked and bowed low,” because at each of the seven gates on the way down, some egoic superpower would be taken away. And, after all that loss, the divine feminine rises from her throne to slap us all dead. Back then, I didn’t know what this death would look like.

Now, I think I do.

Why did we make a Hell of Earth? It isn’t natural. Nothing forced us to whip up our terror of death in order to separate from Nature and set up systematic oppression. And this is what patriarchy is: the terror of death masquerading as power over it, controlling the world through systems.

And when those men, working the system, flexed their unchecked power over terrified little girls (we now fear to the point of death), there was someone looking through a camera lens waiting to flex an even more superior power over the pedophiles.

Blackmail.

International kompromat over powerful people being made to do what even more powerful people demand. Blackmail is a form of patriarchal superiority, a top dog telling a bottom dog what he will do, whether the bottom dog likes it or not. In this analogy, it’s another form of rape. That’s what Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson are accused of. Giving financial secrets, high-level insider secrets, to Jeffrey Epstein. Why would they do such a stupid thing?

Kompromat, and the threat of death.

Two people have died in police custody so far. Jeffery Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel of MC2 Modeling Management - associates in the sex trafficking trade. Epstein set Brunel up in business. And he bragged to Virginia Guiffre that he’d raped (my word) one thousand of Brunel’s girls. That was their on-the-job training.

One convenient suicide that halts a powder-keg trial is suspicious. Two, following an identical pattern screams “execution.” Will Andrew Moutbatten-Windsor have a sudden attack of conscience and kill himself in police custody, too? How about Mandelson? You might think it would be too much, but Epstein’s death, and then Brunel’s, were too much, and we swallowed that.

And where are the caretakers who worked at Zorro Ranch for twenty years? I hope they’re hiding out somewhere safe. I only wonder how there can be such a thing as somewhere safe, because those two know where the bodies are buried.

And it’s all coming out. There’s no stopping it now. There’s a Truth Commission looking into just that property, and who among the powerful of New Mexico looked the other way or participated. Shadow secrets have a way of rising up through the chimneys, grates, and ventilation shafts, overtaking the whole culture in a miasma, like the toxic yellow smog that enveloped London in December 1952.

The truth will out.

And when it does, we will have the opportunity to say no to patriarchal dominance. Men, of course, must reject the poison, but also the women who have sought safety through proximity to powerful men. They are invited to a Gisèle Pelicot moment of their own, Sleeping with the Enemy style.

This, coupled with ecological collapse, could be the Divine Feminine’s death-slap, and it’s global. It goes through New York, yes, D.C, of course, Hollywood, too, and more, the rich and powerful of every industry, the real influencers. Sorry, social media and self-help gurus, you aren’t the real influencers, though you are guilty, too. It’s not just the rich and powerful, and as Celeste Davis pointed out this week, it’s the everyman, too. I would just add the everywoman. If men were the only ones holding up patriarchy, it would have collapsed long ago.

It’s a system of control and oppression, as pointed out this week as well. A system that runs on autopilot, which I would name: unconsciousness - our refusal to see all the harm we are doing because, like an addict, we just can’t see any other way to live. But there is another way. Anyone who has been through their suffering and out the other side will tell you it’s filled with joy.

said, quite rightly, that the word the mainstream media is missing in all their analysis of the Epstein trafficking ring was patriarchy. Yes! I say. And blackmail.

It goes through Moscow, Tel Aviv, London, Paris, Ankara, Eastern Europe, Brazil, and institutions like Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and the idyllic Seychelles Islands - all over the world. It controls senators and congresspeople who won’t or can’t say no to Trump, even though they know how many times he’s mentioned in the Epstein Files better than we do, and that what he’s doing to our country is treason. Why would they give him such cover? I don’t think the desire to be reelected explains it.

Even if they personally have never raped a little girl, they’ve accepted PAC money from people who have, or who’ve refused to investigate storage spaces, or insist on a search warrant, or follow the Epstein Files Release Act, or release the other two-thirds of the files. Maybe like other kinds of addicts, they have a story running about how everything can still work out if they just keep their secrets a little longer.

Why was there never a search of Zorro Ranch when there were two credible independent FBI tips, four months apart in 2019, and another credible tip from a former employee after Epstein died? Why has it taken three decades to get into the unacceptable position we are in today? Denial. We weren’t willing to let everything fall apart. We were afraid to let our way of life die. But it died anyway, thanks to the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the corporate billionaires, media appeasers, DOGE, and ICE. All the Barbies and Kens.

This time, the whole thing is going to unravel anyway because that’s the way of secrets and the way of this archetype. And it’s the way of the collective unconscious, too. There’s a synchronicity that’s larger than any of these tech billionaires who want to put all of us under Chinese government-style surveillance. And just as the cover-up artists fear, the truth will topple governments. And we will have a moment, collectively, that slaps us dead. The sheer scope will stop our minds and explode our hearts.

We are in an apocalypse, the ancient Greek word meaning "to reveal" or "to unveil." We are being revealed to ourselves in a you-can’t-look-away moment, which is also a you-can’t-avoid-this moment.

So what do we do while our empire is wheezing, our culture is thrashing about in death throes, and the diagnosis is terminal?

We suffer.

Consciously, willingly, and with open hearts. If you die before you die, then when you won’t die, you won’t have to die. This phrase, attributed to Rumi, is also inscribed on the Mt. Athos Monastery in Greece. The patriarchs would do well to heed it.

I have died and been reborn many times, some truly terrifying. And now, I trust suffering so much, I’ll lend you some. It’s counterintuitive in this death-phobic culture that wants to medicate suffering to the point of insensibility. If you sit with dying people, and I do, you know the lengths our culture is capable of, driven by our terror of death and our avoidance of suffering - and the inevitable. But there is another option.

We can suffer consciously. Then, we are present to make choices. For example, we can choose to love rather than seek personal comfort. We can accept that we are dying and become as beautiful as Andrea Gibson. We can love out loud as they did. We can do what’s right no matter how expensive it is. Because we know we are going to die, we don’t need to hoard. In the face of our monumental death, money doesn’t matter. Love does. We can accept our own death.

According to the mythic archetype, we’ll only be dead for three days. How long is three days collectively? I don’t know. It could take years, or it could literally be three days. Not knowing if we survive death or not is part of the suffering. After that, we’ll be reborn, but not as who we were. That culture, thankfully, will be dead.

I hope we make something beautiful, life-affirming for humans and non-humans alike. Something Earth-supporting, because she, Nature, is the divine feminine. I hope we take our roles as stewards very seriously and begin really taking care of our environment and one another (no matter our pigmentation or sexual orientation), for future generations - for we are Nature, too. I hope we can embrace our impermanence and release our terror of death, for that is how they control us. Death is a friend. I hope we build a genuine matrifocal egalitarian culture, geared toward supporting the next generations, rather than the momentary greed of a few adolescent billionaires who think they can live forever if only they can harvest our collective energy, suck it out of our lives, and into their offshore bank accounts.

We can have a culture that values members for how much they give away, because no one lives forever. We could value interconnectedness. We could accumulate wisdom rather than stuff. If we embraced the fact that we are going to die, we wouldn’t waste our lives working ourselves to death to make other people wealthy.

I hope we learn to worship life instead of our terror of death.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Now, at grandmother age, I reside inside the long view. After the decades it took to heal the personal trauma caused by our dominator culture, I’m free. And while I have enormous compassion for the weary travelers still trodding Recovery Road, I’m less and less interested in personal healing. Twelve-Step rooms, therapy couches, divorce courts, yoga studios, and almost all alternative spiritual communities are full of people walking the path of healing these unnecessary wounds. It’s hard, good work. But I’ve met so many iterations of my story that it's ceased to be personal. It’s time, now, to prevent the harm. Let’s cut to the root of the problem.

My healing took extra decades, I think, because I never connected the cultural dots. For too long, I thought my story was about my mother and my father, our private hell and the pact we had never to speak of it outside the home, and barely mention it inside. I thought we were a separate, isolated nuclear unit with alcohol and violence problems few other families had. Our hell grew organically from the ground beneath my particular mother and father. I now regret how little compassion I had for them, how paltry my love, and my unwillingness to extend my healing to them.

I want to go up to them and say Stop,

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die.

Sharon Olds, from I Go Back to May 1937

This shift to a broader view coincides with changes in my short-term memory that come with aging. I no longer need to keep track of details or multitask as I did when I was a full-time high school teacher while raising a family. Thank the gods for small mercies. When the changes to my memory started, I thought it was a regrettable sign of my coming dementia. Now, I see it as a wonderful blessing, a relaxing into a much larger (grand) point of view. Biologically, I’ve stopped sweating the small stuff.

So now, at some 68 years old, I’ve become grand. I recognize that my personal trauma, and everyone else’s, came directly out of monotheistic patriarchal capitalism. My family followed a common enough pattern, which Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil - only writ small.

I spent a great deal of time in spiritual communities that taught transcendence, another patriarchal idea. I learned detachment, that desires were suspect, to be “in the world, but not of it,” as an ideal. I was going for the big prize: enlightenment. I simply did not want to be here, yet I was. Understandable, perhaps, but counterproductive, since I am here. This kind of spiritual detachment is a form of approved dissociation. Not of the individual, I was a master of that, too, but of the sub-culture. The opposite of detached enlightenment is caring, you know, giving a shit.

The idea that this world is inherently evil, fallen, or not the “truth of being,” comes from an ancient mythological gaslighting. I’m just so tired of talking about Eve and original sin, but you know. In almost all of these mythologies, a woman is at fault, or at least a female divinity, such as the Gnostics’ Sophia, who wanted a child and became pregnant without the involvement of her male partner. That’s parthenogenesis, or out of only herself, the way the divine feminine reproduced before patriarchal ideals were mythologized. Because she did it that way, she created everything bad in the world, and even the world was bad. Rotten to the core. And now, thanks to Sophia, we have to work to perfect our perception and get back to the good stuff, which is in some higher realm.

In almost all of these mythologies, sex is bad because the world is bad, because women are bad, because sex is bad. And that’s why the world is bad. Don’t look behind door #3. It isn’t because patriarchal domination is bad. No, it’s not that the fathers are wrong. It’s not that capitalism is bad. It’s not that the desire to hoard wealth is bad. Or the belief that if we can own women, we can own life. No. It’s definitely not that. Hmmm. Let me think. It’s that we’re not really physical beings. We’re spirits or souls, longing for our true home, which is not here.

Yada, yada. Yet, here we are. Being physical. If the state killings in Minneapolis taught us anything, it’s that we should believe the evidence of our own eyes. We are real, physical beings in a real, physical world with real, physical needs. If you’ve ever given birth, you know that.

Here’s the thing. Nobody’s mythology is right. We are social animals, herd animals who once wandered as nomads before we threw down roots. Even after that, we were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. We already have, hardwired into us, the alternative to the horrible abuses of monotheistic patriarchal capitalism. And now we are trying to get back to the garden - home - to way things were. Home, in this analogy, is the real matrifocal societies we came from before the takeover of patriarchal control, which thought it could own life if it made women, the bringers of life, mere possessions.

Community, focused on supporting mothers, recognizes two universal truths. We are all born out of our mothers, and we are all going to die.

But alas. We live in a death-phobic culture that hates women. Let the self-destructive absurdity of that sink in. We live in a rape culture that allows something as vile as the Epstein pedophile ring to flourish to the tune of complete immunity from consequences. We’ve always had the forensic accounting tools to expose the whole multinational network. We even have a catch phrase left over from the Deep Throat years: Follow the Money.

Here’s a question: If the victims of Epstein et al brought their complaint to a Supreme Court made up of 9 fully embodied, wide-awake Black and Indigenous grandmothers, would they have looked the other way? I’m talking fierce grandmothers, embodied grandmothers, daughters of gods like Coatlicue, the Mother of Gods, who represents the earth as both a womb and a grave - creation and destruction. Badass. Those judges would not clear their throats and look the other way.

Here’s the thing about mythologies. None of them is true, not even the dominant one, though a lot depends, for the powerful, in you having faith. Not them. They can be godless and do horrible things to children, but you must believe.

Mythologies are different ways of understanding the huge reality we find ourselves in. Some maps are better than others, but none of them are accurate. That’s why we need to really separate church and state and rescind all tax protections from politically active religious institutions. We could form a compromise here, where we fund specific ministries that demonstrate a quantifiable good to taxpayers, such as those that feed or house homeless people, for example. But if an institution is purely ideological, they can pay their own way. If their congregations can’t or won’t tithe, perhaps, like any business, they are bankrupt.

Instead, we should support artists. NEA grants should be much easier to get than a tax exemption for claiming you have a mythological being telling you what to preach. As a grandmother who can carry her own water, I’m done with preachers, especially those who want to uphold patriarchal dominance by shaming both men and women. Just done. And traditional family values. I’m done with that, too, because when they say “traditional,” they only mean the last few years or so. Mythologically speaking.

But here’s the thing. We shouldn’t have homeless people. Grandmothers wouldn’t stand for that. We could repurpose our empty office buildings, schools, malls, and other municipal buildings into apartments, like Hopi dwellings. We could embrace found extended families, mothers and babies, grown or still little, no matter how they were conceived, how much money the mother has, or what her pigmentation is. A baby is a baby is a baby. Period. And so is a family.

There is no reason we couldn’t have low-income mother-centered communal housing where tasks like cooking weeknight meals are shared, freeing people from the grind of the bed-for-profit hotel corporations, which can charge 3 times what rent is, locking single mothers and working families into homelessness. They simply can’t make enough money to get back into an apartment, but the corporation is making lots of money. Instead, we could put a grandmother in charge of the dwelling, which might even have an outdoor space, a communal living room with a big kitchen, and a pool. Our grandmother-in-charge could be a retired LCSW, a schoolteacher like me, or simply someone well-trained and armed with a wealth of referrals. Or, we could just let go of our addiction to credentials and put grandmothers in charge. How many lonely elderly people lack family connection and a deep sense of purpose? These models already exist.

Shareholders will happily tell you that capitalism is the best system that human beings have ever devised, and that patriarchal systems evolved 12k years ago or more, as a natural occurrence connected to the Agricultural Revolution. I call BS. That’s social Darwinism, and it’s not true. Our ancestors weren’t primitive children, and there’s nothing patriarchal about agriculture. Many settled peoples were matrifocal, right up to and including modern times.

In fact, in the 17th century, when the Pilgrims landed, the Haudenosaunee were matrilineal, matrilocal, and matrifocal. They still are. In fact, the vast majority of casinos owned by tribes benefit everyone, not a single owner. The tribal members are the shareholders. In many cases, they provide a reliable universal basic income for tribal members. That model could benefit all of us if only we would learn from it.

Many countries have shown us that the functions of government can be run like companies - with the people as shareholders, for a profit, providing a good middle-class income and guarantees for the people employed there. The U.S. Postal Service operated this way until 2005, when Congress hamstrung the agency in hopes we’d end up in a mess so bad we’d let them privatize the whole thing. This is one of the many ways governments can raise cash without taxing citizens. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tax obscene wealth. We should. I draw the obscenity line at 50 million for an individual, 100 million for a partnership. It doesn’t matter so much where we draw the line, only that we draw one. The oceans will thank us for every gigayacht and its support vessels we remove from the high seas.

Support vessels. That one’s rich.

So, what would it look like if we took the collapse of our culture and the dismantling of our government as the benefit it could be? I mean. Come on. Wouldn’t it be delicious if our flirtation with MAGA, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the right-wing disinformation networks resulted in the end of the good-ole-boys white supremacist Christo-fascist capitalism? I mean, just imagine.

In fact, by destroying the old ways of government, they jump-started the project for us. I can’t say I’m grateful yet, but it’s on my gratitude list. I’m faking it till I make it.

First, don’t let any billionaire (or even a lowly millionaire) tell you that we can’t afford this. Hogwash. Here’s what a matrifocal culture would provide:

Universal Day Care and Pre-k. I hear that day care can cost as much or more than the monthly mortgage. Of course, no family is a nuclear island, and no woman should be asked to do all the free labor a modern wife is supposed to provide. There could be many hands helping to raise children, as there once were, before we were all cut off from one another and sequestered in separate stalls like livestock.

Free Public Education. Of course. Many countries provide this. It’s pretty simple. We didn’t have to turn them into social clubs with better facilities than a four-star hotel, because they compete with one another as corporations do. When I was a college kid, I could make my tuition to the University of Massachusetts with a summer job. A person could graduate with no debt, or very little, until Reagan came along and told us that the government should not subsidize intellectual curiosity.

Universal Pensions. Let’s cut the relationship between working and the right to live. If you worked your whole life in unpaid labor, also known as motherhood, you should get a pension. If you worked your whole life as an unrecognized artist, same. What if arts and education supported each other without the burden of red tape? What if the struggling poet were a part-time aid in your high schooler’s English class a few days a week as part of her grant? Or the muralist was helping the art teacher. Yes, in grandmother reality, we have art teachers. What if the tedious patchwork of 501(c)(3)s were dissolved and teachers could work directly with artists? Honestly, a better world is easier in so many ways. We just have to remove the jaundiced eye that thinks everyone is trying to get away with something. That’s projection.

Universal Health Care. Obviously. Including complete reproductive rights over one’s own body. Health care doesn’t have to be tied to work. One of the perversions of patriarchal culture is that a person’s right to live is contingent upon whether or not they work. Because I had a good union my whole working life, I had good health insurance - until I retired. Now, I have to pay for Medicare. That’s $200 a month for my husband and me - each. Not only has my income been reduced by a third, but my expenses have increased. All because I’m no longer working to stay alive. If we had universal health care, we could also have rural hospitals that provide a good living to people who don’t want to live in cities. On top of this, we could have much better maternity outcomes (the country of family values is a terrible place to have a baby), and we could add postpartum support and maternity and paternity leave that really help families bond. In a matrifocal culture, there is more to us than work, and more important things than shareholder profit - especially in health care. Just ask Luigi Mangione. In fact, the system already exists. Just give everyone the same health coverage that Marjorie Taylor Green will enjoy for the rest of her life after five paltry years of work - if you can call what she did work.

A robust system for mental health. Think of all the mental health professionals trying to float their own boats. I know so many who couldn’t afford the freelance helper lifestyle and gave up. We’re going to need all of them as we wean off patriarchal shame as a means of raising and controlling men and women. Recovery Road is long and full of pilgrims.

Just look at the mental health crisis we already have. Our culture is gunning for us. We lead the world in gun violence, and that isn’t just because our politicians have refused to enact the common-sense gun laws that most of us want. No. The right is correct when they say: Guns don’t kill; people do. That phrase demonstrates that we have one of the sickest patriarchal cultures in the world. Obviously, that’s true. We won’t even change when little children are shot in their classrooms. It’s a domestic violence crisis that comes right out of white homes. If you are a fucking bitch, you deserve to die. Because our patriarchal culture values violent men but doesn’t value women, we allow all the reporting on partner violence to be chaotic when it exists, so no one really knows there’s a threat until someone is dead. Instead of “Oh, well,” grandmothers would make it, “Oh, no. You can’t have a gun.” And then that man could pack his bags for a pilgrimage down Recovery Road.

And don’t rear up in fake helplessness over the Second Amendment. The Constitution didn’t rule out common sense; gun lobbyists did. They tortured that text into pretzels so they could ignore the words “well-regulated.”

Ending state-sanctioned corruption. If there was ever a system built for corruption, it’s the lobby system. We have almost no need for what they do. And there are many better ways for people to advocate for change. This leads me to other hallowed institutions of corruption that grandmothers would do away with. For some reason, bribery is against the law, but even when officials are caught taking 50k in a paper sack for favors, it’s not prosecuted. I could cite sources here, but I bet you know. Also, grandmothers would never allow politicians to buy and sell stocks. Every time Trump says “tariffs,” an insider-angel gets their wings.

PACs and dark money in politics. When our Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United (for corporate political speech) and then Janus (against unions having the same), it delivered a one-two punch to fair elections and signaled unmistakably that our Supreme Court was captured by billionaires. Of course, the Supremes have always been a tool of the wealthy, but around 2010, they stopped caring who saw. All political campaigns can be publicly funded. Many countries do this well. We could also limit how long campaigns can operate. Can you imagine a world in which politics doesn’t command every waking minute of your life? I’m old enough to remember it.

Just an aside, it’s been proven now that foreign governments have contributed to political campaigns in the U.S. You know who taught me that? Jeffrey Epstein. He showed Russia how to create media companies to funnel money because their umbrellas protected them from revealing their sources. So, out with all that. Only public money and only 6 months of campaigning. We deserve the opportunity to focus on life, not politics. We have the right to let our nervous systems, especially our collective ones, decompress.

Mail-in Voting. We all know our tech systems are vulnerable to satellite hacking. There’s mounting evidence that’s already been done, and then improved upon. Every state should turn to mail-in paper ballots with shorter windows for voting, and longer windows to count and recount if necessary. It’s simpler than figuring out if Schrodinger’s cat stole an election. Eighteen states already do this without incident. So, why does Trump insist on ending mail-in ballots and moving to a system where the federal government runs elections? Hmmmmm. My granny senses are tingling.

Guardrails. And now, because grandmothers know who did what just by looking into everyone’s eyes, we need enforcement with teeth. My grandmother used to say she could tell who was lying because she could see a red light in your pupil. I believed her because it was true. Not the red light part, but the seeing part. She always knew.

No more honor system built for gentlemen who have none. No more Electoral College or any other abomination that can be manipulated to create minority rule - which is what we have now. Just look at what North Carolina did to their democratically elected Governor, Attorney General, Superintendent of Public Instruction, and Lieutenant Governor. They effectively invalidated their citizens’ votes. That’s flagrant. The grandmothers know that’s cheating. A kindergartener would know that’s cheating. The Supreme Court’s emergency docket and its shadow docket are routinely used for cheating, too. In any case, 1 in 3 rulings by courts are simply ignored by this administration. There’s a strong whiff of treason in the air, but nothing happens. Why? No enforcement mechanism. Our whole government was basically a gentlemen’s agreement. So, we need laws with teeth.

Accountability. Grandmothers know that a grandson with no accountability only grows up to become a malignant narcissist who hurts people for pleasure. And here, I’m talking about every pedophile who raped children through the Epstein trafficking ring, and all the other rings we’ve never heard of. People who abuse power to feed their addiction to hoarding wealth and avoiding accountability. Grandmother can see into your souls. It’s not good for the people, and it’s not good for the grandson. Just look at the warped personalities who are running things now. No grandmother worthy of her wrinkles would allow any of these people to lead a dog, let alone a country.

But we live in a death-phobic culture that hates women and thinks it can own life by owning every single thing. Let the absurdity of that sink in. Now, they’ve decided that everything we need to live should be a subscription. Corporations are buying all the starter homes, putting homeownership out of reach for most. They want education to be a subscription, too. Because, you know, it’s become so expensive. Everything is becoming Netflix. And we’re just supposed to pay and pay while they frolic on the high seas in gigayachts - with service vessels.

But we don’t have to allow this. We can have nice things. We just have to know we want them and insist.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, please restack with a comment; it would be friendly. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. You can’t imagine how much it means. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

What happens after our shadow has erupted, the thing long-feared has happened, and caused irreparable harm? Everyone sees it. We can no longer believe the cultural myths. We are not the land of the free. We don’t have a government of the people, by the people, or for the people, and we haven’t ever had one. At least not yet.

And, surely, we have been here before, this moment where people have died, and it seems there is no possibility of pulling the soft blanket of our illusions up to our chins again. If you’ve ever been in any kind of recovery, you know this crisis is also an opportunity, but you also know the whole family system is complicit.

The good news is, we can no longer pretend. The bad news is, we can still double down on the addiction by claiming there is no other way to live. So, we have two choices. We can admit we are in trouble and seek healing, or we can continue to capitulate, appease, and allow because we are terrified that otherwise, we will die.

At this point, we could have a whole long history lesson about all the other times this culture has had a reckoning and turned away from it, but let’s start with the moment we are in now.

We’ve had every opportunity to address this problem before it gave power to the Heritage Foundation, the tech oligarchs, purveyors of government surveillance systems, and the ruthless political opportunists who are in charge now. We knew J6 was treason. Refusing to return top-secret documents was treason. We knew Trump was an entitled, unrepentant sexual predator. And we know he won’t release the Epstein files - ever. Yet, his approval rating remains around 39%, fueled and funded by enemies of our state through paid media outlets and influencers. No matter how many times pundits tell you he’s tanking, he’s not. So, what do we do about our MAGAland and the undeniable part of us that allowed all this to happen? That’s two sides to the same whole, if you’re keeping score.

It turns out, the only way to heal shame is to humble ourselves.

First, we admit we are a death-phobic culture addicted to power. We start by telling the truth about everything, even our own complicity and benefits. Though we are terrified that it will start a civil war, we arrest everyone who has earned a prison sentence, starting with the treasonous top.

This will require a Truth and Reconciliation Commission-style hearing in which immunity is granted in exchange for the truth. That means some really horrible actors will be let off, but I would argue that a public mea culpa with all the gory details is not a free pass. We, as a culture, have to behold the extent of our addiction to dominance, and the existential terror that makes our evil seem banal. Cruelty has been woven through all our systems from the very beginning, and not by “them,” by all of “us.”

We must see it all, to the depths of our depravity, and then we must act:

1. Tell the unflinching truth.

2. Feel all the difficult emotions, knowing they will be terrible.

3. Make amends even though there is so much we can never atone for.

For example, we cannot make up for our indigenous genocide or the attempted eradication of a whole way of life. We cannot atone for the centuries of slavery or the wars that took land from Mexico and the institutional racism against people already living in their homeland. We cannot make centuries of unnecessary suffering right. All those generations that are gone now cannot be made amends to. But we can listen and try to do what their descendants say we must do to make things right from here on. This means reparations, surely it does, because what are reparations but another way to say amends?

Are people balking already? Thinking this is impossible?

That would mean we are still in the grip of the addiction to power and force in a death-phobic culture that has refused, until now, to admit we have an addiction. But we do. Ask anyone who had a huge deficit to recover from and now has decades of sobriety about the joy that brings. It’s as big as the sky. Amends only seem impossible until we make them the most important thing. And yes, we can afford it.

But this is not enough. Our addiction to dominance got us into this problem, and only abstinence can get us out. We, the dominant white culture, must step back and allow - no, trust - others to lead. The antidote to the poison of an addiction to dominance might just require us to let power slip through our fingers. We have to admit we haven’t done such a cracking job of it so far. To my mind, New York has already moved in this direction by electing Zohran Mamdani, but there are still many ways the old guard could sabotage it. But my money is on him and the coalition he built.

How do you tell a raging alcoholic how much better life can be if they would just stop drinking? Maybe the rest of us just need to build community, share the joy, and let them watch us thrive.

We have never been an honest culture, not since the first day we set foot on indigenous soil and set about the project of colonization, with the fear of God and the fear of Death (which are the same thing) firmly centered as our mythology.

All the terrible things we have done, we justified by telling ourselves that this is what God wants. But surely, we have matured enough now to know (though I suspect we always knew) that there is no God like that.

There is no god who wants human beings to dominate Nature.

There is no god who wants men to dominate women.

There is no god who wants white people to dominate everyone.

There is no god who ever wanted genocide.

There is no god who ever wanted slavery.

There is no one called God who created us as isolated skin bags who want to live forever or as long as humanly possible, no matter the cost, like some Disney villain.

If there is an intelligence behind life on Earth, and there is evidence to support this view, that force, which I call Love, factored Death into every facet of life. There has to be a reason for this, and it’s not, as our Puritan forebears would tell you, because God despises us, or tests us to find out what omnipotence already knows, or punishes us with original sin for his own creation of disobedient women who eat apples.

Perhaps life and death are the same thing, a oneness. Perhaps she’s a spiritual teacher, a spiritual lover, a best friend. Perhaps, Death is love, too. Embracing Death doesn’t mean we’d all run out and kill ourselves. It just means we will make better decisions, because what’s important is front and center: We are all impermanent.

If we loved her and learned from her, we could accept that we will not live forever. She would teach us that no matter what we do, only love matters. And joy. And Peace, beauty, and right action, and every other facet of the diamond that is divinity. We are all of that, though I think we each have an affinity for expressing one more than the others. Mine is joy.

In fact, I would argue that even the top 1%, the only ones who “win” at our cultural game of dominance, are devastatingly unhappy. Does anyone imagine that Trump, J.D., or Steven Miller is overflowing with joy? Pete Hegseth? How about the billionaires, Peter Thiel, Elon, or Bezos?

I remember the aftermath of my first shadow eruption. Terrible all the way to homelessness. Then, someone told me to surrender. Blink. Blink. I didn’t have a thing left, and on top of that, I was in debt. “Just say it,” she insisted. “I surrender.” The thought filled me with terror because I knew these were not just empty words. Something was listening and taking me at my deepest intention. I would lose control, the thing I feared most. “You are already out of control,” she said.

And that’s my point to everyone in the dominant culture. The collective is out of control. Thinking we can fix MAGA is one of those pesky half-measures that will avail us nothing, except a repeat of our addiction cycle.

After the devastating shadow eruption of WW2, Carl Jung defined four stages that cultures must go through in the wake of a shadow eruption like ours.

1. Acknowledge Collective Guilt.

2. See that the individual is the only bulwark against a repeat.

3. The victors must avoid psychic infection by refusing to use the same authoritarian methods of the regime that just fell.

4. Choose integration over repression. We must not create an “other” who did this fascism thing.

I think Jung is wrong about number 2. If the individual is the bulwark, we are utterly lost, hence the endless repetition. Fortunately, we are not individuals; we only think we are. In fact, many cultures in the world are not individual-centric.

I bet you are all aware of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Of course, if you are a feminist, such as I am, you are also allergic to hierarchies, even this one. What you may not know is that after he published his famous theory, Maslow visited the Siksika (Blackfoot) Nation in Alberta, Canada, and they blew up his belief in self-actualization by demonstrating that interdependence and self-transcendence for the greater good of the community are far more important and mature. They flipped his pyramid on its head because 80-90% of them had a level of self-esteem seen in only 5-10% of Americans. Their culture was not based on individual dominance. Maslow’s revised theory holds that the highest goal we can achieve is an interdependent community in which the needs for safety, food, and belonging are met for every member.

Maslow’s revised theory was ignored. We weren’t ready to pay for the social systems it would require. Perhaps now, we can see that clinging to a culture built around individual dominance is way, way, way more expensive in every kind of cost.

The answer to our patriarchal dominance problem isn’t a focus on equal rights for women without changing our dominance worldview. I have argued many times for a matrifocal community where a mother’s needs in raising the next generation are more primary than a man’s need to go to work and be Father Knows Best. That and we need an alternative to the isolating nuclear family, which makes child-rearing so difficult. Notice I didn’t ask for an end to it, just an alternative alongside.

The indigenous nations of the Americas have been holding the answer all along. How ironic is that?

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me.

If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

What would happen if the sky thought it could keep out the thunderstorm?

Friends of mine say that we must protect our psyche, our joy and creativity, you know, stop reading the news, stop talking about all the outrages. Don’t let it trigger us. We must self-monitor all those hydra-headed death thoughts, like, I can’t do it, What difference will it make? And, I don’t want to be here.

But what if I’m not fragile? What if I accept that I’m going to die and admit all those terrible emotions into my trembling heart? What if facing our own death (or the death of our democracy) is the only thing that can set us free - and we’re avoiding it?

I’m not gonna lie. It’s terrible. But right behind the terror is joy. All of it.

I’ve spent four decades healing the effects of toxic patriarchy lodged in my body.

I don’t use the term toxic masculinity, because masculinity is not toxic. The system is. Masculinity is good and necessary. The system, though, gives rise to women like Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, Suzy Wiles, Karoline Leavitt, Ghislaine Maxwell, and all the mothers who have told us not to wear something because it makes us look whorish or fat. Some women participate in the system, and some men don’t. The problem isn’t gender, it’s the system.

Almost every trauma I’ve endured has come directly from the imposition of toxic patriarchy. My father, for example, felt such a need to dominate my mother, such shame over his secretly impotent manhood that he medicated himself with scotch and violence. I grew up in such a rape culture that I was not safe sleeping in my own bed. That’s not normal behavior for any animal, not even human beings. That’s culture. That’s toxic patriarchy.

And all this was before I even ventured out into the dangerous world our patriarchs have created. We all know how much men, who need to think they are powerful, lust to conquer the trembling innocence of young women. That’s toxic patriarchy, too. We still haven’t released the Epstein Files, and we all know that was not the only trafficking network for rich men that has never faced consequences. Yet we like to pretend that Jeffrey, Ghislaine, and Donny were a one-off, even though we know they weren’t.

Toxic patriarchy destroyed my family, but it didn’t destroy me because I became willing to feel difficult emotions. I’ve walked through all the terrible darkness, opening my heart the whole time. And that willingness has brought me to healing communities, great friends, advanced degrees, jobs, family, and financial stability. There’s nothing from my past I’m afraid of anymore.

But here’s the thing. I still live in the United States of Dicks in Charge. I am suspended in toxic patriarchy, so the wounding is ongoing. Just this past Monday, I sat on the couch rage-crying over the cold-blooded misogyny that could shoot a woman in the face. Add to that the cold-blooded lizard liars who have the unmitigated gall to slander the recently dead without any regard for her children, her extended family, or her community. Charlie Kirk be damned. That’s some cold shit, there.

Plus, they are knowingly giving Proud Boys permission to shoot again because they want a big enough escalation to declare a state of emergency. If they lose power now, before it’s consolidated, they’ll spend the rest of their lives in jail. And you know what the next escalation is, right? Shooting into a crowd of peaceful protesters. Will they go that far? Since the prize is World Domination, I’m betting they will.

I wonder if they tell themselves they’ll become human again after they’ve won. Does Little Marco Rubio harbor regret? Lisa Murkowski, who voted for all that Proud Boys’ funding? Are they sacrificing their humanity so their progeny will bask in endless wealth?

Every morning, I close my eyes and creak open the recalcitrant hinges. Open my heart. I say it 3 times because 3 is a magic number, and I still indulge in magical thinking even though our patriarchal overlords tell me it’s infantile. I drop the phrase like a stone into a pond. Open my heart. Resistance whooshes into flame, representing just how much I’d rather not feel these painful emotions. Yet my resolve is absolute. Open my heart, fill me with joy.

This is how a heart grows three sizes.

Some days, before the joy comes, I sit with my mouth gaping, sobs wracking my whole body, and I don’t even know why. There’s no story. Just body crying.

After that, I might go for a walk in Nature and be wrapped in joy the whole time. Or if it’s a Threshold Choir day, I’ll go and sing bedside for people standing on the cusp between life and death - the mother of all fears. Sometimes dying is hard work, fraught with pain, but I am present as joy, even as my heart is being meat tenderized.

I am joy, and rage is welcome.

I am joy, and fear is welcome.

I am joy, and grief is welcome.

I am joy, and despair is welcome.

I am joy, and even death is welcome.

Granted, when I was younger, the raw material threw me harder - and for longer. But that’s why, in the old system before patriarchy, grandmothers were in charge. Grand in this sense means big. By old age, everyone is her child. Whether you have physical children or not, you can grandmother the culture. Imagine if the Supreme Court were made up of grandmothers who had alchemized their pain into joy.

If we can take our country back, it won’t be through violence. If answering violence with violence worked, WW1 would have been the war to end all wars.

The stakes are high. By many calculations, we are already in WW3. Our country is already captured. This war’s axis of evil, the NATO-attacking, Putin-backed, Christo-fascists, the media moguls, the oligarchic tech bros, this regime and their Proud Boy enforcers, leaves no doubt as to the existential moment. All their empire-grabbing won’t stop with Ukraine, Gaza, Venezuela, Cuba, Taiwan, or Greenland. The axis is carving up the world into spheres of influence, and we are merely another resource to be mined for their wealth. Extractive capitalists are cannibals.

And you know what our only state-sanctioned job is, right, ladies? We give birth to the foot soldiers and workers who create wealth for others. They need an endless supply of bodies to exploit. As long as this is the goal, we won’t be allowed to do anything else, not even vote. They think our bodies belong to them.

The antidote to all this toxic patriarchy is a matrifocal community that cares deeply about each member and sets up systems of support for mothers - not heads of male-run households who are the only ones who vote - mothers. Since everyone begins life as someone’s child, supporting mothers means supporting everyone. In a matrifocal culture, the precise opposite of the culture we have now, all our resources would go to supporting the community so the next generation is wise, educated, compassionate, fed, and healthy. Everyone.

Zuckerberg knew what he was talking about when he decried the feminization of his workforce. Feminists are an existential threat to them. And we mean it.

Here’s a secret I’ve come to know in the last few years. Joy is my container. When storms come, joy is holding me. The awareness of joy isn’t shaken even when grief or incandescent rage are present. At first, this seemed impossible, but when I let go of clinging to the storm and recognize that I am the sky, everything is truly welcome, even that most hated of feelings: helplessness. I admit, I’m still working with that one. It’s the most deadly weapon in their arsenal, which is why they bombard us so relentlessly.

The path to freedom goes through your deepest fear, which is why most people avoid it. And now, in the body politic, this is the work we are called to do in community. Face our deepest fear.

The podcaster, Charlamagne tha God, was right when he called the killing of Renee Good domestic terrorism. I’ll just add that domestic terrorism is domestic violence on a national scale.

Since I grew up in a swirling storm of domestic violence and the victim-blaming that inevitably results, I know a thing or two about violent men seeking to dominate a “fucking bitch.”

According to the Childhood Domestic Violence Association, by the age of 17, one-third of us have witnessed intimate partner violence. But half of all incidents go unreported, so those estimates are very low. Adults who grew up in these households are 3 times more likely to repeat the cycle - become an abuser or marry one. That’s an escalating number of fucking bitches, and ever more helpless children. Our toxic patriarchy causes this intimate partner violence. 80% of mass shooters (again, low estimate) were childhood witnesses of domestic partner violence. It leaves a mark.

Domestic violence is the toxicity of our patriarchy, the culture that worships some kind of anthropomorphic male-dominator god that the Heritage Foundation insists… wants this violence and supports them in dominating us. Think about that. Their god endorses this violence. Of course, he does. He’s a jealous war god.

Women are a threat to this system if we aren’t properly submissive. That’s how you become a “fucking bitch.”

Just days after Renee Good was shot, I saw a video of a Proud Boy in ICE clothing asking a group of women protesters, “Didn’t you learn the lesson of the last few days?” He seemed frustrated in a what’s-it-going-to-take kind of way.

When a woman answered, “What lesson? What lesson were we supposed to learn?” He slapped her face and knocked the phone from her hand.

This lesson, Bitch. Daddy’s on a rampage, and all of you terrorized children better just watch in silent horror as he blames our mother for the fact that he shot her.

And that Proud Boy wasn’t even wearing a mask. Since the killer of Renee Good is being protected, what possible repercussions could come from slapping a woman for asking a simple question?

None. I hope that Mama looked that Proud Boy right in the eye and smiled.

We must not shrink from this moment. We have the opportunity to reject that whole worldview. I say we reject it with resolve and joy.

We have examples of how to do both.

Freedom Riders and Civil Rights marchers like Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash showed us resolve. We can absorb their violence and win. In fact, it’s the only way if blue state governors, congresspeople, and senators continue to refuse out of fear. Resolve isn’t for the faint of heart. Let the black-and-white film clips play. People die. People have already died. The regime is in it so far; they can’t back out. Neither can we.

The Portland frogs showed us joy. The giraffes, the dinosaurs, the absolute mockery of all things violent. They showed us the power of the joyful community. I say we meet this moment with the practice of Joy. Let’s provide the radical willingness to feel it all and live in the joy behind everything. Because joy is a force of Nature.

No matter what the storm does, the sky is still the sky. And when the sky is clear again, the air sparkles with joy. From this clarity, joy becomes a verb. It knows what to do even when we don’t.

So, going back to the opening question, what happens if the sky thinks it can keep out the thunderstorm?

Nothing. Nothing happens. That’s the good news. And the bad? Nothing changes.

The sky simply loses awareness. But we can embrace the storm, welcome it as an opportunity to clear away dead wood. Then, we act from the strength of our inherent joy for the good of everyone.

We are bigger than we think.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

In therapeutic and recovery circles, the phrase hysteria is historical means that if an intense, out-of-proportion emotional reaction explodes inside you, then you are probably experiencing an unresolved trauma from the past. I think of it as stepping on a landmine. Hysteria and I are old friends now, because she always comes bearing an extravagant gift: freedom.

Throughout my decades of unpacking a childhood drenched in domestic violence, alcohol abuse, and sexual misconduct, if I had an out-sized reaction to any trigger, I taught myself to stop. Become still. Pull my focus from external stimuli to the internal cause. Feel my negative emotions rather than act them out, even though acting them out can feel sooo satisfying.

While that bastard deserves everything he has coming, healing is more important. Here’s the prayer: I’m willing to feel this, which isn’t directed to any god. No mythological figures are necessary.

After the whirlwind of emotion subsides, clarity comes like the morning after a thunderstorm. The dark night of the ego (thanks ) can seem long, but if the willingness is there, clarity never fails.

Then, if there is something to do or say, it comes from unshakable clarity, which is an attribute of love. It almost sings Wha-Haaa! Automatically, love loves everyone involved. The discipline is strict and difficult, but it’s the only thing that improves circumstances. Acting out invariably makes situations worse.

The word, hysteria, when applied to mass violence like witch trials, has always bothered me. You probably already know that the diagnosis derives its logical heft from the ancient Greek word, meaning womb, and the belief that the womb was the seat of the outsized emotions belonging to women. Women were emotionally difficult due to their “wandering womb.” Men, of course, weren’t plagued by hysteria because they didn’t have the offending organ

In the late 1800s, Jean-Martin Charcot developed a systematic medical study of the disease and its symptomology and presented his findings to a roomful of like-minded medical men. After that, Charcot’s students, Sigmund Freud chief among them, were off to the races. “Hysterical paroxysms,” now known as an orgasm, was the agreed-upon treatment. This procedure was administered in the doctor’s office, using only a manipulation of the wandering womb by the doctor’s skillful hands. Looking at you, Larry Nassar.

So, here’s the question that plagues me: Why did the mostly male historians blame the tens of thousands of judicial witch trial murders in the U.S. and Europe on hysteria? Were they saying that women were to blame for their own murders? That’s some serious victim-blaming there. It sounded like my dad, looming over my mom, kicking her and yelling, “Why do you make me do this?”

My discomfort with those questions sparked my second novel, an examination of the Hartford witch trials, which took place more than four decades before Salem. Not many people know that we had two witch-hysterias. Does that make us serial hysteriacs? Of course, a historical novel is also an analogy for the current political situation, or why bother at all? I obsessively wondered: Is this how our history rhymes? Are all novelists just a wee bit obsessive, or is it just me?

How does our current mental health crisis mirror the past? Are we periodically hysterical? Cyclically so? Menstrually?

Can our almost unrelenting anxiety, depression, and addictive behaviors be responses to the crisis of patriarchal violence devastating both men and women? What about our epidemic levels of domestic violence and violence against Nature, and rape culture? While the consequences are multiplying, we steadfastly believe in the patriarchal worldview that acting out in violence solves problems and dominating people is the only way to win.

The foundation of that worldview in the U.S. was a purity project - our original colonies - the fight for freedom of religion! But that’s not true at all. No one was free. You were fined if you didn’t attend church. The church, which was the state, could accuse you of witchcraft—death by judicial murder.

Hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples lived in the eastern U.S. before the colonists arrived. When you’re in grade school, you read that those poor wretches didn’t have immunity to European disease. But, later, if you went to college, you read about smallpox blankets and the Pequot massacre. But Puritans get a pass here, too, because they were hysterical. I mean, they were surrounded. Terrified. What else could they have done?

If the patriarchal control of Nature, indigenous peoples, and, of course, women isn’t enough mental illness, just add a cupful of Calvinist self-loathing, which teaches that violent form of original sin called “Total Depravity.” That’s our natural state. That’s why it takes so much violence to control us.

Who looks at a newborn baby and thinks: total depravity? Not a mother-god, I can tell you that.

Add to that, you must be stoic—no compassion allowed. Spare the rod, spoil that child. Go on. Take a deep breath, swallow those difficult emotions, and save him with violence. In our patriarchal mythology, we are so naturally bad that the only solution is a strong daddy. Like God. God is a strong daddy, and our authoritarians must be as strong and unfeeling as God, or we are all damned - which we probably are anyway from before birth (predestination), no matter what we do, but still we won’t surrender. Because we are exceptional. That’s why wealthy people are considered gods and not craven power-addicts. They were pre-selected by God, or given some kind of genius, by God, of course. That’s why we can never hold them accountable. It would be like holding God accountable. God forbid, and yet, that’s precisely what I propose.

The mental illness in this country, as in many countries, is the worship of dominance. The problem is our worldview, our mythology, our monotheistic patriarchal religion, which shifted the creator god from being a divine mother who gives birth to a dominion-claming father who creates through his word. Not much travail in that.

And what we made in his name is an upside-down system, exactly opposite of what comes naturally - indigenously. That’s right. Patriarchal control is not natural. That’s why it takes violence to maintain it. In the original colonies, as now, if you are on the outskirts of belonging, you are a target. And just as in middle school, the whole culture could turn on you in a heartbeat. God forbid. They’ll threaten your children. Just ask Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Our particular mental illness begins with the violence against natural, matrifocal indigenous societies, which Puritans were determined to erase. Of course, the Puritans brought that dis-ease and those tactics with them, but let’s keep our focus here. Not only did they commit atrocities against the colonized, but they also made laws against “going native,” which were intrinsically linked to the suppression of “sedicious” or “satanic” matrifocal egalitarian societies.

What’s natural is extended matrifocal families, where raising children is the point, and everyone serves that purpose in their own way, whether they have physical children or not. All the children belong to everyone, and are naturally accepted just as they are, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. But you can love your biological children more if you want to.

Naturally, lineage is counted through the mother. You come out of her body, while anyone could be a father. Clans lived in longhouses of extended matrilineal families, but that doesn’t mean men had no power. When a woman is going through difficulties, the clan shifts, people pick up the slack, and give her the time and peace she needs. Mothers were not isolated in single-family homes, where they’re chained to 80% of unpaid labor and 90% of all emotional labor.

We should all be so lucky as to go native and become more matrifocal. What if only clan mothers could declare war? Where would Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu be then? In trouble with the grandmothers, that’s where. And you don’t want that. The Nonners can be terrifying.

This is the system our Puritan fathers were so threatened by that they were determined to destroy it. This is the culture they described as “Satanic,” backed by laws against “going native.” Because once people did, they often had to be brought back in chains - especially men. It can’t be said enough: Patriarchy is terribly cruel to men, too, which brings me back to our collective mental illness, our mass hysteria, a symptom of which is an epidemic of domestic violence, which leads to outbreaks of the domestic terror of mass shootings, and the violent round-up of black and brown and indigenous peoples in indiscriminate ICE raids. We are hysterical.

Here are the symptoms of mass hysteria that AI used to characterize the witch trials for me. The parentheses are mine.

1. Lack of legal due process (ICE)

2. Contagion and Clustering Effect. (copy-cat mass shootings caused by sensational media coverage)

3. Moral Panic of Status Loss (God-given dominance is slipping)

4. Scapegoating/Simplified Narratives. (Complex social problems blamed on witches - or immigrants.)

So, what happened during the Hartford witch trials of the 1600s, and later in Salem? Mass hysteria? A one-and-done and thank-God-we-are-so-logical-now? Of course not. It was (is) a trauma-induced hysteria, a mental illness caused by a worldview that goes against nature. It’s chronic. Remember the point of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible? He argued that the McCarthy hearings on un-American activities were another outbreak of the witch-hunt hysteria.

And here we are again. Conservatives are right about one thing, though. Guns don’t kill, people do. Sick people, traumatized people acting out unspeakable pain. Until we can have mass healings instead of mass shootings, we’d better put in those common-sense gun regulations the majority of us are clamoring for. Honestly, though, death through partner violence kills way more people—all the more reason.

Our mass shootings arise out of our domestic violence crisis. This is what the Hartford and Salem panics were, too—an outpicturing of our trauma. And in the last election, some people fervently wanted a strong daddy in charge because they were terrified that allowing differences would end the world as God wants it. Now, that’s a hysterical worldview.

Why was my father so violent, so filled with impotence, rage, and shame? Because he had internalized a set of standards imposed on him by the culture he was born into. The man box: He must be stoic, dominant, and in control. He took it into his not-yet lungs through the amniotic fluid in his mother’s womb. And it killed him, though it took 45 years of the steady drip, drip, drip of toxic shame.

We must recover from the Father Knows Best trauma that leads to the narcissistic displays that become our wars, our mass shootings, and the private despair that leads to our suicide epidemic, where men outnumber women 3:1. Yet, if you listen to patriarchal voices, they’ll tell you we need to double down on an unnatural system that never worked in the first place.

Don’t listen. Run an experiment. Just open your eyes and blink. Look around. Check the weather. Read the news. We are suffering from internalized domestic violence that is projected onto the world as patriarchal hysteria.

But this time, so many of us have gone through some kind of recovery and ended up on the other side. Is it enough for a tipping point? I hope so. Honestly, I think so.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and cultural healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me. You are the reason why.

In response to my last post about The Joy of Hanging In There, some people whispered that they, too, stayed in a marriage against the wishes of their own minds, their friends, and relatives. Those subtle undercurrents prompted me to tell the rest of the story, for things were not as they seemed.

1. No matter how magical your meeting, what brought you together will fade.

One day, after decades of loudly proclaiming I’d never marry, never have children, would not learn to cook or clean, that I was fine being alone, I woke from a nap, sat straight up, and sucked in the shocked breath of realization: I wanted a baby, a family, a picket fence, a backyard - gasp - a husband. “Oh no!” I wailed. “Not that. Anything but that.” But I knew it like you know your own name. The medicine that would heal me was the poison I’d been avoiding my whole life: A family. shitshitshitshitshitshitshit.

How could a fuck-up like me raise a child without fucking them up? I used to joke that I didn’t know how to love since it hadn’t been modeled for me. Wouldn’t I just inflict horrors on my child and then have to watch them suffer, too? Since all my relationships recreated the past, how could I avoid marrying some version of my father? I’d absolutely refused. But this desire to have a baby wasn’t fading as normal dreams do. No. Instead, it was growing in clarity, definition, and longing. I wanted a baby, and I didn’t even know a man I would consider acceptable. Oh, I was sure they existed, but my gaze bounced away. Or if I could see them, I found them weak or insufferable. If they wanted me, there had to be something wrong… with them.

So, I prayed. At this point, in my New Age career, I already didn’t believe in some capricious God on a cloud giving miracles to some and smiting others randomly. I prayed to a Grace I called The Highest Good. Since I often experience fear as anger first, that prayer sounded something like this. “Then you pick him because I keep picking The Father With A Thousand Faces and finding myself right back in my childhood. Make it so obvious that I can’t miss the signs. Override me.”

When I first laid eyes on Tom, he was the go-to man, the fix-it man, the problem-solving man of that New Age mega church I was devoted to in those days. On a busy Sunday morning with two overflowing services, the mantra was: find Tom. Toilet’s backed up? Tom’ll fix it. Need more chairs? Tom will get them. Problem in the parking lot? Send Tom. So, on that fateful day, I’d been sent from where I worked in Pastoral Care on a mission to find Tom. “You’ll know him when you see him. Big guy. White hair.”

I turned the corner into the nursery, and there he was, shocking white hair, startling blue eyes, a burly man with a sleeping baby cradled in each arm. When he looked up, I stammered the request and stumbled back to my post. Throughout meditation, the afterimage of Tom holding babies seared my mind’s eye. How old was this guy with white hair? My brother’s hair started going white in his early twenties, so maybe… it’s an Irish thing like that skunk stripe some of us get?

After the service, people streamed out of the sanctuary, and Tom swam against this tide on his way to reset for the next service. He reached for my hand, pulled me to him, and asked me out to dinner as people burbled and flowed around us. I popped out of my body, above the scene, looking down on the tops of our heads, and I knew. I was going to marry this man.

On that first date, I said, “I want marriage and a child. If you don’t want that, there’s no reason to pursue this. We should just be friends.”

And Tom said, “I want that too. Let’s date and see whether or not we can do that together.”

2. Their good qualities are not all that they are.

Most couples have a gorgeous period of infatuation called the honeymoon, where we take all the good qualities we possess and project them onto our partner. We can’t believe how they sparkle. Next, we heap on the negative projections, too. In fights, we say things like “I thought you were (perfect), but no, you’re (a hot mess).” We never actually see them until much later. Years can pass before the relationship gets down to the difficult work of pulling back our projections. Unfortunately, that’s what long relationships are for. Tom and I moved from the “honeymoon state” to the “let’s get to the real shit” stage fast enough to make your head spin like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.

We were barely three weeks old when Tom took me to a movie—a Bollywood-ish comedy called Bahji on the Beach. One of the women in the ensemble cast, running from an abusive husband, had recently moved into a shelter with her six-year-old son. Throughout the movie, the boy pushes his mother to return, insisting he needs both his father and his mother. He doesn’t know about the violence, and she isn’t about to tell him. So, naturally, the son blames his mother. In the climactic scene, the husband has tracked her down. He grabs her arm and slaps some sense into her - from the point of view of the child. We are about four feet tall, looking up. Boom! I can’t stop crying, because my body is crying, not my mind or emotions. Then the theater is empty, and the teenagers who work there are awkwardly trying to clean around the sobbing woman and the man waiting with her.

Tom took me home, tucked me into bed, pulled up a chair, and sat beside me the rest of that day and into the night. Periodically, I’d tell him a few of the images that were coming into my mind. Mostly, I just sobbed. Tom didn’t offer advice. He didn’t become impatient or annoyed. Tom was holding vigil. When the father in my head yelled: I’ll give you something to cry about, Young Lady. Tom took my hand. His presence held me. He didn’t need words.

The next morning, as he was driving me to breakfast, I was still leaking tears. His hand reached for the gear shift. I flinched and pressed myself against my car door. When I realized he wasn’t going to backhand me, I turned, expecting to see disgust in his eyes, so the compassion on his face broke me. He pulled over and waited, unfazed.

Another time, early in the relationship, we giggled toward the bathroom to shower together. While the water was heating, we stripped and started kissing. The image of another bathroom, a long time ago, popped into my mind. Rage wooshed to life like a gas burner. A childish voice in my chest urged me to bite off his tongue and spit it back into his face. Instead, I shattered. Tom wrapped me in a towel, tucked me into bed, and lay beside me outside the blankets. He just held me, this time with his body and his presence, while I thought about how much fun it must be to date me.

3. At some point, you’ll have to renegotiate the marriage contract.

When our marriage was young, before our son was born, we went to a spiritual counselor together for weekly sessions. We set many deep intentions for our marriage, but the deepest was when we “bolted the back door.” That meant we weren’t going to leave the marriage, no matter what the trouble was, unless there was violence. We were going to surrender to love unless leaving was the only option. To unbolt that back door, the problem had to be unsolvable.

When we’d been married seven years, we hit our first make-or-break. Our son was in first grade at a local Montessori school, and I had just finished my third year as a terrible teacher at a poorly run middle school. I’d limped to summer, but that job was killing me. Ironically, the next in a series of silent retreats that were saving my life started on the first day of school. I had to choose. I had no doubt what my soul wanted: quit that abusive job and go to the retreat. Could I, though? No teacher misses the first two weeks of school. We had a mortgage. For that whole summer, I walked in the woods and prayed for the strength to tell Tom. I prayed for love to speak through me because I didn’t trust myself. Many times I tried but failed to find the courage start that conversation.

So, I made rules because everyone knows that rules keep you safe. I’d tell him as a spiritual discipline. To prevent me from manipulating him, I’d only use one-syllable words and say only the factual truth, such as I want to go. I hate my job. Then I’d shut up and tolerate what came up inside me. No begging, no tearful manipulations - no little girl who needed saving. I forbid myself from using the word “you.” I had one ear pointed out, listening for what he would say, and one ear pointed inward, listening for what I would say.

And he was angry, frustrated with me and my needs, and afraid he wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage, because everyone in this culture knows that this was his ultimate responsibility. Then, once the words were blurted, we stopped talking to each other. After three tense days where we avoided even brushing against each other, Tom finally said, “I want you to go. The marriage will be over if I say no.” That’s the way we left it.

And on that retreat, after seven days of being fully submerged in my craziness, because when you stop all the talking, writing, reading, and listening to music, you do go crazy. Everyone’s deepest fear about silence is true. But here’s the part your ego doesn’t tell you. Going crazy doesn’t kill you. It doesn’t break some fragile mind you’re pasting together with spit. You aren’t better off keeping the crazy. It’s uncomfortable, yes, but it’s all just a thunderstorm in the mind. And after going crazy, you go sane - even if you’ve never been sane before.

On the seventh day and for all of the three days after it, I was beaming with love. Huge love. Divine Love. It streamed through me, and as it passed, I got to feel it. Then, I got to BE it. I loved everything that ever happened to me, even the terrible things. And then on the tenth and final day, all that love focused on Tom. I loved him. I still didn’t know if I had a marriage left to go home to. I fully expected that Tom would tell me he’d had enough. I could understand that. I was a lot. But I loved him either way. And I knew that I would be okay either way, and so would he.

When I got home, I discovered that Tom had been on his own retreat. He’d had his own realizations. He presented me with a nine-page handwritten letter that delved into his own fears and resentments, and how deeply he wanted to stay in our marriage. I’d realized that I’d been asking his permission for everything, that I had cast myself as the child to his adult. I hadn’t married MY father, but I’d married a GOOD father. Maybe Tom didn’t want to be my daddy. It was time for me to grow up.

4. Unpaid Labor Includes Emotional Labor

When I went to graduate school, Tom became Laundry Man, Grocery Man, Homework Man, and Take-the-Kid-to-School Man. He also put dinner on the table and did the dishes. In fact, he took on almost all the unpaid labor women usually do in a marriage, which goes unnoticed by absolutely everyone, unless it doesn’t get done. Then they complain. I could not have worked a more than full-time job as a high school English teacher and gone to graduate school(s) full-time without him. That’s right. Schools. Practically the minute I finished one expensive master’s degree, I started another. Why two masters and not a PhD, you ask? Hmmmmm. The world may never know.

But when I discovered, quite by accident, that Tom had been falling into debt for years, that he had credit cards that I didn’t know about, that my inheritance and his were spent the instant they arrived, all the issues of safety - the lack of it in my childhood home - whooshed to life. I’d been functionally homeless for two years and imagined I was safe now, but no.

I cannot tell you how much I’d judged my mother for not divorcing, how much I did not want to be a single mother, and how much I wanted to kill Tom, or at least punish him severely. I wanted to make the man feeeeeel things. How could Tom be so financially unfaithful? He was an accountant for fuck’s sake. When I married him, I thought I’d never have another money problem. I gratefully abdicated all financial responsibility toTom—Whooo boy.

To tell me the extent of the damage, Tom handed me a profit-and-loss statement. He waited until we were in a therapist’s office. She promoted a plan to contact creditors and make a payback schedule that would drain us of everything and take years. In retrospect, it was a plan that would have worked. His credit card debt was precisely the amount of my student loan debt, a synchronicity. I barely noticed because my debt was legit, out in the open, agreed to - while his was a dirty secret. I grew into a mushroom cloud. The therapist said, “Now, Susan. You can have some respect for the courage it took to tell you all this, can’t you?”

I turned in a slow-motion “Whaaaattttt?” Once safely in the hallway, I told Tom I wasn’t going to any therapist who was uncomfortable with anger. That bitch was fired.

5. You Have to Tolerate Some Difficult Emotions

While we were declaring bankruptcy, I had another opportunity to solve the problem. Turns out, if you have student loans, the judge can pause your payments and order you to pay creditors instead. Of course, during the years this takes, Freddie Mac would still be charging 6.8% interest on a huge principal. The lawyer said she didn’t think our judge would do that. Could I trust this daddy-judge? Turns out I could not. I closed my eyes and begged for clarity—too many times a day. What should I do? Please tell me. Every meditation brought a different divine guidance, and nothing felt right. Finally, I said we should dismiss the bankruptcy. We kept the debt because I couldn’t trust.

During divorce mediation, Tom accepted full responsibility for all the debt. I received all of this as my due. There was only one problem. I’d just found out that our son had a secret just like his dad’s. My straight-A student had stopped doing homework and was failing every subject. When I asked him why he couldn’t tell me he was struggling, he said, “I was going to make it up, so you’d never find out.” He curled into the dog’s bed and sobbed.

Word for word, that had been his father’s logic, too. Something in me broke like Bahji at the Beach. Turns out, everyone in the family system has the same symptoms.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do this to my son. I asked Tom if he wanted to be roommates, just until our son graduated from high school. Then we decided to see him through college. Sometime after that graduation, the debt was resolved, and the student loans were forgiven (thank you, Grampa Joe Biden). We put our wedding rings back on. And now, just as in the Philip Larkin poem, we are walking down cemetery road together.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t easy. I had fantasies about the Beautiful Other, the life I could have had if I’d divorced Tom. I criticized myself as harshly as I had criticized my mother. What perfect second husband might you have married if you’d only been brave enough to face life on your own? Yada yada, I’ll never know. Could I have really divorced my problems by divorcing Tom? How far could I get running from myself? Sadly, until ridiculously recently, I still thought the debt episode happened to me rather than being something I co-created.

And now, I’m glad we never unbolted that Hermetically sealed back door - what Pema Chödrön calls the wisdom of no escape. The joy is crystalline. Pristine and sharp. Maybe I would have ended up in this joy whether I stayed or not. I suspect so. I’m sure that path would have been just as strewn with landmines. But I’m glad that I still have my best friend, the one I love, and that we have the long course of years behind us as we round the final turn and head into the homestretch together. Both of us have thrown our jockeys. When we cross that finish line, kick off our saddles and spit out our bridles, we’ll jump the fence and find the forest where the wild things roam. Maybe. You never know. But whatever lies ahead, I’m facing it with Tom. He’s proven himself to be pretty reliable.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. It lets me know you found value. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns. Rainer Maria Rilke

Suffering

I used to think the healing journey was about releasing one false story at a time. Through interacting with circumstances, I’d activate and then release the personal victim stories, the lack of self-worth stories, and the internalized trauma from a childhood home brimming with alcoholism, violence, and sexual misconduct. I’d eat my own shadow until there was nothing left but light. It was a lot of work.

And there’s no end to it. Neither my family nor my culture started with my arrival. Our culture runs on misogyny and worships domination. The violence wasn’t only at my house. Our political, religious, and cultural systems are propelled into the present by centuries of history that bear weight on the individual. Can we get to the bottom of suffering? Is there a bottom?

Joy

About fifteen years ago, I had a big dream. I was in the back garden, painting a life-sized self-portrait of my naked body reclining in white space using only shades of pink, the color of joy. Then, I’m reclining on a couch before a cozy fire. My self-portrait hangs above the mantle. An invisible force jumps into my body. It lifts me from inside and pops, pushes, and reshapes me until my pose matches the painting.

Suffering

This week, I watched Lydia Yuknavitch’s 2016 TED Talk about misfits. I don’t know what took me so long. I’m a huge fan, and I’m also a misfit. Then, I visited her website, and at the end of one of the free lessons there, she said, “And then, you are going to submit it. Not to me, but to a publication.”

I froze. Shock waves rippled from my little walnut-heart, creating a parenthesis in eternity. What could be different if I had just done that simple thing?

For twenty-five years or so, I rose every day at 4:00 am to write before going to work. I wrote through the weekends. I never taught summer school. I just wrote. Oh, and while I was teaching full-time, I went back to school full-time to earn two more degrees, one of which was the expensive MFA, which didn’t teach me anything. But while I was in that program, I submitted a few things. Then, I took more and more classes, some quite expensive, both in money and in the currency of self-confidence.

I wrote and wrote and wrote - three books worth, and more. But I longed to share my writing with readers in a way that broke me open, all raw and bleeding on the inside. Longing like this is a kind of grief for something you’ve never had. It comes in waves and contractions, just like suffering the loss of something you did have, like say, the loss of a parent when you are still a teenager. The felt-sense of a tremendous longing to be a real writer was the absence that lasted my whole life. But even if I were as well-read a misfit as Lydia Yuknavitch, would that satisfy my ambition?

I walk around singing that old R.E.M. song, Losing My Religion, only I substitute the word ambition: That’s me in the spotlight, losing my ambition. In my native culture, our religion is dominance - winning. That’s what we worship. Fulfilling your ambition is winning at life, which many see as The Point. But of course, it’s not. I sit with people who are dying. At the deathbed, winning isn’t the point of anything.

Joy

When I surrender my unfulfilled longing, joy becomes me. It’s so full and loud that when I walk into a room, people turn and look for the source of it. I know that it’s not me. It’s coming through me, but I get to feel it as it passes through. That’s the gift. I am so grateful for the respite from all that longing.

When I am in this joy, I just want to melt into my garden for the rest of my life in one long tea party with my plants. That’s my relationship with writing, too, because when it’s a good day, and even when it’s a bad day, this relationship with my inner life bouncing off the physical world and back again onto the page is the absolute bliss of being whole. Time stops.

Suffering

But I’m not just an individual. I’m a political animal, a feminist to the core with such strong opinions about the state of our country and the fascists who are blowing up fishing boats, pissing their dominance to start another war over oil… Ahem. My opinions surely add to the choppiness in our subterranean aquifer, so I’ll stop now.

Sometimes, I can rest in the knowledge that we are working out our collective story. Countries do what families do, what individuals do. We work out our story, our mythology, if you will. It’s the same acting out I did when I was projecting my trauma onto the movie screen of circumstances - only bigger. And the U.S. projects a lot of trauma. And yes, people die while our own thrashing minds turn the cascading kaleidoscope of our terrible shadows. We could stop it, but the story tells us that we’re powerless.

Just how dangerous is the world? Don’t we need a strong authoritarian daddy? Aren’t some people more human than others? Isn’t life a zero-sum game with winners and losers? If so, the wealthy must be worshipped as some kind of god-favored geniuses who create wealth rather than extract it. Like all projections, even mine about the publishing industry, it’s a flimsy story. These are the poles we dangle between, the one hand and the other hand, each nailed to a side of Rilke’s cross. We are suffering hard. But the story is not true. The world is not like that. The story, like all myths, is a lie.

Joy

The willingness to suffer misconceptions rather than act them out resolves into joy. Something clicks into place, a key turning tumblers - clickety, click, click. Cascading joy. And then there’s clarity. Inspiration… promptings. Do this. It’s so clear. Say that. Time disappears. Right action is effortless. A breeze. Follow that bliss. It’s possible to allow the shadow to arise inside the container of joy. And joy is not moved.

Suffering

In this, my fallow season, I am reacquainted with my insatiable ambition, my need to be someone else, my projection of a fantasy me, where I’ll be this, and this, and this… and I’ll finally be…

I can’t believe I still run a story like that. But I do. I ache with a longing I have named: Becoming. And that Becommer would push the river aside to walk to the other shore. And yet, I know I must suffer this story in stillness. Any outcome I manufacture out of ambition will only lead to more suffering.

Joy

When the kaleidoscope turns on its own, all the fractals fall into a new pattern. The outcome won’t be what I hope for or what I fear. It will be some third thing, a divine child, a perfect blend of light and shadow. Beautiful, yes, but I am not the pattern. I am the joy pouring through it. Joy like that, so bright and so much… is so powerful that it hurts the eye to look on it directly.

Suffering

My spiritual teacher, who is the most realized person I have met, must have suffered when the community learned that her husband was sleeping with a devotee—that old Svengali bad-man guru trap. Many people left her because she didn’t leave her husband. Obviously, they said, she must be a fraud.

I know how that one feels. That was my impossible task when my marriage was effectively over about fifteen years ago, though the trigger wasn’t sexual infidelity. It was financial.

My family and friends told me to have some self-respect. Trust was over—divorce was inevitable. But marriage, a mini-culture, is created by both people and the full weight of their histories. I couldn’t divorce myself by divorcing him. I filed the papers, but my son was devastated. I watched him break. Having no idea what to do, I fell back on my spiritual practice of stillness.

I swore I wouldn’t move until I had clarity. I waited; I listened inside. I grieved. I walked around for years releasing anger in pluming clouds behind me as I walked the beach. What should I do? Nothing. I begged for clarity. No answer. Then, one day, click, love for him just poured through. He’s beautiful, my best friend and partner. We all are. I started wearing my wedding rings again. And now, I’m so glad I stayed.

Disclaimer: Your results may vary. If leaving were my path, everything would have played out differently. Each person’s fears and feels are a custom fit.

Joy

I still love my teacher, too, though I’m no longer a devotee. Achieving some steady state of enlightenment was never the teaching, which was about being here now… and now… and now. Presence. And that’s how my initial awakening was, too. Presence. It wasn’t what she said. I don’t remember what she said. It was about what she is. Presence. Because that’s what I am. Presence. There wasn’t a process; only circumstances have a process. I’m the joy shining through, illuminating the pattern in the kaleidoscope.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

This past little while, I’ve been trapped in a story. I see it; I know it, and still it plays. So, I’m being still, and being still and being still, and still the story doesn’t resolve like it’s supposed to.

I want to make things happen. My body tells me to wait; things will work out. But I want to achieve, to push the river, to get my work out into the world. I’ve been working on this my whole adult life. I want; I want; I want.

I know how to be still, so I’m doing that. I’m doing presence, but it’s transactional. The deal is: If I’m still long enough, I’ll get what I want. I can hold my breath a long time. As you can probably see, that’s doing stillness to get an outcome. Yep. I see it too.

My reaction against that is to think: I’ll quit then. Stop doing everything. Become a hermit. It doesn’t matter. I’ll just finish that second novel for the fun of it - or not. I’ll sit in the backyard and vibe with the garden until I die. I quit.

Sigh. I hate losing control. Sometimes, okay, often, I have to lose control before anything shifts. And I’m not in charge of when or how that happens. Losing control is an experience of the perfect storm, created by grace.

I learned how to be still when I was a new teacher in middle school: one week of training, mostly about keeping records, no student teaching, just an emergency credential called “sink or swim.”

That 7th-grade classroom was a dark forest. Wolves circled. It was like the universe just picked me up with a Mario Kart crane and dropped me back into 7th grade. YIKES. A confluence of being bullied at school, domestic violence at home - an experience of deep existential helplessness - my core wound, which hurts to that life-or-death vibe I call “issues of safety.” My reaction pattern is to always be competent and in control because I’d rather die than be helpless.

Looking at that dynamic from a position of authority, I became a dominator like my father. I was a colossus demanding silence. Gentle reader, I yelled.

The kids went, blink, blink.

Into that silence, my nemesis, Gerard, said, “Ms K. gone psycho again!” And they’d all fall out laughing and return to whatever mayhem they were getting up to before, often picking on some poor kid, which enraged me further.

They were bullies. I was a bully, and we lived, moved, and had our being in a bully culture. Kinda like the political climate we are in right now, a domestic violence situation that is out of control. And no third parties (say the police or the Supreme Court) are coming.

I asked my spiritual teacher how to stop living this terrible story. Hmmm, something I’d like to know about my country, too. “How do we stop?”

“There is no how to stopping,” she said.

I went blank, confusion all over my face.

She laughed at me, held up her fist. “If you are clenching,” she let her hand drop, “Stop. In fact, stop all doing. Then stop all stopping.”

Cartoon storm clouds formed around my head.

She laughed. “There are three ways the mind moves: against in anger, away from in fear, or toward in neediness for love.”

“Neediness?”

She nodded. “Manipulation of others. Stop doing all three. See what happens.”

So, my prayer became: I will not move against them in anger today, because back then, I couldn’t see that I was also terrified of them and attempting to manipulate them through classroom management. No matter what they do, I will not move. I failed and failed at this, and didn’t know why. Show me, I begged. Show me.

Sure enough, one day they came pouring through the door after a lunchtime fight, all yelling, shoving each other, and throwing things. The quiet ones, of course, sat in the front and looked up at me. They wanted to learn and were still hoping I would provide a safe environment.

I stood and said nothing, watching my thoughts. In a normal voice, I welcomed them and asked them to take out their books and turn to page 10.

Someone threw a backpack. The crowd said, “Ooooh.” The target caught the backpack and hurled it back. “Oooh.” The backpack boys chased each other around the room, and several others joined in.

I will not move against them in anger today, I repeated. Not even if they pull the walls down. I saw the thought: If an administrator walks by right now, I’ll be fired. A chair toppled, an explosion of sound that stopped them for a moment. And that’s when I heard my trigger. It was so soft, a whisper through my mind. “That’s it.” When I still didn’t move, I heard it again, but with more venom. “That’s IT.” I watched the thought. I realized I had permitted myself to do anything after I heard, “That’s it.” After that, I wasn’t responsible; they were. But now, I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t move - the only thing I’d never tried.

My story about them flashed as an image, a picture worth a thousand words, like a dream symbol. Wolves circled me, looking for an opening to rip my throat out. When I saw that, I was fascinated. I just wanted to see. I didn’t tell a story about the image. I didn’t cast them as wolves to my victim. I just stood there.

The story collapsed. The floor fell away from my feet. The ceiling blew off like a farmhouse in a Kansas tornado. The walls tipped backward and disappeared in a puff. I was in a vast, empty space. Everything in space was just fine, like it would be at the bottom of the ocean. All the turbulence was far away.

The chasing, the pelting of paper balls and pencils, the noise… everything stopped. My face smiled at a boy, and he smiled back. I found Gerard, and all this love, which was not personal, bloomed. I, this I in stillness, loved him.

“Ms. K.,” he said, “Are you all right?” And we fell out laughing, because I had never been better. It was one of those laughs that feeds on the next laugh, or the lack of a laugh, or a snort-laugh, someone’s giggle. And we’d all start laughing again. Someone said, “What’s going on?” That was pretty funny, so we laughed some more. I wiped tears from my eyes, and we howled about the teacher crying.

Slowly, they righted chairs, sat down, and looked up at me. “Get out your books,” I sighed because my sides ached. “Turn to page 10.” And they did it.

That was a whole career ago. There were decades of clearing old stories like that by being still and willing to feel it all. I’ll call that my recovery phase. It was long and arduous. I had to transcend the story of my childhood.

After transcendence, the work is eminence, being reborn, fully in my body, listening to her, believing her, and right now, she’s telling me to be still. Don’t be grasping—no neediness; no manipulation, just be in this uncomfortable moment.

My current story is about achievement, how other people can have it but I can’t because there is something basically flawed about me that people can sense - or smell. I’ll just never break through. This is not about being an imposter, because in the story, I’m in my late 60s and I’ve never accomplished anything.

My body is telling me to stop. Wait to be moved by a breath of inspiration, excitement, or synchronicity. Let aliveness come through me - if it’s going to, and let it go if it’s not. I watch the stories flow through me about what I should be doing. Yada-yada. I hold the tension of not-knowing, or I flail and say things like, “I quit. I can’t do it.” But quitting is not the same as surrender, and I’m right back in it. The discomfort reminds me of being nine months and three weeks pregnant with my son, terrified of giving birth, and angry that everything is going to be so hard and painful.

Embodiment, the eminance phase, is about no longer participating in the collective story, because we were born into one that tells us how to navigate the world, and like it or not, I am in that story because I was born here. Our story is about dominance and making things happen. And whoo-boy, it’s everywhere.

Every culture has a mythology about the world and how it works, and every culture is right sometimes, but mostly wrong. In much of the world, we are examining a story about male dominance, about wealth as power, immunity from consequences, about women and their place, about the myth of race. About who gets to be free and who works like a slave. We, alive today, didn’t write this myth. It’s so big we can’t see the whole story or how it relates to the narrative we are living as individuals. Our American myth is very much about achievement in a culture that worships dominance. A culture of bullying that makes things happen through manipulation or force.

All stories, even that one, come to stillness to die. If you look around, you can see some of us waking up from it, while others, mostly the bullies and the terrified who think they need bullies to protect them, fight against that awakening. They want us to believe the story as if their lives depended on it. But we don’t. Our bodies recoil at hurting other bodies, of starving people, canibalizing them for shareholders’ profit.

Anyway, our stories all die when the body dies. That’s transcendence, too. But who could we be if we died before we died and then were reborn? That’s eminence, divine awareness living through the body. Aliveness. You have to be reborn and look out through new eyes, no story at all. Just space.

That’s what happens when you stop. From there, the right move comes. Now, I’m not saying that anger isn’t an appropriate response. Sometimes it is. No judgment. Our bodies know the truth if we would just stop overriding them. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself each time I want to take back control and make something happen.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Oh, those maenads, devotees of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and madness - brilliant pharmakia of the ancient world. Pharmakia, by the way, started out meaning expert at mixing drugs (it’s the root of our word pharmacy) and ended up meaning terrifying witch who should be burned at the stake.

Some scholars argue that Dionysus is the primordial savior god, and that Orpheus, Mithra, and later Jesus evolved directly from Dionysus and his liturgy. What do all the saviors save us from? The fear of death. How is that done? Through direct experience of the god’s immortality, which becomes the initiate’s experience of their own immortality. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.

I hope you see that I’m not referring to the historical Jesus (scholars are pretty sure there was one). I refer to the Jesus mythologized in the centuries following his death, a process of merging beliefs scholars call syncretization. People don’t give up their old beliefs. They pour the new on top. They merge the new with what they already have.

For an example of the process, let’s look at Trump, who, like Jesus, has been mythologized. Why can’t we show the MAGA right how illogical their belief system about him is? Because it’s mythological. The historical Jesus probably does not resemble the mythologized Jesus any more than the actual Trump resembles the figure his followers venerate. They are in the grip of a deep and dark American shadow. One, unfortunately, we deserve.

The ancients were wise enough to know that every one of us, including the numinous archetypes we call gods, has a light side and a shadow side. Dionysus is the god of religious ecstasy, and his equally potent shadow? Madness, of course. Ever experienced addiction? Pure madness.

Dionysus is the god of all things mind-altering, not just wine, as in the goofy Disney version. That includes sex (the union of opposites) and theater, which includes ritual. If you’ve ever been in the audience of a theatrical performance so transporting that your mind was altered, you know why he is the god of theater. And ritual? Mind-altering is the point. The Maenad’s phallic thrysus, which they carried to the party, was a cone-shaped and hollow magic wand (in case you missed the reference to orgies), containing the psychoactive plants and fungi that, diluted in wine, became the body and blood of the god. His attributes are not some random basket of goodies.

The maenads were the expert mixers of magical potions. They consumed the god, and in return, he consumed them. After that, the god never left them. They belonged to him. Through an experience of a psychoactive Eucharist, initiates could “die before they died so that when they died, they wouldn’t have to die.” What is the best substance to dissolve these drugs into? Wine.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

Cauldrons are an ancient symbol of the Great Mother’s womb. Speaking of Macbeth’s witches, archeologists have found the bones of reptiles among the remains of many potent teacher plants in the bottom of ancient cauldrons. And there are some psychoactive reptiles and amphibians… Eye of newt, anyone?

The first time I read that wine in the ancient world was not like the wine we know today, I glossed over it just as the authors did. But that lack of curiosity was a mistake. See, the chemical process of wine fermentation doesn’t change. It’s still true that once you get to an alcohol content of about 16%, the yeast dies—no more fermentation. So what made these wines require an expert to mix them so the drinker wouldn’t die? Mountain herbs and fungi. Teacher plants. Drugs. You definitely wanted an expert, and those experts were women.

These wild women (maenad means raving woman) were high priestesses of the greatest mystery religion of all time. In fact, a pale version persists to this day, influencing approximately 30% of the world’s population. Most Christians still consume the body and blood, only now women are banned from administering the sacraments they likely invented, and governments have outlawed… plants. The psychoactive Eucharist, which once transported initiates to an unmediated experience of the divine, is now a flat placebo, recognized as only symbolic by some protestants, but is still revered as mystical by most Catholics. We have lost so much. Cue Tom Lehrer singing The Vatican Rag. “Two, four, six, eight. Time to transubstantiate!”

Of course, there are other doorways to the divine that don’t require drugs.

Silence is as potent as any drug. No reading, no writing, no TV, no music. You don’t even need any fancy meditation techniques, though those can give the ego something to do. Silence brings about the death of the ego and the birth of Presence. Turns out that presence is love, and all you need to do to access it is die to your ego’s nattering. And that’s as simple as it sounds. Mercifully, once the process starts, it completes. The only hard part is the original willingness. The ego (personal and cultural) will tell you many stories about why you can’t do this, all carrying just enough truth to turn you away. Don’t be fooled.

The most common story is: I will go crazy. Like I said, the story contains a grain of truth. You do go crazy, and then you go sane. Egoic death throes can be full of venom and spite. Mine always are. Then the angels sing: Wahhhaaaa! Presence. Love comes pouring through your whole being. There is no reason for the love, no story about the love. It just is. You are in the god, and the god is in you. Awakening.

Nature is also a doorway to the divine. Even when I was a kid in horrible circumstances, if I was 40 miles out to sea, bang, it happened. Singing can also stop your mind. When I was healing the deep trauma of my alcohol-fueled, domestic-violence childhood, I walked out into the middle of the forest and sang my heart whole almost every day for six months. Now, I sing in a Threshold Choir for people who are actively dying. The presence of pure, tenderhearted yet unsentimental love overwhelms my petty concerns and flows through me - as me. And as the song.

Ultimately, whether you believe in reincarnation or not, the ego is reborn, but its story is less believable than it was. It can take years, but if you continue on this path, some Buddhists say you will inhabit a rainbow body, and that is every bit as beautiful as it sounds. It can take a whole lifetime, but what else are you going to do here? Pursue wealth, domination, and immortality like a Disney villain? Don’t laugh. People do. Look at the cadre of billionaires running the U.S. right now. And as Billy Eilish said recently, “If you are a billionaire… Why?”

Another non-druggy way that works is darkness. Remember those tanks? I used to float in body temperature water so salty it held me up. Total darkness. Silence. A complete return to the Mother’s womb. Bliss. I’m on a waitlist for a five-day total darkness retreat in a cave. I’m both terrified of this and can’t wait. This method carries the same risks of reincarnation as silent retreats. But every time I reincarnate, I’m less gullible for egoic stories, and even less willing to give up ecstasy in favor of madness. Why do it? What has madness ever given me that I wanted?

Because I am essentially a maenad, let’s talk about shortcuts, Nature’s pharmacy, pharmakaia, drugs. Almost every climate in the world has some kind of teacher plants or fungi. Nearly all of them are Schedule 1 NO-NOs, which the government says means a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. That’s kind of a joke because people have been using them for 50k years. You’d think some political or religio-beaucratic someones were afraid of losing control. If the 99% had access to a true awakening, we might refuse to sacrifice our lives on the altar of making someone else wealthy. Could happen. You never know.

The first time I took ayahuasca, I was in a small circle working with a shaman who had trained in vegetalisimo for decades. When I sat before him, he looked directly into my soul and said, “The first time, you may not have an experience of god.” How did he know? Was I that obvious?

The descent was arduous to say the least. There was so much puking and diarrhea. It felt like my soul was being roto-rootered. Glowing geometric shapes hurtled at my face like a 3-D old-time screen saver. When I reached the great wall of my fear of death, it was terrible indeed. An imaginary membrane stretched across my face like latex, blocking my entrance to the Otherworld and my breathing. I panicked. I had ingested poison. Now, no one could save me. I was sure I would die.

Then I popped through and was free to explore. I mean, really free. I wasn’t my body; I didn’t even have a body.

I relived a Big Vivid Dream I had when I was seven and again when I was in middle school, the kind that lays down the primary archetype for your life. Mine? Maenad.

In the childhood dream, it was very cold, as it is when one uses psychoactive drugs. Your internal temperature drops, and there’s not much you can do about it but bundle up. But the cold isn’t outside, it’s in your blood. The cold is kind of great because I’m in my beloved bed under a weight of many comfy blankets. I’m toasty. I fly my bed to school and attend class - still in bed. I fly over a frozen landscape, between the worlds, and in deep space. It’s very cold in deep space, but I’m happy and warm. Now, 60 or so years later, I’d say my dream was a predictor of my shamanic travels, where I’ve gone to learn. Some part of me knew I was descended from maenads even as a child.

Oh, and the comfort got bigger and bigger. It was a theme. I was soooo comfortable that I realized being in my body was uncomfortable 100% of the time. Terribly uncomfortable. Then I realized why I had never been comfortable in my body. Ever. I could actually see how my body reacted to being prey, which, as a young girl, then a young woman, then a middle-aged woman in this Western misogynistic culture, I very much was. Now, as an old woman, I have a cloak of invisibility which I adore. How amazing it was when that armoring fell away. How freeing. Then I situated back in my body. How profoundly comfortable I was in my own skin! A miracle indeed. For three days after.

Warning: Because visions only show you what is possible, I had to spend the next five or so years making that a physical reality. It was difficult work. But I would never have even known it was even possible without Mother Aya. And that was just one part of the first time I visioned with her.

I did…do psilocybin every few years or so with a therapist. It’s milder on the body. That’s not to say I wouldn’t visit Mother Aya again if she called to me. I would.

The therapist and I have three sessions before I journey. They spend six hours with me during the trip, and we have three sessions after. The last time, when the geometric lights were ricocheting around my frontal lobes, I was aware that the medicine was rewiring my brain, connecting parts of me that had been severed by trauma. I sobbed for hours as the stories I’d made about myself and the world as a result of that trauma released through my eyes, nose, and throat. I became aware that none of the stories I’d told for years were actually true. My pillow and even my shirt were soaked. I was dehydrated from hours of sobbing.

Two months before, I’d lost a beloved puppy who was stung by a bee. In the 21st century, we can’t save a puppy from an allergic reaction to a bee sting? He was 21 weeks old, and I loved him beyond reason. I rushed him to the ER, and they worked on him for 6 hours, including a total blood transfusion. While the vet team worked, I spent the day in prayer, begging for Grace, begging for his life, using my most powerful maenad magic to ask the powers of the universe to save my baby.

I don’t think I can adequately describe how his death shattered my illusions. You’re going to have to imagine that one. I will tell you, though, it was the reason I ate the magic mushrooms. I just couldn’t get over it. If my idiosyncratic woo-woo worldview, cobbled together over 50 years of deep realization, wasn’t true… then what was?

In that psilocybin session, it became clear that this wasn’t just about the puppy. I was the one I was grieving for. Duh, you might say, but in the thick of grief, I never questioned that it was about Puck and the prayers that weren’t answered. Yes, that was his name, that little trickster.

And then, I died too. I was no longer there. I could not find myself. Where is this fiction called Susan? I heard a voice say. Where indeed. But more importantly, who is looking for her? I didn’t know. If Susan is dead, how will I ever write again? I didn’t know. That ambitious one, the one who wanted to do all that stuff, had died. Would I drive home to my family? I didn’t know. Did I love them? I didn’t know. Where was I? Dead. Flatline. Nothing. And the next morning? Still dead. And the next day and the next? Dead as a doornail. It’s not easy being a maenad sometimes.

That old Susan was toast. She’d never do anything again. I wrote in my journal how ironic it was that the old Susan had to die so the new Susan could live. Some new, different person would have to fulfill all those dreams. Or not. Maybe this body would just sit in the back garden and vibe - until the body died. There are worse outcomes.

It’s been two years since my last confession, I mean ritual with my inner maenad, and I’m doing all kinds of things now that the old Susan only dreamed of. So, thank the Lord Dionysus, but not the church, for their Eucharist is an inert placebo. If their Eucharist were potent, their priests couldn’t have done those horrible things to all those children. The god within would have made them face themselves and neutered their appetites… I mean, healed them. And certainly don’t thank the state, because my Eucharist has been illegal for centuries now, though it doesn’t hurt anyone as much as closing down medical insurance subsidies, ending SNAP benefits for the working poor, and using our own tax-funded military to invade our cities while rolling out a coup so they can milk us without any government regulations. They keep the general population terrified of death, so we think we need strong daddies to save us.

And, like I said, if you want to meet divinity within your own being, you don’t need to be a maenad. You need willingness. Maenads only offer a shortcut, but it’s arduous either way. And after all of that, it doesn’t give you any power in the world to keep your loved ones alive, avert disaster, or give you any special access to the divine that everyone else doesn’t have. But it does give you Presence. Love. Peace. And Joy. For me, the loudest attribute of presence is joy. And if you pursue this path long enough, it opens Compassion, that much-maligned disease of Western civilization. But it won’t give you power or even dominion. Your ego can’t use prayer as though the Lord of Hosts were Santa.

You can only surrender to a deliciousness that is so alive and aware that you would not go back to the flat, two-dimensional pretend-you if you could.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, please support me by restacking.

If you had a Scooby Doo moment - Rut Ro! Please leave a question. If you have an experience of your own, please comment. There is so much more to this world than my little philosophy. You are all my teachers.

Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing. Please upgrade to a paid plan if you can, so I can continue to bang away at my little stories. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

When I was 12, I went to see the horror movie The House of Dark Shadows, even though I was strictly forbidden. My parents said it would give me nightmares. The vampire looked directly into the camera, swam the channel of our eye contact, and captured my soul. I heard the click when it happened. For years after, I had a screaming nightmare 2-3 times a week, a psychic wounding that served as an initiation, a shamanic descent into a watery Underworld of darkness and depth, a dance with the archetype of evil that would rule the course of my life.

In the dream, I rise from my bed, dressed in sacrificial white, and stand at my bedroom window overlooking the Merrimack River glittering past our house under a hunter’s moon. A man’s disembodied face hovers—his eyes hypnotizing prey. I open the window. A mist flows over the sill, and a vampire swirls into form beside me, so filled with erotic desire his exhale catches in ragged little gasps. He tilts my chin to expose the line of my neck and traces a finger along my jugular, raising downy hairs on the back of my neck. He sucks in a breath, fangs glint, his mouth descends. Teeth brush my skin. I panic. NONONONO. I scream. I want to live.

The first time, the whole family came running. My mother sat on the bed and rocked me while I cried. The brothers, confused and disoriented, returned to their beds. My father ran a helpless hand through his crew cut, crooning, “You’re safe now.” But night after night, the vampire returned. And night after night, I let him in.

After a while, my brothers groaned, “Can’t you make her stop?” My mother merely called to me, “Wake up, Susan.” Eventually, my father just yelled without getting out of bed, “For Christ’s sake, Susan! Shut the hell up.”

The devouring monster was stalking us all. I still wonder if my father might have lived if only we had taken those warning screams more seriously.

When I was 17, my father puttered his lobster boat up the Merrimack River, threw the engines into neutral, and, gaff in hand, tightroped the catwalk to catch the mooring in front of our house. On the trip back to the wheelhouse, he slipped into the frigid April waters and drowned. His body was missing for 14 days, which is still mostly a lacuna for me, though my mother told me how odd it was that I didn’t cry.

So, imagine my mother’s shock when, at 25, I fell in love at first sight with Dracula after a Halloween midnight performance at our local dinner theater. Dressed in black tie, he was 6 feet 4, dark hair, dark eyes. Drop-dead gorgeous. A gaggle of twitterpated middle-aged mothers were swooning around him, waiting for their turn to be twirled by a dangerous flamenco dancer, swirled inside his cape, and bitten in the neck until they squealed.

He dipped a poodle perm into position, looked up, smoldering eyes cutting a channel directly into mine. “Don’t go,” he said, and each word rippled through reality.

My mother scoffed, “Love at first sight? This is your nightmare.”

Less than a year later, Joseph and I moved from small-town New England to big-city LA to become actors. We were living our dream, settling into a pattern of replaying my parents’ early marriage, which meant plenty of drinking, but without the domestic violence. That was still in its early stages, but it was developing. I had hit Joseph once, and the next morning he stood in the bedroom doorway and said, “If you ever hit me again, I will hit you back. Hard.”

Joseph found a job with a market research company that conducted advanced screenings of soon-to-be-released movies. The job took him to most major cities in the United States, just as my father’s career in commercial insurance had involved frequent business trips. I became my mother, spending half my time as a lady in waiting, and the other half celebrating my man’s return.

Then, Joseph’s job started taking him back to Boston repeatedly. He said he had requested the assignments so he could visit his family. I was jealous.

So, one night while Joseph was in Boston, I sputtered awake at 4 am. I gasped, like a woman held underwater to the point of drowning. And I just knew: Joseph was having an affair, and the proof was in the phone bill. Now, this was in the time before cell phones, when everything in the world was different.

I padded out to the kitchen. Call after call to the same number in Massachusetts, charged back to our bill from a pay phone. After half an hour circling the phone, picking it up, and putting it back down, I called the number.

“Hello?” the Whore of Babylon answered.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

After a long pause, she said, “You called me. Who are you?”

Panicked, I slammed the receiver down. Shock waves rippled all the way back to my father’s death.

I called the phone company. The number belonged to a woman I knew from our Playhouse days. The calls had been made from the pay phone in the lobby of our apartment building.

A day later, when Joseph finally called, he said, “I didn’t do anything.”

“Come home today,” I said.

“I have five more days on this job,” he said.

“Tell them it’s an emergency,” I begged.

Of course, he didn’t call again for the whole five days. What was there to say? And, I was back in that same frozen Underworld I’d suffered through when my father died. A country called: he’s dead, but there’s no body.

Except this time, I did cry. And just as I feared, I couldn’t stop. I had to call in sick. The ocean of grief I’d once refused came pouring through like I was a full wineskin and Joseph was a pin.

In one of the few moments I remember from the time my father’s body was missing, my mother was convinced he’d washed up on some shore, trudged to a bar, and simply neglected to call her. Except that he was never one for bars; he did his drinking at home. I heard her ask the police: “Did you look in Jake’s? The Grog?”

And like her, I told myself some stories too. Joseph would be sorry. I’d be hurt. Sure, I’d punish him, but eventually, I would forgive him, and we would be the better for it—we’d quit drinking. Maybe go to couples therapy. We’d heal everything and start fresh.

But like my dad, Joseph said no to healing. When he finally washed up on my shore, he said, “But I love her. I’m moving back.” And just as when my father died, I wasn’t enough of a reason to live. The cost of facing everything was too high. And I get that—too many hours logged in the fetal position, releasing the frozen past from my bone marrow. If I could have skipped it, I would have.

I never saw Joseph again. Because we were 3k miles apart, I never ran into him at the store or walked into a party to find him there. I never called him, and he never called me. And in all the times I went back to visit my family in that tiny New England town? It’s been 40 years, and I’ve still never seen him.

But if I did see Joseph again, I’d tell him how grateful I am. I don’t think there was any other way for me to wake up from the nightmare. See, Joseph was my fourth and most devastating re-father—tortured men who loved me but disappeared without a trace anyway. Every detail of my father’s death was replayed, synchronistically perfect, and that’s a kind of grace. Though I thought Joseph and his lover were the monsters, it was undeniable. The monster was inside me. And just as my childhood dream predicted, I fought to live.

It took years, but now I live in joy. Because of the shamanic descent Joseph initiated me into, I died and was reborn so many times that the old Susan ceased to exist. That’s such a gift. Who wants to be trapped in a 1970s horror movie anyway?

Because Joseph’s betrayal left me no choice, I live in joy today. The old Susan died and was reborn so many times, she has ceased to exist. It’s for the best. She was a fiction anyway.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

About thirty years ago, I wanted more than anything to be an enlightened spiritual teacher. I became a licensed practitioner of a new age religion, a license not recognized by anybody, and certainly not the state of California. From within Pastoral Care, I worked in Transition Support, which is a new-agey way to say death and dying. And I founded Crisis Support because the significant losses we suffer, like the loss of a marriage, a job, our health, or a host of other crises, are mini-deaths, probably softening us up for the main event.

I longed to be an enlightened spiritual teacher so much that sometimes it doubled me over in tears. One day, I opened my heart and offered my complete willingness for the universe to take my life and use it. I was well aware that this meant that I would have experiences... in the real world of my circumstances. That gave me pause.

For someone who has been homeless, that loss of the illusion of control is terrifying. Also, once offered, willingness can not be taken back, no matter how horrible being out of control becomes in the shift from projection to actual seeing. In the throes of those experiences, I changed my mind. I begged for my old life back. But the universe doesn’t listen to whinging. When the dust settled, what I lost was the desire to be a spiritual teacher.

That new-age church is where I met Martin, the lovely man who has been cutting my hair for thirty years. Since the pandemic, this ritual takes place on my own back porch. I love that because we can talk about anything without being overheard. Martin is deep, so our conversations become satsang. This week, because we live in Los Angeles and are in a fast-moving coup, we had political satsang.

At one point, because I do have neighbors, Martin leaned in and whispered, “You’d think, in the salon, everyone would come from the left. It’s amazing how even people who are targeted, good people, can support what our government is doing.” He sighed. “I don’t get it.”

And suddenly, I felt an answer blow through my nerve endings. This, at its core, is about the fear of death.

After satsang with Martin, I read a piece by a Substack friend, Thea Zimmer, at All the Other Writers, Artists and Composers, who had posted about Gnosticism and asked me to weigh in because of my background in mythology. I restacked it with a note: The Christianity that lost had a feminine god. Now, I know that even the Gnostics were patriarchal, and I admit to being a little provocative there. But I was having fun.

And sure enough, the first person I heard from was a spiritual teacher selling enlightenment—Gnosis 101, Kundalini activation, and much, much more! He set about gently correcting my understanding of Gnosticism while still trying to engage me as a client—a move I call The Tightrope.

He said, “Sophia,” (a primary figure in Gnosticism), “fell into the material universe because she created a being without the permission of her husband.”

Husband? Sigh. I went to bed. Better, I thought, to let this rest for a while before I respond. I didn’t want to go to war in one of those “I know more than you do” conversations, which I am quite prone to, because I can be so overly proud of all I think I know.

And I had just fallen into that trap a week ago with someone who responded to a pretty vulnerable note I’d posted about facing my own fear of death, yet again. Seems I can never be done with something that morphs and comes back around cyclically, like most healing does. She responded to all that with: Well, I don’t have any fear of death.

We ended up in a long conversation where we each gave our death-facing resumes. I claimed that as long as we are alive, there’s more work to be uncovered, while she insisted she was completely over it. Honestly, I have a hard time trusting someone who claims they have no fear of death unless they are like my friend Lionel, a PhD Jungian and a medical doctor, in his 80s, with late-stage cancer, dealing with his fourth round of chemo. Even then, Lionel only said, “I have accepted my death.” The conversation with this Substack death-denier made me disappointed in myself. I rose and took the bait when I should have just said, “How nice for you.”

In the exchange with my Substack spiritual teacher, I never questioned his experience of awakening. It’s entirely possible. The ego melts, you experience awakening, and then the ego reforms. Experiencing universal love can actually strengthen your belief system, especially if mythology was the gateway. The ego thinks: I’ve found it! Jesus died for my sins! Right? Except that no mythology is true. This is why the early Buddhists said, The finger that points to the moon is not the moon.

The next morning, I found several posts from my spiritual teacher asking me to respond. He asked what sect I followed because he was a Sethian. I told him I was not part of any specific Gnostic tradition (there are several with differing views), but that I was coming from an overview of the mythology. However, I added that any tradition working to awaken people to their true natures can be “beautiful to the point of gorgeous.”

But, I continued, as a woman and a feminist, I have problems with any creation myth that makes the divine feminine the Fall Girl. In these stories, she is literally the reason we fell into the evil world, which we need to wake up from, transcend, or otherwise escape. I didn’t say this part, but it’s true. The Fall from Grace is the story of the formation of our ego. When we are born, we don’t have one. Ever look into the eyes of a newborn? Blamo! Universal love. Then our ego forms, first individually and then collectively. Ah, that first day of school, our religious indoctrination, that first day of Freshman Political Science, the news…

But if I could design a T-shirt, it would say: IT’S A METAPHOR. Sophia falling to earth… Jesus dying on the cross… metaphor. We all must surrender on the cross. You can do it while you live or wait for your last breath. As someone who frequently sits bedside, I can tell you it makes a difference.

“Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns”. Rilke The Man Watching

Mythologies about the world, our sexuality, and our bodies being evil make us terrified. The more patriarchal the culture, the more we think we need a horrible authoritarian who will dominate everyone and everything, but is on our tribal side. What we trust least of all is the thing that will actually save us—the surrender of our worldview. A Course in Miracles (a more benign mythology) says the world is a projection of our egoic fear. The real world is the exact opposite of the world we see with our eyes. All our stories about the world —personal, religious, or secular —are mythology, but the truth is no story at all.

Then my Substack spiritual teacher said, “Christ is Sophia’s husband.”

I am truly amazed when a mythology twists itself into knots to make Jesus superior to a pre-existing Sophia, and people don’t see through it. Alchemical stories about the wedding of Sophia are about the human Jesus becoming perfected by marriage to the divine feminine within himself. The reason many early Christian sects were targeted as heretical is that they didn’t see Jesus as God; they saw him as only human. What he realized is available to all of us. Now that is dangerous.

Then my spiritual teacher said that Gnostics did not see Sophia as a god.

But Sophia is a god, older than any form of Christianity. That should tell my new friend that his story is mythological—perhaps better than the dominant Christian mythology, but a story nevertheless. I never, and still don’t, doubt his experience of awakening. I said, “My hope is that we can transcend all forms of duality and the need to impose domination over anyone or anything, which I see as the fear of death, which is, consequently, what the ego is made of: the need to dominate because we are afraid.” Here I should have added: to die. We are afraid to die. That’s why we dominate—it’s the combination of our ego structure and our terrifying worldview.

Of course, you know what happened next. This awakened spiritual teacher melted. He stopped trying to convert me and settled into his experience of enlightenment. He let go of every story, even the ones that made him his living, and joined me there. He understood that the stories are helpful, useful, and even necessary. They point the way. They provide the all-important metaphors for an experience that defies logic and resists being put into words. In his business, he was already blending and combining various mythologies, including Gnosticism, Kundalini Yoga, Brahmanism, and what appeared to be Jewish numerology and astrology. Surely he could let it all go and rest in deep realization without any story. Even if it changed the ground of his assumptions, he’d be better off, cleaner, truer, a better teacher who could use stories rather than be used by them. He was dedicated to awakening. Surely, he would join me in that.

Nope. He blocked me.

Some of us, a good one-third as it turns out, would rather die than give up our worldview. And for those people, the need for a strong daddy in charge is essential, regardless of the cost. They understand that it would suck horribly to be on the wrong side and are only glad to be on the right side.

I see the FAFO people online laughing at farmers who have lost everything, snickering at people who plead with Trump to give them back their wives, kidnapped in a raid because they voted for him three times. I’m beginning to think schadenfreude is one of the ugliest of human emotions.

We have not reached the bottom yet, but after we do, we must weave the MAGA crowd back into the fabric of society because they have been lied to by the right-wing media projection machine, sure, but also by their own minds, which are projection machines, too, and the patriarchal worldview they were born into.

It turns out, the worship of a dominator god creates a dominator culture not worth living in. What’s it going to take to instill in all of us the necessary willingness to accept surrender? Now, that gives me pause.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

Under the World Tree, my sister-crones, the narns, the weird sisters, the fates of every stripe close in, shoulder touching shoulder, circling my moldering corpse. I nestle my brittleness into the rounded bottom of the black cauldron, the Great Mother’s womb, and the weird sisters pour in the singing waters.

Through our single eye, I’ve watched this moment approach, a step closer every year. I’ve traced the threads of my life’s story through their tapestry with a finger, skimming the warp and weft of the weave. Still, I kicked and scratched against the inevitable, my heart filled with useless questions. But who will I be, once I’m dead?After 25 years of teaching high school English, I retired two years ago. I loved my kids, and mostly, they returned the favor by moving into my heart and making a mess in there. When I wasn’t big enough, they excavated, renovated, removed walls to create more light and space, dug a new basement, put in picture windows, and added a second floor. And like the young of every species, not all of them survived to adulthood.

Dear One, thank you for your love.

My whole career, I wanted to become someone else. In dreams, I’d transform into the Holy Grail: a writer with a pension. Graduation after graduation, I’d smile in tearful photos, hug my beloved kids, and nod my respect to proud parents who had managed to keep their teens off the streets, out of gangs, and otherwise protect them from the big bad wolf. “Hey!” I’d joke. “When can I graduate from high school?

“Come with us to college,” they’d say.

In 2010, Kay Ryan, then poet laureate, spoke at USC, and after school, I walked across Jefferson Boulevard to see her. She spoke about why she taught remedial English at a Community College rather than working at a prestigious University. “While my colleagues’ students are writing twenty-page research papers, we are working on,” and here she paused, “the paragraph.” In the back of the room, I gasped: Oh no! I’ve done this all wrong. Still, it took me ten more years to go. Children can be so sticky.

I have a word problem for you. If Susan has 1 section of AP Lit and 1 of AP Lang, and an additional AP Psych, plus 2 sections of senior Expository Comp and 1 of Creative Writing, with over 30 kids in each class, who is going to read all that shit?

Answer: No one. Susan finally let go.

Dear One, thank you for all you have done.

I spent the last four years at a continuation high school, the last chance saloon for all the at-risk kids who had slid through every crack like a Dali clock - the hurt ones who carry multiple wounds, refugees from the wars: civil, racism, misogyny, gang and cartel violence, and the familial domination whose chief weapon is shame. And yes, sometimes these traumas turned into behavior, but mostly, I could sit beside them, tell the truth, and they would meet me there - teacher, mom, social worker, grief or suicide prevention counselor, whomever they needed on the day.

As I’m sure you know, being with someone’s trauma isn’t about what you say. It’s about presence. And yes, we also worked on the paragraph, speaking, and reading in English. Those kids made even bigger messes in the heart. And when they graduated, it was an even bigger celebration. And no, they didn’t all survive their childhoods either.

Dear one, thank you for all you have given.

I finally obtained the Grail, but for two years after I retired, that fishhook easily yanked me back. Last semester, I resumed full responsibility for my old classroom as though I’d never left. They’d had one 30-day sub after another, and well, I couldn’t say no. I joked that subbing was all the best parts of teaching and none of the onerous ones - no meetings, no professional development, and no phone calls from administrators seeking to delegate their stress. Heaven, right?

But this August, when the phone rang, something in me refused. While my mind was adding up the extra money, my heart was saying, “No, no, no, no.” Finally, LAUSD got the message and stopped calling. In that silence, I began to decompose.

For weeks, I walked around sniffing the fear of death on the wind, recoiling from the stench of decay coming from my own flesh, watching the grief rise to my eyes without spilling over. I wrote about the Underworld, about being at the bottom of a muddy well, about eating my own shadow with a spoon. I offered my willingness to feel it all, to surrender to what is, to die to my old self. Nothing shifted. My surrender carried the expectation of liberation - too transactional. Okay, I whined toward those pesky Weird Sisters, but who doesn’t want suffering to end?

And the Fates sang over the loss of my beloved country, too, reducing us all to a gelatinous goo.

One outrage after another shut down all our systems, our vital organs ceasing to function. We will never be the naive and complicit populace we once were. Even if we are reborn, it will be as a new expression, for surely the old one is dead.

I scrolled the cultural chemo. As we descended into autocracy, I read Christopher Armitage and watched Aaron Parnas. I marched, I prayed, I donated, I grieved. Still, the National Guard, the Marines, and the Paul Blart Gestapo occupied my city, then spread their malignancy to DC, now Chicago, coming soon to a civil war theater near you—corruption en plein air, tariffs metastasizing at the grocery store and everywhere else. Greedy bastards wink and nod over insider trading, because it’s not really about money; this is about domination. Money keeps score. And this, on top of two wars, a genocide or six, and the wanton destruction of agencies we depended on, the mining of Social Security data by people with no clearance, the cuts to Medicaid, the on and on and on and on.

Now, it’s your time to rest.

The Fates threw another log on the fire, then another. Notes stirred, and flames spat. Melodies twined through the root system of our World Tree. A fungal circle of magic sprouted. Harmonies clung to the branches, the breeze whispering unsentimental love. Between the worlds, at the bottom of the cauldron, a pile of bones in tattered rags lay, their marrow rendered. Bone soup.

The aroma tickled my nose. I sat up, wiped the tears, sniffled, and laughed.

And the Weird Sisters cackled, full-throated and kind, because they know the sweetness of the moment when fear and resistance finally give way to acceptance. The one with the all-seeing eye took my hand as I stepped over the lip and into her swaddling arms.

In the oldest stories about the end of the world, the last image is a green shoot ferning her head from the blackest soil. The world does not end. It dies and is reborn, just as we do.

If the weight of your world is heavy, here’s a link to the Santa Barbara Threshold Choir, singing to the presence of death in three-part harmony: Oohs and all. Lay back, nestle, a blanket is nice—press play. Curl into the fetal position. Close your eyes. Let the mother crones sing over your bones. Become bone soup.

If you read this far, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. Restack, please, if you were moved. Subscribe if you'd like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you are able to. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

The combination of the Moon Gate of Heaven and pearls representing the Great Mother dates back at least 6,000 years. Although the first mention of a specifically Pearly Gate is found in the Book of Revelation, Christianity emerged in a world that already existed, rich, fully nuanced, and full of flavor.

The pearl is a symbol of Isis, Aphrodite, and many other feminine gods, including Mary, herself a syncretized god much older than Christianity, whom Origin, the early Christian scholar, called “mother of us all.” The moon is the mother god’s vulva; her pearl is a portal. Aphrodite Marina’s body was said to be the gate to heaven. Souls were born into the world through her gate, and after death, they departed through it as well.

Egyptian priests referred to the moon as the "Mother of the Universe" because her light was believed to make things moist and fertile. The Egyptian symbol of the World Egg was an embryo inside a woman’s womb. They saw the moon as the vagina of Ma’at, and they called her the “Moon Shining Over the Sea.” It’s not hard to imagine earlier people looking up at that moon and seeing the mother’s vulva shining, pearlescent, above them.

The Cosmic Mother was called the Pearl of the Sea or the Pearl of Wisdom (I’m soooo tempted to add: of great price, but I’ll restrain myself). She was also known as the Holy Dove (Hmmm, an earlier version of the Holy Spirit?). As Mother Night, she brought forth the World Egg, the moon, which the serpent, with his tail in his mouth, coiled around seven times until it split into two halves: Heaven and Earth. The Greeks called this serpent Okeanos, the sea serpent of the ocean.

An aside: Zeus, in the form of a serpent, impregnated Persephone before she became his daughter, proof that she is much older than the hapless maiden who was abducted by her uncle with the permission of her father, and raped on her marriage bed. Many scholars think she is far older than Zeus and take that story as an accounting of the switch over to patriarchy and the undermining of maternal authority, matrilineal inheritance, and the overthrow of the matrilocal system of the husband joining his wife’s household, and maternal brothers serving as male role models because fathers just weren’t that important. They came and went, but the uncles were family. I smile every time someone says that when we were matrilineal, we didn’t know where babies came from. Because women kept and bred animals, they knew.

The mother god’s trinity makes easy common sense when compared to the male version, which requires considerable theological explanation. Her moon phases, waxing, waning, and full, are the maiden, mother, and crone, aspects of the same god, three in one; one in three. When the crescent is showing, we know the rest of the moon is still there.

At the turn of the year, as the world began waxing, the mother’s gate was called ‘Life in Death,’ representing the renewal that flows into Spring after the dead of winter. Then, as the year waned and the dead flowed back to their mother, the gate was called 'Death in Life.' Souls of the dead (not just people) ascended through this gate and attached to the inside of the mother’s womb to suck in her regenerative power before being reborn.

The moon is the mother’s vulva, the Abyss, the Vesica Piscis. Ancient people looked up in worship as she stood over the earth and all her creatures, perhaps a benign form of upskirting. The Orphic cult saw the moon as the home of the dead, a female yoni through which souls pass on their way to Paradise. The Egyptian Abtu, the Western Gate where the sun sets, was called the “fish who swallowed the penis.” The Celtic Sheila-na-gig shows the gate of birth as another form of the vesica piscis, the almond-shaped nether-mouth of the vagina.

You may know the Vesica Piscis as the Venn Diagram. Hard to imagine how many yonis middle school teachers have set before their innocent children. The Right Wing’s Christopher Rufo, the ideological father of Moms for Liberty, should probably put a stop to that. To the ancients, though, the god’s vulva was the portal of life, where the sacred and the earthly met, the entrance to heaven, a pretty apt description of sex if you ask me. Jugians call it a mandorla, the symbol of the Self.

After I made love to the man who would become my husband for the first time, he shone with a halo as bright as any saint’s. His whole body glowed. He was vulnerable, healed, and enlightened. And he has been devoted to me ever since, though I freely admit that I haven’t always been easy to love. For 33 years, I’ve carried that image of his face, his awestruck wonder when he looked at me that morning after. That light has allowed me to see him clearly, when everything in me wanted to project my darkness all over him. No wonder church fathers made sex so sinful as a means of controlling both women and men. No wonder they seem afraid of it (ahem), us. That’s some pretty awesome power, there.

Ancient mathematicians referred to the Vesica Piscis as the bladder of the fish. The ratio, 265:153, was referred to as the ratio of the fish. Closest to the square root of 3, the trinity, 153, was referred to as the measure of the fish. It birthed our understanding of the Golden Ratio, the rule of beauty and design in nature, art, and architecture. Jesus’s second miracle was for Simon Peter to draw up exactly 153 fish in his previously empty nets. A remarkably specific number, that. The Pythagoreans viewed it as a means to comprehend the entire universe through mathematics.

The Vesica Piscis adorns the cover of the Chalice Well, the Red Spring, in Glastonbury, which is associated with Mary, the Cosmic Mother. But how could she be the cosmic mother if she was only a sinful human woman, born two thousand years ago, not a god at all, as various branches of Christianity have insisted?

Jesus, Iththys, was a fish who came from the fishy womb of god. Early Christians recognized each other by drawing a Vesica Piscis in the dust. But the original Iththys was the son of the Syrian goddess, Atargatis, a pre-Christian symbol of abundance, life, and the regenerative power of females. Images of the ascension of Christ often depict Jesus, the Ichthys (fish), rising into a heavenly vesica as if returning to his mother’s womb, the portal from the earthly to the divine. Pearly Gate, indeed. The fish symbol and the word "fish" were synonymous with the womb, the eternal source of life. Put that in your holy grail and drink deeply.

Worship for the divine feminine is hidden throughout our churches and cathedrals. For example, the mandorla serves as the entrance to many a cathedral. We enter the womb of god through the portal of the divine feminine. And why is that door painted red? Ah, but the magic of menstrual blood is a topic for a whole separate post. Soon come.

Powerful men have excised the divine feminine from religion by appropriating all her potent symbols and refusing to let women serve any sacrament except dinner. Yet, there were hundreds of early Christianities, and a significant number, such as the Maronites, had women in positions of power. They were systematically wiped out, but some people still insist on worshipping Mary, though the church makes a sharp distinction between veneration and worship. But if you scratch the surface, the divine feminine is still there under the gloss of all those centuries of patriarchal control. And if you close your eyes and ask, she will surge through you and let you know: she hasn’t gone anywhere.

The appropriation of these feminine symbols smells pretty fishy. Maybe Freud got it backwards: penis envy is the myth, and womb envy is the real motivator.

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About 35 years ago, I entered the womb at Newgrange, Ireland, and followed the 60-foot corridor down to the central chamber deep inside the earth. As my husband can attest, I am still enthralled by all things cave. There’s just something about being inside the mother that never loses its numinosity.

At winter solstice, a shaft of light streams through the small rectangular roof box, illuminating the downward-sloping corridor and reflecting from the floor and corbeled stone ceiling to light the underground chamber as if it were midday. Very Indiana Jones. I was in tourist mode, so I was not expecting magic.

I stood inside a womb that was being called a tomb, in the female earth, which had been offered so much respect and love. It had taken generations to build with huge stones from far away. Who were these people? What worldview animated them? Since this was their monument, I felt sure it wasn’t anything like the world of male dominance I came from. I felt, again, an all-too-familiar disquiet, as if a huge part of human history had been erased.

To give a sense of how dramatic sunrise must have been for those ancient people, the guide turned off the light. I’d never experienced total darkness before, not like that. Eyes closed; eyes open, the same. It’s an otherworldly feeling being inside the womb of the Divine Mother, neither dead nor alive, suspended between the worlds, awaiting rebirth. Time stretched and stretched. When would she turn the lights back on? Now, right? Soon?

Something huge and very much alive was swirling through that darkness, listening. I could feel it all over my skin. I breathed her into my body. She moved me to tears. I made a prayer, standing in that darkness. I wanted to understand the ancient ways of being here, on the earth, in a body. And I wanted to serve this feminine earth, which was my mother, too. Seems the genesis, for me, is always some prayer.

When I was in grade school, being fed the Myth of the Hunters and Gathers, something in me silently rebelled against this strict division of labor theory. How do you know that no women hunted? Was there a rock tablet that said: Since women are obviously helpless, we men undertook all the hunting, for even the small animals…

We’ve since proven that mythology false, but I bet grade school textbooks haven’t changed much. Of course, some women hunted. In some cultures, women were even warriors. It took until 2017 for us to admit that Birka, buried with a huge cache of warrior’s wealth, including horses, was actually a woman. They conducted DNA tests to be absolutely certain, because we don’t want to make a mistake about something like the sex of a warrior. Sigh. And I can only ask why it took so many centuries to notice her pelvis.

Flash forward to 2005. By then, I had completely unraveled all the way to homelessness and reformed back to solidly middle class - a marriage, a son, a mortgage, and a career as a high school English teacher. So, imagine my surprise when a postcard set me on a new path. The moment I picked it up, I knew. Pacifica Graduate Institute: animae mundi colendae gratia. Tending the soul of the world.

Desire lit every neuron. Logistically, it was impossible. Plus, the new cohort had already been admitted. But the longing wouldn’t let me sleep, so I called, and with one week before the semester started, they got me into that cohort, with people I still love to this day.

I thought I was at Pacifica to study Irish mythology. I wasn't particularly interested in the Greek gods, except as psychological archetypes for human behavior. But the Women’s Mystery at Eleusis grabbed something in me and wouldn’t let go. In its day, Eleusis was famous the world over.

Do tell.

Questions started popping like corn. There was a woman’s mystery cult of Demeter and Persephone that stretched back at least 2k years before Christ and maybe as far as 10k? And, it was so egalitarian that even women and slaves were routinely initiated? A culture as overtly misogynistic as ancient Greece celebrated female gods so lavishly? Three thousand people a year attended? Including famous male people like Socrates, Plato, and Cicero, who said the rites were so transformative that they removed the fear of death? There was an Athenian law against telling the secret of the mystery that carried the death penalty for anyone who told? The death penalty? Over a secret? Must have been some secret. In fact, it was so well-kept that no one ever told. Do the math. That’s a lot of people who didn’t tell, and you know how infamously bad people are at keeping secrets. To this day, we don’t know what it was. That set my little novelist heart aflutter.

I fell into a research hole that lasted years. There were three levels of initiation, the highest being epopteia, those who see. What did they see (or understand) that removed the fear of death, because as near as I can tell, the fear of death runs every aspect of our lives, from the structure of our individual ego to our institutions like our religions and courts, our schools, and our politics. Time machine, please! I want that initiation. Our fear of death bleeds into everything. Who wouldn’t want to be free of that?

I come from New England Puritans on my father’s side, and that was a fear-of-death cult if there ever was one. Were you asked, in eleventh-grade American Lit, to read an excerpt from Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God? My kids read it. Those people went to church for at least six hours on a Sunday to be berated by clergy telling them in agonizing detail how God holds you over the fiery pit of Hell by a spider's thread and surely will drop you, because you are despicable to him. You are disgusting to God, who abhors you. The sermon, delivered in a deadpan tone, caused people to writhe and wail in church.

Imagine the fear of death that dogma produces! And then imagine the way it plays out in everyday life, as your belief system must.

That bit was presented in the textbook I taught from as an odd window into the Puritans’ psychological makeup. Except that the part overlooked was that it led to the judicial murder of at least 11 people in Hartford, and 40 years later, at least 25 people in Salem. Poor Hysteria. Blamed for so much for so long. Why were they hysterical? Hmmm. Could it have been their fucking male-dominating, god fearing religion that claimed dominion over the earth, native peoples, and women? And if you look around, you can see how the descendants of Puritans use the fear of death to gain wealth and power - still. But does this demonizing still lead to judicial murder, though? Yes. Yes, it does.

In researching my novel, I discovered that there was a place in absolutely misogynistic ancient Greece where women had power. Where they were allowed on stage: Eleusis. There was a place where women earned an independent income (lots of it), where they had children unfettered by marriage, and kept them - Eleusis.

How does a culture with a misogyny so thick that wives were sequestered in separate parts of the house also contain a place where Women’s Mysteries were so venerated as to be protected by law? Another women’s mystery, the Thesmophoria was too. By law, a man could not prevent his wife from attending. I wondered. Was there a time before the hatred of all things female was institutionalized entirely?

And the answers started flooding in. No systemic change of this magnitude could happen overnight. Impossible. Without violence, cultures change at a glacial rate because change is resisted. People do not willingly give up their gods, though they may happily put new gods beside the old ones. Wasn’t it possible that the old ways and the new ways existed side by side - for millennia? Not only possible, but wasn’t it likely? And wasn’t the violent end to the Women’s Mysteries at Eleusis an inflection point in the march of monotheistic patriarchal dominance that we still live in today? Hmmm.

Honestly, when male academics try to claim that we have patriarchy now because we’ve always had it, or because it’s just a superior system, I see just how effective burning all those libraries was. If I asked my brighter high school student how old Western culture is, they’d blink and say 2k years. If I asked the less bright ones how old the world is, I’d get the same answer. It’s when the calendar starts. (Calendars are a whole separate post)

I call myself a humanist now, because the word feminist carries such freight, but I haven’t changed except in one way. I’ve finally realized how horrible this culture of domination is for almost all men, too. They are suffering hard under a system that controls them by denying them the full range of human intimacy, where their idea of self is manipulated by shame because the last thing you want to be is a pussy. And, as a veteran high school teacher, I can tell you the most depressed people I see are adolescent boys. In every class, I had boys so depressed, high, or both that they could not pick their foreheads up from their desks. And now, another one has gone and shot up yet another school. Thoughts and prayers. Which is my version of Vonnegut’s “And so it goes.” Fear of death and fascination with it are poles on the same spectrum.

So, how did we fall into this mess where we worship death rather than life? Hmmm. Let me tell you a story.

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Last week, my cousin Katharine’s post, a handmade life, from her beautiful Substack, essays from the edge of town, had a snippet about Haskell’s Island in Casco Bay, Maine. When we were girls, Kathy’s mom, my aunt Polly, took up residence in the house we called 97 because it had a door from a shipwreck with that number on it. Shipwrights built and maintained these houses with Maine-ish practicality.

That Island is the epitome of an idyll. Without electricity (There wasn’t even a generator), everything was cooked on an ancient wood-burning stove, which, of course, those women had mastered. No roads (There were no vehicles), only footpaths along rocky seacliffs, through marsh, field, and forest. There was a wild raspberry patch behind the house, which was situated with a commanding view of Little Cove in the front and ocean-facing wild rock cliffs in the back. Aunt Polly was a teacher, kind and gentle. Her mother, Kay, was my grandmother Eleanor’s sister. The men came up on weekends or whenever work allowed. It was a haven from the alcoholism, sexual impropriety, and domestic violence that swirled secretly inside my house, which I’ve written about before. Since Kathy’s parents never uttered a cross word, I let my shoulders drop from my ears for weeks at a time.

Sometime around the end of June, I’d drive up from Massachusetts with my grandmother, and stay with Katharine’s sane family until my father, mother, my three brothers, and the dogs cruised up the coast from Massachusetts in the Chris Craft, which slept all six of us. He’d anchor in Little Cove for the week or two of his vacation, then I’d hop on the boat and chug home with them. Or the reverse trip happened too. I’d come up on the boat, they’d leave after a week, and I’d drive back later with my grandmother. Haskell’s Island was part of the reason I survived my childhood.

When I was married in 1996, Katharine’s parents gave us three days in the little red house called The Shanty as a wedding gift, and I was able to show one of the best parts of my childhood to my husband, Tom, as a way to prove there was more to me than fuckedupness.

So, last week, my cousin’s post brought up the time we were coming up from a swim, and her little Shetland sheepdog, Tammy, grabbed the corner of my towel, had a tug-of-war with me, then suddenly let go. I flew back against a boulder jutting up in the field and broke my fall with my elbow—a big, bloody gash. The remarkable thing, her parents had said, was that I never cried, not as we crossed to the mainland, the 30 minutes or so by small boat, and not in the car or the doctor’s office as I was being stitched, and certainly not on the return trip. Did I remember that?

And, I do. Mainly because on my honeymoon, as we were loading our supplies into the skiff for the trip over to the island, Uncle Roger recounted the whole story, still full of wonder that a child of ten could have such an experience without crying. A little over 25 years later, that was the thing he remembered most about me. The story hit me sideways then, and last week, when Katharine mentioned it, more than 25 years on top of that, it slid in sideways again. Why was I so tough?

The funny thing is, thinking about that story now makes my eyes tingle. I want to go back in time and tell that ten-year-old that she can exhale. Except, what do I know? Maybe if that girl let all the terror and helplessness pounce, she’d shatter, and maybe at that age, the shards wouldn’t fit back together so well. Maybe tough was a refuge. I wonder now if my Aunt Polly and Uncle Roger knew what my stoicism was hiding. Probably not.

I didn’t cry much when, seven years later, my father fell or jumped from his boat and drowned. I don’t remember any of the fourteen days his body was missing. Still, I’d bet a week’s pay I didn’t cry, just as I didn’t cry at his funeral, not even when my grandmother, Eleanor, shook my hand as she went through the receiving line looking ten years older than the day before. At seventeen, I couldn’t cry unless it was late at night, I was very drunk, and I’d driven to a secluded spot on the other side of the river where no one would see. Then, I’d pop in Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle and wail until my shirt was wet. Turns out, the superego dissolves in alcohol. But that didn’t count in my reckoning because I was not in my right mind. It didn’t heal either, because there is no real surrender in drunken tears.

Toughness is a big feature of my ego, which loves competence and hates helplessness. Also, it craves male approval. So, among descendants of stoic New England Puritans, one way for a tiny, insignificant girl to gain some male approval was to refuse tears. Plus, crying prompts people to ask what’s wrong. What leaps from my audio cortex is: what happens in the family stays in the family. When my father said this, he specifically did not mean grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. He meant we six who knew things.

So, it’s no surprise, really, that my ego doesn’t bend or melt. It shatters. About a year ago, pre-Substack for me, it shattered again when I thought I was safely decades past that stage of healing. Curious, I made a little list of the times during the almost 40 years spent healing childhood trauma, when circumstances have risen like Jonah’s whale to dash my ego against the rocks. There were eight major events. I’ve already written about the first three, here, here, and here. I’m sure you aren’t interested in the last five because it helps me delay writing about them.

In each case, it’s a worldview that shatters, something I’m absolutely certain is true but isn’t. I’ve come to believe that’s what my ego is: a worldview, an orientation, a story collection. It shatters because the purpose was to protect me from reality. Unfortunately, that includes profound, spiritual realizations too. Worldviews, it turns out, are about controlling the fear of death, and for me, that’s what spirituality was for. Some part of me was still trying to achieve safety in a world where there is none.

I didn’t start crying until I was almost 30. Then, just as I always feared, I couldn’t stop. The first wave of grief lasted three unbroken weeks, a brief respite, and back to work, like contractions. Sometimes I wonder how many hours I’ve clocked in the fetal position. I was right to fear that. If reincarnation is a thing, I’ll respectfully decline. It was worth it, too. It was a long, arduous journey, with freedom on the other side.

One of those shatterings my inner editor didn’t reform. I can’t control myself anymore, which I think was the editor’s purpose. Tears just well up inside me. Sometimes it pisses me off, this inconvenient wetness, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just a wet person now, but I wouldn’t go back even if I could.

That’s what I told my high school English students when their essays made me tear up, or their circumstances hit me in the eyeballs, or I noticed they had been cutting, or I had to breathe someone through a panic attack. Then there were all those parent meetings… I’m a wet person; it doesn’t mean anything. Or the five times one of my kids died without making it through high school. One of my shatterings was around that. Think about all the hurt adults you know, the ones this culture ran over with a Mack Truck. They were all in high school once. Even the ones who look like they’ve got it going on can be hiding something huge. Often, those kids are hiding the most.

It’s not about rescuing people. Of course, there were times when I had to call child protective services, but usually, it was just about presence, a holding of someone without arms, a softness in the eyes that says, I understand. Something wet from inside me embraces them. Usually, it has nothing to say. What if someone had cracked me open when I was in high school? Could’ve been a disaster.

You can hold a whole class at once if you’re quiet enough, especially a Creative Writing class. It took longer for me to become willing to hold the adults, you know, the crazy teachers, administrators, and parents who used shame or violence to get kids to do their homework or make them behave. Those.

But after a while, I realized that they were high school kids once, too, and I should embrace them. It made no sense to refuse just because they were older. Then, one day, you find you can embrace an entire school. After that, their community. And then they were all just in there, inside presence, making an uncontrollable mess everywhere. It makes my eyes wet just thinking about them.

This world is meat tenderizing my heart. My country, the United States, is out of control, and we are not alone in that. Our collective ego is out of control. Our need to prevail, to dominate, to win, to accumulate wealth and power, even for billionaires who clearly have more than they need, threatens everyone and everything. Seems there’s no such thing as enough.

Recently, I’ve been opening my heart and asking what I need to understand about death. At first, this was an exercise of discovery - for writing. My main character has Death as an ally, and I wanted to understand her arc better. What would she learn if Death were her teacher? Very quickly, this became about me. Writing and living simply won’t stay in separate lanes.

Here’s the first thing Death said: every time I’m even a little worried, it’s her I'm terrified of. When I look out at the world around me, I see the results from our worship of the fear of death. She assures me that what we give our attention to is worship, the only kind there is. And yet, she also assures me, death is a friend. I’ve decided to trust her.

Where would we be without her? she wants to know. Who would soften our hard hearts, interrupt our certainty, and show us what really matters with such enormous patience? Will we continue to ignore her good counsel and try to exert our petty dominance, or can we listen with our skin while allowing Death to whisper love songs through our hearts? Everything seems both simple and impossible when Death speaks. What would it take for us to surrender like that? I shudder to think. She will win in the end, though. She always does. Perhaps that’s why she’s so patient.

Since it’s so much easier to listen than exert force, I don’t know why I still have a hard time giving up control. Isn’t listening and waiting for something to rise up inside me the simplest thing in the world? Isn’t exerting force the hardest? What is easier than listening?

Death also said I have to admit I don’t know anything, which, if I’m being honest, is genuinely terrifying. It’s the willingness to be vulnerable and helpless. I think that’s what faith really is, not a blind belief in some god’s myth. We have to embody it, this understanding that we don’t know. Then, we have to be willing to address the obvious issues that are right on the surface.

In the United States, these will be tough conversations. If we could enter them from a place of not-knowing, I’d put my faith in us, the presence around us, the love that we are, which is holding all of us. We would have to admit some terrible truths and experience some painful feelings, though. We might even have to ask for forgiveness.

The largesse of our hearts might move us to offer a redress almost as expensive as a war. We might hear our own voice offer something as outrageous as restitution or even reparations. We might create a pathway for immigrants to succeed, thereby ensuring that we thrive, too. Our compassionate hearts might want to give people the shirts off our own backs, for crying out loud. What if we truly let the “other” in? Listened to their story and felt their pain? We might take home every waif living on the street. We might want to give them healthcare, pay their medical debt, or send them to college - out of love. It’s like Ram Dass said: “We don’t have fear in our hearts. We have fear of our hearts.” You never know. Our hearts might give away the whole store. Remember during 9/11 when New Yorkers did just that?

Ram Dass also said, “The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.” I think Death would agree with that.

People who pursue dominance end up at war, either literally, to the mass destruction of limbs and livelihoods, or in the more mundane contests over whose worldview will prevail that we see in personal relationships like marriage. Listening and responding truthfully takes just a smidge less courage than allowing your country to send you out on a soul-destroying mission to kill other people or be killed yourself in a war. So, why can’t we just stop? Death says we are terrified of what would happen if we did.

Another thing Death said is that the body never lies. I can listen inside myself for what the body is saying. If I don’t want to agree to something, my body will know it. If there is some detail bothering me, I’ll find the words in my body to express my misgivings. When my mind overrides my body, I’m in trouble. This makes me think about how willing Abraham was to sacrifice his son as a burnt offering. For what? To show his obedience? To a god of war? If I were in that situation and asked my body? It would tell me to find another god. And where has the god of the three Abrahamic religions gotten us? Look around. We override our bodies for all kinds of terrible reasons, and of course, with appalling results.

While I was asking Death why I continue to bear down even when I know better, she offered this gem: I don’t know what anything is for. That’s lesson 25 from A Course in Miracles. Decades ago, I was a teacher of ACIM, but I’ve rarely thought about it since then. But this is the second conversation in a row where Death has brought up one of the early lessons. Last time, the lesson was: I’m never upset for the reason I think. And before that, the very first time I sat down and had a heart-to-heart with Death, she said: Can you admit that you don’t know anything?

Yes. Yes, I can. My eldest brother didn’t speak to his only daughter for 16 years and three grandchildren over something she said when she was a teenager. She tried, and I tried to create a reconciliation, but he wouldn’t agree to it. He didn’t relent until he was in the hospital, dying. She said there was a light in the whole room, a gentle love that held them both. I would say that death was in the room. What was the first thing he said after all that time? “I’m so sorry.” Then, they cried and laughed and told each other love stories. He was at death’s door. He passed two days later, and she said it was beautiful. He was in the room, around them, holding them. Before he died, my brother wasn’t capable of that.

The other side of the fear of death for me is the longing for obliteration, for non-existence, for putting down the burden of striving. That’s an ego death, too. So, I offered my willingness.

I got sick, violently ill. I saw the death wish, felt the helplessness. All these rigid structures in my mind melted from my flesh. It wasn’t a long illness, only a flu, but it took me straight to helplessness, the place I’d rather die than visit. I curled up on the cool bathroom tiles, and even though my meditations on death might have opened the door for this illness, I’m glad, difficult though it was. Because I think our overriding task on this earth is to develop a strong ego and then let it go. When I die, even a small death like that one, the ego effaces so more of me can come into the room. The only thing to survive that fire was a longing for connection, a longing to love and to delight people.

So, will I stop asking in my artistic life what I should know about death? No. I’m not afraid to ask, even if I still have a fear of walking through that doorway. I don’t think asking to learn will hasten the day, though it may provide teachable moments. I don’t think there is a greater mystery on earth than this one.

This world is spinning out of control. It’s very clear we don’t know anything. We are trusting the wrong people and allowing them to do terrible things. In these circumstances, it would be a relief to admit we don’t know anything and let someone like Death, with an overview, take charge of us. Then we could sit down with our perceived enemy, open our hearts, and listen. Don’t speak unless spoken through. Make sure our body verifies anything we might say.

We could enter Discovery, the antidote to Dominance. In discovery, you are there to find out. By definition, you don’t know. Then we could invite Death into the room to see what she has to say. Perhaps we could agree on the most obvious things, like a moratorium on killing. Sending food to those who are starving. We could sit down and gaze into the abyss together and wait for something true to bubble up. I’m afraid this is the function of war and disaster. Maybe maturity is being willing to let go of the need for disaster before we are willing to listen.

I’m at the very beginning of my exploration. Since we all have experience with death, I’d love to know what yours taught you.