Standing in the presence of my older son Henry and my husband’s son Linden, both almost 17, both over 6’1”, both fierce and wild, full of fire and muscle, full of deep – sometimes hidden – tenderness and both rightly, biologically, full of rage about whatever injustice crosses their path in the moment, I am brought to tears by the roaring fire within them. They are programmed for this. We need them. Life cannot continue without them. Thousands of years of careful crafting makes the adolescent male one of the most potent creatures on the planet. They do not simply want to to be powerful, to have a purpose within their culture. They must be acknowledged as having a purpose. They must be given a real life/death reason for this journey of growing up, of bones stretching and muscles thickening, of hormones screaming and vision extending exponentially.

If we cannot give them a life/death purpose, if we as their witnesses and mentors, cannot see the obvious place, power and purpose of these wild young ones, they will find such a purpose on their own. If all we can offer them is an expectation to perform well in our beleaguered and hollow educational system which offers them only frustration, they will find other places for their growing rage, for their passion, for their muscle and their will. With the biology of Life itself exploding within them, they do not have the option of sitting this out. They have two choices: they can choose to follow the expectations our culture at large has for them (to suffocate their wildness and a true healthy need to find their place among the adults around them) or they can set a new course, leaving the well-worn paths of the status quo to find acknowledgment from elsewhere in the dangerous waters of a rebellious hero’s journey. Rarely in this solo journey do they find out who they really are. Rarely do they return to their people with the gifts of their courageous journey. Rarely do they receive what they are needing; the acknowledgement of the culture within which they were born, to which they are beholden. Now, with more than 2000 young men facing life in prison, we can also say they are literally dying for acknowledgement and purpose… some of these wild young men have even killed for it. It is a beautiful biological necessity for our young men to be given the opportunity to be heroes. It is a sure sign of our own pathology that we cannot see what is really happening here.

Rapper Nas writes a letter which starts, "Dear Young Warriors, fighting the wrong wars..."

In a culture in which we proclaim new enemies every day, we cannot pathologize our young men for inventing some of their own, for killing each other in the streets or killing themselves with drugs. We cannot offer them a nobility and heroism in war, the only acceptable place for the largeness of their warrior bodies and souls, and then act horrified when they perceive enemies right in their own homes, backyards and communities.

If we, in our own lostness and laziness, our oversight, our lack of attention to them (because we are too busy struggling to keep ourselves afloat both financially and spiritually) cause them to search for their own purpose, their own place where they can be as big as the vision and chemistry coursing through their veins…then we cannot punish them when they get it very wrong. If we do not guide them, they will make mistakes, as they do. And the consequences will be catastrophic, as they are. If they, in their attempt to find reflections in the world for the magnificence and miracle of what is coursing in their bodies, find only disappointment, lack of integrity and soul-crushing inertia in the adults around them and if, as as result become enraged, terrified and act out, the solution is not to make them the enemy. The only enemy here is our own lack of courage and vision as a culture to evolve in obvious and necessary ways. No matter how egregious these young men’s crimes are, no matter how many labels of pathology and criminality we invent to prove their dangerousness, we cannot lock them away and imagine this is anything other than another crime, a sure sign that we are now spinning out of control. I have come to see the adolescent male behavior, the apathy and the compliance (that we often label as success) and the violence and risk-taking (that we incarcerate), to be the voice of Life itself speaking to us. “Please wake up now. Please open your eyes. Please take a step up and out to see the inevitable catastrophe of this invented entropy.”

How can we turn our own sons into sacrificial offerings to this monster of a culture we have created? How do we stand ourselves in the dead of night when the TV is off, the words worn thin in our Bibles and the wine bottles empty? And what on Earth will we offer next, once we have silenced, medicated, castrated and sacrificed every last wild young man?

To learn more about the campaigns to support juvenile offenders sentenced to life without parole, please visit The Pendulum Foundation.

The relationships are different, of course, depending on who we’re talking about. My children and husband, the cats and dog, plants that live in our home, the garden that dwells in the earth just outside our door, the gypsum boards that make our walls and 2×4 studs they are nailed to. The fiberglass insulation in the walls, the paintings and photographs, the frames, glass mats, the doors, windows, ceiling, floor and sump pump somewhere in the basement, the carpets from my mother’s home, the old wood table of my grandmother’s.The rings on my fingers and the wood box they rest in. They are all my relations. The difference lies in the conversations I have with each of them.

They all have a spirit. They all have a lineage. They are all alive in some way, carrying the essence of whatever elemental ones were stolen from their original places and used to make objects of our desire or need. I am in the practice of seeing all these as they rightfully are, as their own subjects. As ones, as beings.

It is noisy in this place, this place of relationship with all these ones. Somehow each of us has been called to this relationship, these relationships together in this one life. Every day I try to listen – what is wanted of me here? And here? And here…? What is mine to do? It is likely that the doing here, in these relationships, is largely unfamiliar to us Westerners. It is likely that there is nothing to do at all. It’s already been done. These relationships I have with these ones are more of a being-with. I feel called to acknowledge, to see, to perhaps name in a way that doesn’t limit or truncate but rather invites me, and perhaps others, further in, to allow my ears and eyes to find more of what is right in front of me but that I can’t see or hear with my all-too-numbed dayworld senses. Because my language doesn’t have a robust way of describing relationship, I have come to call these ones my ‘cousins’. In the English language, cousins can be first or second, they can be once or twice removed. The gypsum board is my cousin twice removed. The car that brings me and my family safely from here to there is a violent conglomeration of many relations, many different ones. For this reason it is several times removed. The purpose of naming a relation a ‘second’ or ‘third’ cousin is not to create a distance, not at all. But rather, to acknowledge the process, the removal from its original way, that each one of my relations has experienced, and this includes me and my experience of removal. For me, this acknowledgment is a vital element of our relationship. It’s part of the listening and honoring. It’s certainly part of the truth telling of my impact on the rest of my larger family. This truth-telling is a requirement, a first step without which I cannot be in right relationship with this world.

This morning as I write this piece I sit on our back porch overlooking the condos, the mansions beyond them, and then the mammoth mountains of the Continental Divide. Right next to me is the Cottonwood Tree, Populus Wislizeni, sometimes called the Rio Grande Cottonwood. None of these are true names. (It’s true name would have to include it’s purpose, which has something to do with holding the dry cracked earth together with its massive outreaching root-legs and the fact that it is the only noble mansion in this neighborhood, home to hundreds of others who rely on its pollen, it’s bark, it’s leaves, its shade and its height for their survival.) At the moment this one is a perch for a loud Blue Jay and young Brown Squirrel, neither of which called Colorado their home as recently as ten years ago. They are all talking Fall….their calls and daily routines markedly differently today than they were just four weeks ago. My relations tell me the cold weather is coming. Fall, too, is a relation with a beautiful spirit. To me, Fall is the coyote season of abundant harvest, of withering vines and necessary ecstatic decay. For a few months each year, Fall lives with me as a wild and prosperous cousin of delicious bacchanalian full-ness and impossible-to-bear loneliness and loss. With each year that passes I welcome its arrival with increasing terror and celebration. This morning, I notice that Fall is a dear relation to this Cottonwood, whose leaves are rustling and shivering in the breeze that is Fall’s pre-arrival messenger: harvest, gather…prepare….what is to come is unavoidable.

All of these Beauties, these ones, are alive with spirit. Each one comes from this earth, this finite yet extravagant enclosed ecosystem. It’s all ‘nature’ as Pattiann Rogers reminds me. Everything shares a common original source. One parentage. I am the daughter, sister and lover of all these ones. I am called into a deep sense of honor and responsibility through this heritage. This is my ReWilded lineage.

In the way this miracle of a process that is Life/Death naturally unfolds when unobstructed by human hubris, my extraordinary sister gave birth to her second child this morning. Beautiful, vibrant dark-haired William Field Shenstone Eddy, was born in a paradoxical flurry of certainty, speed, ease and pain (and more pain!) insistent upon his arrival while his parents bundled an unflappable 3 year old off to day care, attended to last minute business and parked the family car in a legal spot.

Will’s arrival is poetry in three dimensions – the poetry of life itself. It is not simply a birth (though that alone is miracle enough to warrant the stars and planets streaking across the sky as extraterrestrial fireworks). Will’s joyous birth is one ecstatic act in a process that is the oldest of all processes. One piece that, without which, all the rest falls apart. The death of our mother one year ago (Will’s maternal grandmother), Ruth Shenstone Harris Pelmas, is another act in this same process. Will arrived in much the same way our mother departed; with an uncanny efficiency, perhaps even an urgency and, to our frail understanding, earlier than any of us anticipated.

For me, this is a dangerous thing to leave to the devices of my mind alone. But it is also too complex a terrain to expect my heart to navigate by itself. We humans have a consciousness around this ineffable dance between life and death that is perhaps too great for our own good. It requires our acceptance that while we may enjoy agency and autonomy in many arenas, we are simply part of the web, not the makers of it; we are not the center of life nor the lords of it. The western mind (and the ever-present ego) have to grasp that death, grief and pain are not a personal attack.  Rather, it is a process that is very naturally happening to us and everything else around us, all the time. In my work as guide to the human soul I have come to acknowledge that we have slowly devolved into a culture that is (ironically) bereft of its grief. And this bankruptcy of grief is very possibly the most catastrophic of all human events. Yet, were I to attempt to process the grief of my mother’s death – a reconciliation between life and Death – to my heart alone, I would be lost in a dark sea of confusion and pain so deep I might never be seen by the dayworld again! In this past year I have been so blessedly reminded; to truly honor this process requires that we live in the Borderlands where heart and mind commune, where death and life are not opposites; a place of true liminality. This is a place where things that are predator and prey in the dayworld live in harmony, drinking from the same spring without fear. This Borderland is fecund – to say the least – where never-before-seen species and systems are reciprocally co-created in a wild relationship of survival and thriving. It’s likely where everything that matters happens. These liminal Borderlands live within us, in the luminous internal terrain of our psyche, as much as they exist in the measurable sensual world of trees, birds, oxygen and earth. Our unique voice and way of seeing the world, our authentic wild sexuality and creativity (the very force of new life), our mythic significance, all our births and all our deaths, each of these dwell in the Borderlands.

This morning I have become aware; the last year of moving through the loss of my mother, its own distinct dark night of the soul, has quite clearly come to a close. I still have tremendous grief over the death of Ruth, but the grief has shifted from a cessation to a birth – morphing (to my gratitude!) into a source of creativity. Rather than sending me into a mind-bending journey into the why of existence itself, it has integrated into the deeper story of my life and fed the continually unfolding sense of my purpose.

After 20 years in the professional field of psychotherapy and a lifetime in a personal conversation with the critical importance of dying so that we may live, I know there is nothing more important than not simply our understanding but our perpetual honoring of this immutable process. So, to honor this, today I offer a bow of gratitude to the very spot on the map of the Worlds where the path of little dark-haired William Field Shenstone Eddy – on his way into this world – intersected with the path of Ruth Shenstone Harris Pelmas – on her way out of this world. I believe, in this moment it is possible to hear the oldest creature of life itself breathe a sigh of rightness that this relationship is alive and well.

In these moments we are offered the profound opportunity to choose. No matter what the choice, the act of choosing is the devotional act. Should you be lucky enough to find yourself at this threshold, don’t for a moment call it a mistake. Don’t wish it away or judge it to be the sign of a life off kilter. If allowed, it will become the most extraordinary process that will ever happen to you. Do not medicate it, numb it or box it up. Rather, water it, feed it, sing to it at night. Make love to it through your fear. This is your chance (perhaps your one and only) to live the only life you have – the one that is yours alone to live.

In the first light of dawn my husband takes his powerful hand and guides my own to my breasts. He says, “…these beautiful breasts that have nursed two strong boys into the world, the soft skin and curves of this belly and the marks on it are proof of your full womanhood…tell me you see how beautiful you are.”

And oh the waves that wash over me, stinging my desire to simply love everything about myself without imposed stories or expectations. Somehow, it is almost more unbearable to see this body, my body, as beautiful, as a mirror reflection of the perfection of the life I witness, the next day, as I sit and watch the flickers, squirrels, finches, starlings and woodpeckers flutter and feed in cacophonous vibrant choreography outside our kitchen window. I would never question the perfection of these ones. And yet, staring at the geography of my strong woman’s body, always more than game for anything I desire to experience, it is like Yeats’s “terrible beauty”. The grief that wells up in me, for my own betrayal, is sharper than the pain of the shame itself.

How do we ever apologize for the dismissals we make of our instinct, our bodies’ needs, our beautiful longing? And how do I admit that, in my human-ness, I will continue to dismiss and ignore my perfection over time, some days more than others. It would be fraud to promise that, from this day forward, I’ll look into the mirror and see only wonder. On some days I will see stretchmarks and skin that has lost its resilience. There will be nights when all I can acknowledge are my failures. And rather than see these failures as glorious signs that I’m fiercely on my path, I will see them as symptoms of my general incompetence. I will continue to weave and illustrate the old stories of my own small worth and the ones of me who are so heavily invested in my smallness will say, “yes….we are still here. You won’t get rid of us that easily.”

But I know, because I have tracked this over my 45 years, that slowly but surely over time, if we are sincere and loving in our invitations, the wounded ones who hold these stories of our worthlessness, come out of their hiding places and into the light of day. They lay down their shields and swords, throw off their helmets and breastplates and in their innocence and nakedness weep for the smallness they’ve insisted upon as surrogates for other people’s pain. Our own truth – the stuff we’re each born with – the play and humor, reverence and awe, imagination and brilliance all flood back home and the process of wholing, of voracious integration, is unadulterated ecstasy. It is both utterly humbling and empowering and we stand ready to listen to our true calling – the reason we came into the world.

But in the spirit of truth-telling, of honoring the stories of both greatness and smallness,  I will promise one thing. Tonight, when my husband moves himself on top of me, gazes down and breathes a breath of awe at what he sees, I will not close my eyes. I will breath awe with him; for his beauty, for the beauty that is larger than either of us that moves through us in our love making and for the specific beauty that dwells within me, without which the world will not be whole.

As I sat there, waiting for Henry and the instructor to return from the driving test, my life as a mother flashed before my eyes. There among folks who don’t make eye contact being made uncomfortable by the joke-cracking, open-hearted woman behind the counter (who I feel in love with over and over), I allowed tears of joy, fear, pride and uncertainty to tumble down my cheeks. I allowed myself to be utterly raw. If we can’t be real here, at this confluence of humanity, where in the world can we?

I cried for the uncertainty no one ever really tells you about, because they can’t possibly prepare you. Each one of us has to stumble into it for ourselves, and by then, it’s too late to change our minds. I cried for the unbearable uncertainty that comes, at no extra charge, with being a parent. I cried because I gestated the once single-celled being that is now, many iterations later, navigating a 2500 pound steel box around town, using hand over hand steering and making sure to look first in the side view mirror before giving a QUICK over the shoulder glance as he deals with the confusion of snow and ice and other drivers’ terrifying unpredictability, all while being graded, just so he can pick up his girlfriend and take her on dates.

How did this happen? How did he become such a beautiful hot-blooded young man? I flash to the young male fox, just coming into his second year; the one Simon (my younger son) and I hit with our car last winter. As I find myself staggering with awe at the way life insists upon itself, is programmed into the marrow of every living being on the planet, I remember clasping my strong hands around the fox’s slender neck, trying desperately to stop its suffering. Only to discover the insistence of Life had gotten to the fox first and I was now in a battle of epic proportions with a thing I do not care to challenge ever again. I suppose you could say that, eventually, I ‘won’, but it still doesn’t feel like a victory I’d ever claim as mine. I think that level of hubris alone might make me a marked woman.

Sitting in the DMV and watching Henry sign the forms, pay his $21 and receive his temporary license, all of a sudden I felt duped in some way. Like I had been lulled into participation in a thing that felt at the time, quite frankly, like a perfunctory endeavor. I had gotten married, gotten my Masters degree and landed a dream job, I’d owned a house since I was 24. My husband and I had already gotten a dog. Having a baby was the obvious next step. Sign me up! It’s what my people do. It was expected of me. In keeping with the easeful way of most events in my life, nine months later out popped Henry.

16 years later, he stands here; his 6’1″ sinewy strong body, his close cropped blond hair, his one blue eye and one green eye nested in an ever-curious expression, his low-riding pants (just under the buttocks so they’re in constant danger of falling to the floor), his Armani cologne given to him by his girl. Life has seized him by his slender neck and is having her way with him. Do I have anything to do with this equation anymore? The grief, the jealousy and the mother-bear protectiveness that seizes me by the neck in this moment stings my eyes and throat, makes my breath fail. I remember, back in the earlier stages of the Global Culture of Women, I spent many glorious hours on Skype with woman’s groups from around the world. In this moment, one particular group from Mali West Africa stands out in my memory. The topic of our conversation was initiation, and more specifically, male initiation. Somewhere in the midst of this raucous conversation (which I had little to do with because I live in a culture that does not honor its young ones in this intentional way), I burst into tears. Right there on Skype, much the way I did yesterday at the DMV, I burst into tears. In her beautiful lulling accent, one of the women said, “CC (my nickname)….what do you cry for? This is a joyous conversation!” And I admitted that I was raising two boys in a state of deep grief for what I, as a woman, could not provide them and what they, as young men, wouldn’t get from the men in this culture. Another woman then said, “Mama…you have birthed these babies into this world. You have fed them from your breast, given them strength and will and certainty of their own names. Now that they are young men your only job is to be in love with them, as a woman. You must simply let the woman of you love them. No matter what, that is your task.”

So, as I honor my son – this breathtaking young man – and the giant step he has just taken into the world of adulthood, I also honor Life’s insistence upon itself. I honor the will, the innate urgency, of a being to thrive; to navigate itself toward thriving at all costs without fanfare. I honor that I have done my part so that Life herself can now take over, dancing her mysterious unpredictable love affair with Henry. And I will let the woman of me desperately, deeply and hopelessly love the young men I have birthed, and pray that The World will make their place known to them.

Re-story this life
with its cracks and flaws
re-word fear and hatred
 with rhyme

No matter how dark
cast just enough light
to honor 
the lineage line

Whose choice was this
to conjure up shame
to see truth
 as an evil to slay

Without truth of the bone
or song of the blood
each one of us 
looses our way

Allow harmonies to weave
through these islands of men
whose ancestors once shared prayers
 with the sea

Allow grandeur and anguish
to have room on this stage
until all that is caged
 flies free

This became my love affair. I fell in love with the simple beauty and profound medicine of female truth. All truth really, but for some reason it felt more within my purview to cultivate safe landscapes within which women would sing their truths to the world, as if all life depended upon it, because it most assuredly does. This was five years ago now, and I had forgotten this powerful quote that had been the impetus for what is now a glorious organization.

Then just last month, in the process of packing up all our belongings and moving into the Earthquake Man’s home, I came across a piece of paper, torn at the edges and filled with push-pin holes, on which were written Muriel’s words, “What if one woman told the the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Right there, as I was hunkering over half-filled boxes amidst a chaos of belongings, these beautiful words spun into the most efficient arrow and pierced my heart. Tears began falling onto the paper, a silent promise. Somehow when I read this poem years ago, I heard a call to create cross-cultural world-wide invitations for women to speak their truths, no matter what. This time, reading Muriel’s words, I realized she meant me.

This will be interesting for several reasons. I make my living as an educator, guide and counselor. And though I’ve taken my practice about as far off the map as I know how, my success is likely based, in part, on the projection that I have answers. In the process of telling the truth it will be obvious to everyone that I have no answers. I have only questions, questions that multiply with each day. And while I have tremendous certainty, I also have extraordinary uncertainty, insecurity and fear. I am in a constant discourse with the World at large as to whether I am qualified to be claiming anything at all, sitting with people as I do and listening to their most intimate fears and revelations, loves and longings, as if I have a clue. I dance with my demons daily, and some days they lead, as we whirl in a frenzy of darkness that allows me to forget what is so exquisite about this life, about living in general.

This blog will now be a place in which all of it gets shared, exposed to the air, offered up as medicine, as encouragement, and simply for the sacred act of telling the truth. I believe the only way to truly honor a thing is to tell the utter truth about it. I practiced this with my mother in the years just before she died. I practiced standing in front of her and telling her everything that was in my heart about her, both the darkness and the light. After we’d settled into this new way of being with each other, she told me that at first she didn’t think she could do it. She didn’t think she could handle truth or speak her own truth. But then, she admitted, she trusted me so deeply because of this practice we shared. In the wake of losing her, an on-going process from which I will not emerge in this lifetime, I feel an urgency to make truth-telling the practice – fully honoring this life I have so generously been given.

May this be an offering of celebration and prayer to my biggest love, The Mystery, which has, in her infinite beauty and imagination, dreamt the entire universe and each one of us into being.

This morning it is cold
frigid air has cast a spell
and from where I stand
in my parka and boots
warm on the inside of the door
nothing moves out there

Moments later
nostril hairs frozen to each other
I crunch through snow to the back fence of our yard
beyond that, three lush snow-covered pines

After trying to open the compost lid
its frozen seal unyielding
I give it one hard kick with my lug-soled boot
cracking its secrets
open to this morning’s air

As I bend down to make my offering
of spent black coffee grounds and fragile yellow onion skins
I am baptized
bathing in the unmistakable
steaming smell of life and death

And all of a sudden
as if the spell has been lifted
the dark inner branches of the three lush snow-covered pines
come alive with sound of bird song
every key, all tempos
wending their way through the trees
like invisible garlands
surely even the rain forest cannot compete with this glorious cacophony

As if emerging before my eyes
below my feet I notice
captured in the icy snow
a chaos of confluent and diverging traffic patterns
hundreds of footprints
of morning dove
rabbit
flicker
starling
finch
and of course cat
forever cat

I close my eyes
but not before my tears
are found by the frigid air

On the other side of this moment
this blessed synesis
I return anew across the yard
a woman greeting the world
as if for the first time

My wild predator
Cat companion
Jet-black Artemis on four legs
Comes racing home
Up and over the patio fence

Coyote joy in yellow-green eyes
Fat-cat tail swirling like a propeller
on a high-strung speed boat

Five dive-bombing barn swallows
Hot on her trail

For minutes the swallows rush the patio
As she
Now settled safely next to me
Casually cleans all carnage
From her front paws and face

And I watch in wonder
At this swooping feathered fierceness
In such small packages

Feeling exhilaration
My heart pounding
As if it were my life

Wanting to make this something
‘us’ against ‘them’

Yet there is nothing personal here

Only a primal agreement
To protect borders
as much for the other as for themselves
While knowing
That the very nature of life
The unthinkable demand of it
Insists that all borders get breached
All sovereignty sacrificed
Each individual life devoured and reconstituted
In service of the one life

This one life
It is a great shape shifter
First it is a rabbit
Then it is a fat coyote
Dreaming rabbit
Then it is scat
Dreaming flowers
Dreaming of butterflies

It is a woman
Singing opera in the shower
Then it is water
Saturating ceiling panels
Then it a tender green leaf
Pushing itself up between driveway pebbles