I re-entered the workforce after running my own healing arts practice — after a divorce that destroyed my social fabric and my economic foundation, after PTSD, after an extended period where I could barely care for anyone beyond my children. And still I wound up caring for the people in the organizations I joined. Still took the brunt of a system designed to extract from the majority of us, and especially from people like me, who periodically forget that hard work and vision and a lifetime of experience count for next to nothing in a machine that treats human beings and the earth as commodities.

That sounds extreme if you’ve never stepped outside of it. You likely fall into one of two camps: how could you not know that? or what are you talking about? Either you’re aware and playing the game, or you’re somewhere inside the machinery, depending on your personality and your proximity to power.

I first left the system at nineteen. I was walking away from McGill University, from a spot on the basketball team, from a scholarship. I was walking away from something that was consuming me, not because I knew what I was walking toward but because I could not survive another moment inside it.

It took years — dipping in and out, never making money at the level this society sees as succes, but always working hard, always surviving — to find my way into the healing arts. But as it was with doula work, hospice work, coaching executives: you cannot heal people out of a system that is destroying them. And as I bleakly discovered at nineteen, living and traveling from my vanagon without the means for land, there is no getting entirely outside of it.

So we work to kill the earth, kill ourselves, kill each other, wishing it were otherwise. It is otherwise for almost none of us.

I had hope on the margins. When I was a small business owner making a small but honest living, providing somatic and trauma therapies before those words became brand names and marketing strategies. When ancestral work — not only my own family’s inheritance but the inheritance of the whole earth — was still considered radical rather than commercial. I’m not sure how many people are getting it at root now. That is a longer conversation.

Recently, a new boss — someone I had known as a colleague for six years, someone I respect and hoped to learn from — made a single decision about my work that collapsed my entire personal life overnight. When I said, plainly, do you realize what you’ve just done? she returned with: it’s a business decision.

Business decision. Extract. Commodify.

And this is considered the professional standard.

I understand she has paid a significant price to get to where she is. Thirty years at the same institution. She has not built a business from nothing, not found her way outside and back, not had the education of the margins. She has played the game to survive it and make it this far. And I can’t tell whether she has forgotten something, or never knew it in the first place.

I am a fifty-year-old woman who, before re-entering the workforce, felt satisfied and accomplished and confident in the ways I moved through the world. I have watched this institution chip away at every one of those things. Insidiously, methodically, the way systems do.

And yet — I am also clear-eyed in a way I wasn’t before. I’ve had time to compare myself against peers. I am bright. I am strategic. I often see further ahead than others are prepared to follow. When I’ve led from the values I hold, with the autonomy to do so, I’ve led with humility and honesty and genuine care. The system reads this as weakness. It is not weakness. It is just not the thing the system rewards.

Now I am in surgical menopause, four years in. My children are nearly grown. I sit in this backyard I made — prayer flags I sewed from wood block prints and ink on cotton, all of them faded now to off-white, like the cedar fence below them — and I ask myself what I am doing here and what comes next.

I do not think I will find the answer in an app. I do not think the technology is the enemy; but I do not think you can app your way out of a relational crisis. An app can be the pizza party that invites people in. It cannot be the relationship.

I spent almost twenty years working as a somatic therapist. Now that there is more collective reckoning — the naming of trauma, the return to the body, the questioning of systems — I want to ask: what now? We have the language. We have some of the science. We have people who have lived it. But it cannot be a new commodity. That is the antithesis to its true understanding.

I do not believe in singular divine power. Or gurus. I do not believe there is one among us who holds the whole answer. I think that is actually the point — this is collective work, and it requires many skill sets attending to different elements simultaneously. Policy and constraint that holds the large players accountable. Sanctuary spaces for people and animals and plants and rocks. The kind of trust that is built slowly, ratified by actual agreements between people who are actually present.

I am a writer. I am a body. I am trying to be a body in words. And I have spent thirty years, without always understanding it as such, helping people return to their bodies and to the body of the earth. Returning over and over to this in myself.

That’s what I have to offer. The particular thing I know how to do.

So here is where I am: not OK, and unwilling to pretend otherwise. Children almost grown and launching. A system I re-entered as a temporary measure that I tried to convince myself would not consume me as I had my own children to feed. A backyard where I can hear birds and feel the weight of what we are collectively choosing not to reckon with.

Everything leveraged with debt, for all of us, whether we understand that or not.

Le défi du jour, c’est d’écrire une scène de Sanguine en français.

Que se passe-t-il quand je pense en français?
Montréal, sans doute.
Et le jour de mon premier piercing —
un anneau au nombril.

Il faisait encore un peu froid,
mais le soleil s’accrochait derrière les immeubles,
dans un ciel bleu net.
Mes amies et moi marchions près du Musée des beaux-arts.
Le studio du perceur était petit, presque confidentiel.

J’avais peur.
Et j’étais excitée aussi.

Après les papiers, il ne restait plus que moi et lui.
Il était doux.
Attentif.

Il comprenait l’importance de ce moment —
mes peurs,
son intimité.

Il savait aussi des choses
que je ne savais pas encore,
sur le plaisir d’une femme,
sur le corps.

Il ne me demandait rien
que je n’étais pas prête à donner.
Mais dans ses gestes,
il y avait la promesse
d’un monde plus vaste
que celui que je connaissais.

Et je voulais comprendre.

L’aiguille a piqué — vive, précise.
La douleur était là.
Une brûlure.

Et pourtant, en même temps,
mon corps s’est ouvert.

Quelque chose s’est mis à couler —
le sang,
la peur,
le plaisir,
la vie mêlée.

Et je suis devenue,
dans cette seconde,
un peu plus femme.

We built expectations around institutions doing their jobs, around democracy correcting itself, around someone else holding the line. What we are discovering instead is how much participation, literacy, and sustained attention democracy actually requires — and how vulnerable it becomes when power quietly consolidates in ways that benefit the few.

From my own work examining systems of power in women’s embodied lives, this pattern is familiar. Harm is often minimized not because it is invisible, but because acknowledging it would require long-term reckoning and structural change. It is easier to fragment, delay, or deny.

What we are inside of now is not a single crisis but a learning process. One that unfolds over time, across generations, and in conversation with histories far older than our own. Other cultures have already navigated these realities — and are still navigating them — with hard-earned wisdom about resistance, survival, and consequence.

The question is not how quickly this resolves, but how deeply we are willing to learn.

I went on a walk yesterday — an hour and a half of meandering the quiet streets, taking in the muted colors that finalize Fall and letting my grand pup nose his way through the world. I used to smell so much more of this season, but whether it’s age, covid, or the long-term stubbornness of my sinuses, I no longer have the complete immersion I once felt in the sweet decay of late autumn.

Still, I stopped beside a tree and pulled off a bit of resin, cold and hard between my fingers. I let the dog smell it first — priorities — then tucked it into the roll of my sweatshirt sleeve. I told myself I wouldn’t forget it there and discover it later, melted in the dryer and strung like amber spiderwebs across every garment I own.

Hours later, gratefully, I pulled it out: a little sticky, mostly fragrant. I rolled it into a small ball in front of my computer screen and thought: this is a reminder.

A reminder of all the ideas that rise up every single day — wells of creativity, sparks, fragments, notions, entire universes — knowing only a handful can ever be acted on. A reminder that the creative life is an ongoing bloom, even when the garden feels too full to tend.

And that brings me here. Monday.

From May through October, Octopus Gospel kept me grounded —
a place where I could think out loud, explore the mythic undercurrents of my life, write from the body, and stay accountable to the deeper work — while I found my footing inside my novel, Sanguine.

If I didn’t also have a full-time job, family in flux, the need to move my body, maintain friendships, cook meals, pay bills, and enjoy the gentle hibernation of a winter that is (so far) graciously mild — I might spend all day creating for these spaces.

I would write all the essays, post all the ideas, record all the audio, crochet wild shapes, carve bone (literally and metaphorically), and give in fully to the new whims (ask me later about the mischievous Don Juana taking shape).

But the truth is simple:

This book needs to get written.

So I’m shifting gears.

I’m going to let more of Sanguine flow directly into this space.
Pause the weekly and monthly newsletters.
And let one post a week — one honest, present offering — be enough.

I’ll share process. I’ll share prompts. And, if you’re willing, I’ll begin inviting you further into the making of this book.

Sanguine is a story of bloodline and trauma, of sensitivity and joy, of learning to be very alive in a world that prefers we stay muted. It is a story of remembering the senses we abandoned to survive and the lineage that was taught to forget itself.

And so, this little ball of sap will stay here on my desk — a tiny reminder of how many things are creating and being created at any moment, each one waiting patiently for our notice.

What is your winter muse calling to you?

Of course I love the flow of a good session when I am writing. The images, words, and concepts create a world I am weaving—one I know others will eventually be able to inhabit. It all makes perfect sense, or close enough, and in those moments I feel confident, successful, inspired.

When writing memoir, even when it is painful, there is purpose. Meaning comes from bringing the experience to bear, from getting it right.

But I’ve been in an avoidance pattern for a couple of weeks. Other necessary things have taken my attention, yes, but I’ve also felt the resistance. In the moments I did have to write, I didn’t. Or I wrote about other things. Not the long-form memoir I am so eager to finish.

Shame.

Shame will stop almost anything.

The extreme self-consciousness it brings, coupled with its intense physical response, makes shame so recognizable: the sense of being completely and uncontrollably exposed. In shame, it feels like everyone can see your flaws and failures, and the only response is to hide or disappear. That exposure leads to paralysis… Shame paralyzes the self.
—The Horizons of Chronic Shame

I’ve been reflecting on the time in my life right after high school, when I first lived on my own and became increasingly unable to function. I had been the high performer—the grades, the sports, raising my brothers, the “good girl,” “so full of potential.” But it was crashing down.

I had a full-ride scholarship to a top university. On paper, everything was perfect. In reality, I was suicidal, deeply depressed, completely overwhelmed. I couldn’t keep up the work—or the facade. I dropped out.

Something in me had stopped working altogether while something deeper was fighting for a different version of myself in this world.

It was a period of profound shame, long before I even had that word for it. The shame stayed lodged in my body, so when I write into it now, it brings back the same sickness I felt then. It takes me back thirty years. And it has taken two weeks of simply living—going to work, attending to my son, doing my workouts, reminding myself who I am now—for my body to return to the present. Only then could I come back today and face it again.

And today, I can see it with more clarity. I can understand it was shame. I can see why I felt so badly about myself, and what was missing from my understanding then. I can write it with more nuance and honoring—as part of a life shaped by PMDD and the slow, painful evolution of understanding my own sexual assault.

I can also see that I couldn’t just “get over it” or “push through” while my whole nervous system was working to assimilate pain, healing, grief, and new consciousness.

How do you write until those things come together?

This is a critical part of the story, one I’ve resisted revisiting but one that colors everything else. Get it wrong, and the rest of the book sits on false ground. Get it right, and the flow resumes.

The writing, like all healing, has its cycles and seasons.

In a world—and in my own high-achieving roots—where goals and tenacity are survival strategies, it’s too easy to add more shame by berating myself for procrastination or “laziness.” But the truth is I have been standing at the edge of a painful space, giving myself enough time to gather the strength to re-enter that earlier state of being—this time with new embodied knowledge.

Over the years, I’ve found many ways to run from shame. Subconscious drives that only surfaced later. And when procrastination loops pull me back into fear of failure, it’s easy to berate myself all over again.

But instead, I am practicing something different: giving myself time. Not stopping everything, but shifting focus. Recognizing when something is up with the writing, taking space, and then returning—not forever avoiding, but also not forcing. Setting a timeline, yes, but allowing room for the hard hits without collapsing into the shame spiral.

In alignment with my body’s rhythms.
In accordance with the time I do have.

Big asks, in a production-based world—and when I, too, want to get this done.

—
References:
Shame Symptoms
Why Shame Paralyzes Us
The Horizons of Chronic Shame

Subscribe now

Author’s Note: This is a re-print of a piece I wrote in 2015. Recent events have it on my mind once again. This is not a call to violence. It is a reckoning with the rage inside, and how naming it can keep us from enacting it.

October beckons.

I long and I rage.

Agony.

Dead human bodies pile up around the earth while a false dominance pursues power. The targets are not just women and children, but anything that chooses a route other than greed. Greed is not want, is not survival. Greed is consumption in its ultimate form: a wasting away, the old english meaning, the sickness.

False Dominance.

As if anything other than the earth ever held supreme power.

Anger.

I want to spit on you. I want to eat the skin from your cheeks, devour your eyeballs, the very gelatinous flesh itself before biting into the orb, before taking apart your maxilla and cracking open the mandible to take a deep look inside and choose from each of your teeth which I want. Your gums are red and vibrant. I suck the life from them, draining the color. I want to disassemble one vertebrae at a time your spine, holding you up as though you are king and proving to you once and for all, what reigns. Your heart I will leave beating, until we are through with this dance. You are my dinner, but more than that, I am your reckoning.

But only if you are not willing.

To decay.

Come sit with me on this hill and watch the hawk circle.

See it’s umber tail?

Red-tailed hawk, we call it.

She, it, my beautiful creation, given a name for ordering; yet, what is that silence in the still air today? What is it that can lift her wings and settle you down? What is this time of year that matches day and night, earth and sky? Already, we are over the tipping point and into the beautiful decay. Already the night lengthens. Already the fermented leaves, fermenting to her tail’s stark subtle defiance, already the wet disassemble of veins, of thin skins piled on top of one another becoming earth. I am only looking for a lover that can die too.

Die into me and I will die into you.

*

When you, but not you, get uppity, it is my turn to smack you down.

This voice is not comfortable, is it?

I’ve spent a lifetime trying to adjust.

There is a truth that this is also the voice of my own mother, the flesh, blood, most immediate that I come from, not just the mother of millennia—as if a mother could be ‘just’ a mother, as if justice is an earth term.

Human justice:

Man’s defiance of decay.
Man’s repulsion of menstrual blood.
Man’s fear of the cycles.
Man’s imposed order.
Oh go on now, ‘our heavenly father’?

Do I sound angry?

Good.

You have the Old Testament, I have Autumn.
Winter will resolve the debate.

I only get angry when you will not listen.

Back to the decay.
But I cannot go, back to the decay.
Nobody is there.

You wrap yourself in plastic and put your body to the ground as if we need to find you later. We know you are there, sweetheart. Your bones are now earth and we have intermingled. You cannot be forgotten. The plastic is only your separation, the one divide. The reason you never come home. Why did you build this divide from me? Me, darling, we are the us.

I am over here crying that decay is the answer, it is fall, it is necessary, this is the only way through to winter. Death is the only way through to spring. Summer will follow. Do you understand? When you birth a child, you cannot skip transition. You cannot birth without the fetal ejection reflex: that is to say: without letting go. But science gives it a name. Does that help you understand? It is not pushing, per se. There is no pushing in birth. Only release. I made you this way. To just let go.

I have always been here to catch you.

*

I am so angry it makes it hard to be your lover.

I’ve been sitting here waiting for you to understand ever since, well, you left my womb.

Why won’t you come back?

If you have lost your mystery, why is it my job to explain it to you?

Do not fear death.

It is not so bad.

And,

quite

inevitable.

*

I know you need more than these voices in order to understand. Someone to translate. I will try. Sometimes the voices are so forceful that I don’t want to do anything other than listen. Write them. Heed their words. Hope for you to understand without my translation.

Translation, my own resistance; but that is for another time.

And it is lonely when we do not speak the same language.

For one thing, our language is limited. Est ce que vice comprends? Even this autocorrect won’t let me type in French. As if it is that far removed from English, which is light years removed from the crickets.

The word ‘vice’, interesting choice, if I do say so, for the autocorrect, It should, or course, be another word that I cannot get this computer to type. It should say ‘you’, but in the formal, plural sense; the you that is more than you. A recognition, in French, of the ‘multiplicity’, the common, the connected. A ‘you’ that is ‘all of you’ that is one word I can use to show we are connected. One simple difference, but such a leap in understanding. Imagine, if we did not erase the language of the animals when we moved into the Germanic tradition…

Really,

take a minute,

imagine,

I’ll wait.

Ah. The voices, they are compelling, It has taken a long time, in my life, to find a balance that can hear them without either being consumed or angry that I have to explain. And I know, my reward, is that when I am done writing this, I can go and dig a soft place in the leaves and decay myself. Sweetness wishing for you also to join.

So let me elaborate, let me put it in temporal time.

Yesterday. I drove my silver F150 to Moscow Mountain with my red, white and black Trek Mountain bike in the pickup bed. It has the coloring of a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, the bike, very striking. The lady bugs were out full storm, mating. They coat your skin, bite in love. There are patches and swarms in density and reprieve, neapolitan layers moving up the hill.

I was exhausted. I read an article that the full-moon eclipse may be responsible. Perhaps. I am also anemic because I lose so much blood with my cycle every month and it is an effort to keep up. I am also tired because I am a single mother and my duties are relatively non-stop. I am also tired because, well, the pace of this modern world is not one of my choosing. Not exactly. I choose to come here and write and translate because I am compelled to do so. And when I chose not to, I feel worse. I feel it is my calling to write what I hear. I feel simultaneously like a channel and yet intimately aware of my own input. I feel half autistic and ADHD trying to bring the confluence of thoughts on to page and wish sometimes I was Grande Ronde entering the Snake.

There is so much to learn and observe at a confluence.

I long to just be the confluence.

I was exhausted. The one place that makes that better is the mountain.

I was exhausted and by exerting myself into the mountain she would exert herself back into me and I would feel better, and I would come home, and I would have something to bring back to the concrete world I live in both metaphorically and literally.

I was still exhausted when I reached, close to the top of Moscow Mountain, and saw that Bennett Lumber company had cleared an old logging road once again, making a trail to several sets of boulders I marked as the best kind of resting spot to which I would return. Hot rock gives of its ages.

But first, I needed to bike to the top, the ridge that rides across to the Four Corners, so that I could find a zenith, a transition from which to return.

I stripped off my tank-top, when I came back to the lumber road, and chose not the boulders that were jutting off into steeply sloped hillside— legs fumbling and the climb onto boulders jutting over the cliff edge a hazard—I chose, instead, the deadened, hardened edge of road with wild grasses yellowed and reedy, the clustered flowers brown. I lay down my shirt to soften the sharpened edges.

Still. Absolute stillness; a fullness that leaves no void.

It was only in that absolute stillness where you can feel everything that I looked up and not down for a moment. Hawk. Drifting, spiralling. Equinox. In the week after, more night than day, more focus on the earth than on the sky. Yet, still an acknowledgment of sky. 5000 feet on a hill, I sat, a silent hawk, but I could hear everything.

Stillness. Connecting us completely.

Stillness, a state I did not want to leave but have learned that I must. And can return.

This yesterday I am telling you about was compounded by the yesterday before. On that yesterday, I was consumed by the poetry of leaves. I was aware of my wandering bones and the way in which the autumn has always called to me to make love. Because the yesterday before that, I was reading once again of the genocides and massacres of this human race, and trying to gather all these collected bones into my womb to tend to them. Because I am a mother and there is a part that mothers everything. And I am a woman, now without fallopian tubes. And that makes me closer also to a grandmother. Who makes love in a completely different manner.

So on the yesterday before yesterday, I was collecting memories of bone into my womb and weeping and wondering how I could share that collective grief of loss and decay. Because I have held hands of people dying and handfuls of decaying leaves to my nose and mouth; I can still always taste the ferment in the smallest breeze that lifts those same molecules into the air, so that now, even fragrance is body is death is decay is the sweetness of connection through life and death. And the bodies of the cruelties and the bodies of decomposing flora are all one of the same in the womb that wants to blend and contain them all.

But I’ll stop here for a moment, because in the midst of all this, the love making and reckoning, there were more deaths.

Another man took another gun and shot more people.

He was disconnected and we can cite reasons, but I found in the voices that spoke to me in the last several yesterdays that his voice also blended with mine. His anger matched my anger and we breathed it in together. That is not to say that I, too, will go out and engage in a violent act. It is to say that I am willing to say that within me there is still violence. And, in my experience, when a punctuated event breaks through the masses, it will find the places with which it resonates.

Have you heard of the psychologist who used to spend time in prisons and appeal, in his own form of non-religious prayer, to the parts of those sentenced so that he would find their hurt within himself and heal that first. That it is this healing that heals.

Heal Ourselves. Heal Each Other. Heal The Earth.

This child, a young man, who shot students in Oregon, found a way to make sense of his profound disconnection and subsequent anger through violence. I thought back to how violent the need I had to tear into a mandible with words in the opening of this essay, to tear a ‘man’ apart. It was no different. I wrote about my anger instead of purchasing a gun, and what I was saying about the earth and decay came from a different vein. But same heart. Same arteries. Different pattern of return.

A friend and fellow musician was killed by her son earlier this year. Brutally. It was winter. I asked my stepmother to please tell me the details so I could know, being that she is deputy coroner, and I thought somehow, as one who has always been keeper of that darkness, that I could contain the wrath. I cannot tell you the details. I could not contain the violence.

This all sounds like words but I am crying now, in this living room, that I forgot I was in as I consumed and became consumed in this certain womb. I have raged enough now to be only tired once again and only saddened and in grief. But even that, see? Even in grief we are connected.

I worked for hospice for many years. I wanted to make sure I understood death as I thought I understood it. And yes, it was. Numinous. Luring. Easier to let go when you are not one of the family or one of the friends, and, like the Autumn, a threshold.

Three yesterdays ago, I sat with one of my sons and his friend and taught them how to be with death when they found a robin, cataracts and nearly vacant, sitting upright and slowly breathing, coming close to its end as a robin, sitting on the grass of the commons where they play football. We stroked the bird’s soft oily feathers. We looked into its thickened lenses where life was already joining the soil. And we reminded ourselves that to know we are part of something larger, and to know we are loved is what mattered. And so we gave our love to the robin and were loved in return and in making this love, we grieved and were completed. The boys buried the robin later, after I wrapped it in an old t-shirt, but first we kept it close to us, so the boys could be part of the process of death, to know the last spasms of muscle and nerve that are like life taking hold again and not be afraid, but just know. Just that simple. And the robin, whom we knew was already held by the earth, could also be held, by the hands of boys. My son, later, unwrapped the robin from the cloth and simply tended to its feathers and its being. My son tended to his soul and became more embedded in this earth as well.

So, when I say I sat on the mountain, on a deadened strip of earth readying itself for the winter and stared at the hawk who is a hunter like I am and smelled the decay, I mean to say that I sat on the earth and wept from my womb while I decayed within and absorbed the decay without until we were all one.

*

Which is where I started: October beckons.

I long and I rage.

I have told you about the rage.

Let me end with the longing.

When life has been stirred in the womb. When children, full beings and flying through trees, made of you and of so much more can come into being. When everything about your body a center for creation and destruction and you know you could house the world—

then decay comes like a sweet ripening in reverse. Your own decomposition is the melding and blending of the universe. Grief is the product of feeling intense connection that is lost. But you can’t forget, that intense connection. Because every day, your most intimate beings, the ones created of you, go out into the world. Are consumed.

So, what can you do but decompose your own self over and over again back into the earth and become the dead of the Fall?

The melting into eternity, its own sensual form. The earth as lover peeling my layers back from my bones until I am undone. The insane beauty of being.

I come back to write to you so none of us forget.

If we must use words, so be it.

My body also waits.