Whew! A Brief Reflection

SNOW on the Mountain!

I woke this morning after election day with a mix of joy and tears, knowing that many of my fellow Americans are experiencing the other end of the spectrum. I’ve been there – grieving loss. Most of us share that experience. So, in our celebration of the history-making moments of yesterday, let us hold everyone in our hearts.

Much of my joy about the results is the demonstration of our strong stand for diversity and inclusion. WE the People, ALL the People. Victories for Indigenous peoples. For Latino and Latinas, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, African Americans, Women.

Our care is deeper, our hearts are stronger, and WE are wiser than every attempt to enforce that we are separate. From one another. From Mother Earth. From Life.

When floodwaters rise and fires rage,

When Mother Earth quakes and erupts,

We rise in support and care for one another.

When lines are crossed in efforts to divide,

We unify and declare ‘this shall not be!’

We act from our knowing that we all belong,

Even when we fail to get along.

On the road ahead let us learn to live more fully into that which our hearts and souls have never forgotten: We belong to Life!

Let us ‘learn how to belong to the same earth at the same time’.

While much of the focus ahead is ‘out there’, continuing to organize, make sure our voices are heard, engaging post-election perhaps as we’ve never done before, our work is also individual and internal to change ourselves to meet the demands of this time.

Creek Flow after Recent Rains

Reckoning Within as We Reckon Without

Dawn Beauty in the Mountains

As above, so below; as within, so without. Ancient Hermetic axiom

… May our disagreements become doorways …The Agreement Beneath All Names

This blog morning finds me without many words less than a week out from election day here in the U.S. and in the wake of a moving visual experience as clouds danced in these mountains just before sunrise.

As I key in on what I’m present to, that experience seems to move in me, and what I’m present to within is some deep reflection and reckoning along with a sense of shame that often accompanies self-honesty. Shame for judgements I hold, rants and angry outbursts rather than responding in a way that invites ‘disagreements to become doorways’.

Inviting curiosity to my reflection, among other questions I wonder ‘what is the doorway to understanding technology, AI in particular, that will open me up into discovering/seeing positive possibilities to meet the complex challenges of our world?’ I wonder as well ‘how might I stand in my opinions and observations without judgement?’ What the heck is so scary that it evokes my resistance and angry rants?

Bringing curiosity to my exploration opens the door to forgiving my shame generating behavior, to more fully accepting my human imperfections, and to being grateful for yet another humbling lesson on this road of life.

As I look out at our world, I see a vast landscape of reckonings individually and collectively. Many are conscious of viewing events from this perspective and of how the world reflects our personal lives. Many are not.

As I muse beyond my own life, I wonder how we will choose to walk this path? How will I? Will we continue the worn out, life destructive ways of domination and power over? Or will we lean into new ways of being in our world, bringing curiosity and care to our reckonings so that we may co-create a more peaceful and just world TOGETHER?

Morning Beauty: Snow, Stupa, Colorado Blue Sky

From Rant to Reflection

A Coot on Coot Lake and the Northern Sangres in Salida, Colorado

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. R. Buckminster Fuller

First the rant: an early morning ringing of my landline (yes, I still have one) as I was about to settle in to write. An unknown number which I typically ignore, but it was a local number, and I thought perhaps a community member in need may be reaching out or have dialed incorrectly, so I answered.

Alas, no, the caller claimed to be ‘Ashley’ from ‘Medicare Benefits’ rather rudely inquiring about my Medicare enrollment due to a supposed missing check. As I attempted to ask a question, the voice spoke over me and ended the call when, for the second or third time, I asked, ‘who are you calling?’

Returning to my cozy place by the fire, I thought about letting it go, yet I wanted to know more, and I wondered if I should alert my community to a possible scam. Checking via reverse number lookup, I discovered that the number had no ‘registered owner’. An accompanying map indicated the phone’s location as somewhere in Missouri, nowhere near Crestone, Colorado as shown on the caller id. I was then given the opportunity to report it as a ‘possible spam number’ and did so. Not feeling quite complete, I posted a quick alert to my community on a local social media page. Done. Or so I thought.

Finally, I could engage the Ink. As I began writing about the call, I settled in recognizing it as an extension of both frustrations and concerns about technology that I’ve experienced over the past week or so. Looming under the broader umbrella of questions about AI, its potential impact (both for good and for ill), and our choosing whether and how to engage with it, I’ve been questioning how to discern what is ‘real’ and how technology seems to disconnect us from one another. Could this be by design?

Was ‘Ashley’ the voice of a live person speaking to me or a recorded bot voice routed from a remote offshore location through Missouri and appearing as a local number? Her voice sounded authentic, yet my intuition leans toward probably not. Would a real person supposedly trying to help me while most likely attempting to obtain personal information to scam me be so rude? And, if so, what drives one to participate in that?

I’ve been wondering as well about whether (and, if so, how) our greater use of and reliance on texting and email to communicate with one another leads us to hesitant to speak to each other. Are we less willing today to connect our voices in conversation?

On the road yesterday I was uncharacteristically listening to NPR and heard a story about a study indicating that many young people don’t merely prefer texting but are afraid of talking on their phones. Is this the world we want to create for ourselves, our children, our communities? Will we simply stop speaking with one another?

I’m present to a personal longing for more, deeper conversation and community building. How might technology facilitate that rather than feeding the forces that separate us?

As I reflect on where we are today, I’m certain that past innovations - automobiles, electricity, telephones, even the computer itself, etcetera – brought their own forms of questioning, concern, and yes, fear. For me it isn’t about the answers or finding ‘right’ choices but rather reminding myself to be mindful of the choices I make and inviting those in my communities of connection to do the same.

As I often do, I wonder, what is the deeper truth that wants to surface in this territory? For me. For you? For humanity and for Life? Is Bucky Fuller right?

Morning Walk at Home

Beauty as Protest & Contribution

Geraniums Coming Inside

In order to become attentive to beauty, we need to rediscover the art of reverence. Our world seems to have lost all sense of reverence. We seldom even use the word any more. The notion of reverence is full of riches that we now need desperately. Put simply, it is appropriate that a human being should dwell on this earth with reverence. John O’Donohue (Beauty: The Invisible Embrace)

With winter weather on the horizon yesterday as I was preparing my abundant collection of geraniums to be moved indoors, I was filled with gratitude for their beauty and for that beauty’s contributions to me, to this home, the land I occupy, and to my community.

I realized that beauty is why I nurture and care for them year-round. They invite me to attend to beauty in a world where much seems to have turned to ugliness. Choosing beauty is a healing form of countering the many ills I witness in the world.

I choose beauty not to turn away from or deny or as distraction to these ills, but rather they remind me of my energetic choices. Where do I choose to focus my energy? Do I focus on what might feel like the drudgery of daily chores or on the beauty that my labor is nurturing? I aim to choose beauty.

Perhaps beauty as a counter to ugliness is akin to non-violent response to acts of violence. Not to equate creating and nurturing beauty with holding non-violence on the front lines of tense, volatile protests, yet each represents an energetic choice, an intention, a purpose. For the sake of what am I engaging in this?

Perhaps this is a question we might each ask more frequently to bring deeper awareness to our choices. For it is through these choices that we are contributing to the world, indeed, to co-creating that very world as part of the collective energy of ‘we’. How might our world change if we add more beauty to our thoughts, our words, and all that we contribute by our energetic choices?

Muse and Ink flowed slowly this morning – a chilly one by the fire as temperature dropped and the possibility of snow visits this blustery day. Still musing after writing about yesterday’s experience, I turned to John O’Donohue for a quote about beauty. What I found wasn’t what I expected, indeed, it far exceeded whatever unconscious expectation I held.

O’Donohue in his artful way showed me that I’d come to this place of gratitude and holding beauty as protest and contribution through engaging with reverence. Through how I be when I am at my best with self, with others, with these woods where I dwell, and with Life itself. At my best I am reverent and in that reverence I both witness and experience the beauty of Life.

I wasn’t present to reverence as I was working with the plant beings yesterday, yet O’Donohue helped me recognize that sitting quietly to honor a recently fallen pine in the woods one day last week was a reverent act and that the more I dwell in reverence for Life, the more I open to recognize beauty and feel the depth of gratitude for Life that Life deserves and that we so desperately need.

The fallen pinon? Well, that’s a story for another day. Until then I invite you to join me in rediscovering reverence and to experience the beauty that it holds.

Fallen Pinon and Altar at First Light

Through a Portal Another Layer is Peeled

Morning Light on a Portal Near Home

…to listen long enough for the deeper truth to surface. … to learn how to belong to the same earth at the same time. May our children inherit not our certainties, but our courage to co-exist. The Agreement Beneath All Names

If tears are any accurate representation, then in the past week I’ve peeled another layer of this onion we call life. Through a darkened portal light begins to emerge. I can see further underneath surface events and people that led me to a journey into and, fortunately, through heaviness, anger, and grief. And I sense the next steps forward.

The dance (I can all it that now as I emerge, but in it the experience felt like navigating through and sometimes on a bed of hot nails.) went to a depth beyond the ‘mama bear’ anger I experienced and shared a few weeks back. Although that experience likely helped pave the way for this one, for several days this week I found myself locked in the grasp and rolling tapes in my head about events that had triggered anger inside.

I couldn’t quickly tap into the tools that often bring me to a higher frequency and clarity about how to move forward. Whether walking the labyrinth, writing in my journal, or quietly leaning into Grandmother Pinon, I was present not to the moment, but to a mind stream that was feeding my stuckness rather than providing nourishment to move forward.

I finally surrendered, inviting whatever deeper truth that wanted or needed to surface, to do so on its own time. Through the haze a portal began to emerge, though not one that held a quick solution or pivot. Rather one that invited me to question more deeply: ‘What is this experience really about?’. What deeper truth needs to surface that will guide me through, beyond, and into more fully aligning with and serving Life?

I calmed, the endless tape paused its roll, and these questions began to lead me into territory and times before life in this physical vessel. Beyond ‘this person’ reminding me of mistreatment from ‘that person’; this unfair tactic in a local political campaign bringing the tone of national politics too close to home; and that I had no voice or choice in either other than possibly withdrawing I began to wonder when I might have experienced this in another lifetime. Dare I ask if I might have been a perpetrator?

I became present to seeking the deeper truth not simply for relief from the pain of my anger and to feel better (though both would be welcome!) but for the sake of healing something that felt old, ancient, ancestral and of both me and the land that I occupy individually and all of us collectively. The inquiry wasn’t new, yet it seemed fresh with expanded possibilities for walking on the planet in greater harmony with one another and with Life itself.

The deeper questions seemed to provide light through the portal, another layer peeled, not with answers, plans, or specific pivots but with renewed and deepened curiosity, commitment, and capacity to speak up in new ways yet to be fully revealed. I began to wonder how we might engage in community conversations collectively asking one another and the land we occupy what is genuinely needed in this time.

I sensed new light being shined on the necessity of addressing, indeed healing, the pain and trauma perpetrated by our past colonizing ways, ways that we have carried forward into the systems we navigate as they dissolved today. And, in a most unexpected way, I received confirmation of just that.

Our way out of the current chaos, dissolution, and yes, dangerous threats not just to our democratic ways of life but to Life itself is not an exit strategy. It is our willingness to move through these portals of darkness with the light of our awareness, our care, our commitment, and our love. Individually and collectively may we move from knowing to asking and from head to heart as the drivers of our choices. May we build together the courage to co-exist.

Beauty of an Autumn Morning

Whose Intelligence and Truth Will We Choose?

SNOW!

… So we choose again. Each morning, each meeting, each moment of heat, to respond instead of react. To include instead of conquer. To listen long enough for the deeper truth to surface. … Excerpt from The Agreement Beneath All Names.

I’ve been reflecting quite a lot on what divides us and feeds the appearance that we are separate. I hear things like ‘… we all want the same things…’ yet many, perhaps most, of us feel a great divide as we witness violence around the globe and right here at home.

I personally experienced the divide this week in conversation with someone who I both know well and trust. That conversation that revealed one candidate for a local office had misrepresented (the kindest word I can use) the positions of their opponent, and my friend seemed to accept the erroneous position as truth, becoming what I experienced as defensive when I questioned them and shared what I know the candidate’s position to be based on hearing them speak publicly about the issue.

For myself, I felt both frustrated and angry in that moment, unable to engage in the kind of conversation and listening that was called for to surface the deeper truth of where we each seemed to stand. Later, upon reflection and moving from anger to anguish, and finally, grief, I realized that the event had brought the great divide that I witness ‘out there’, all too close to home. I felt the deeper truth that when I can’t talk with another, I am separating myself and I feel the depths of that separation even while knowing that none of us a separate from anyone else.

Beyond the obvious politics of division designed to do just that what has so many feel so separate, so isolated that we lash out with violent words, actions, and war? What is happening to our deep care for ourselves, for one another, for community, for Mother Earth and all her beings, who are our kin?

I’ve been thinking about this in light of technology and the current concerns and debates around AI and data centers, observing and sensing that technology is widening the separation we feel and experience. Where is the sense of connection when an AI bot solves a problem we’ve encountered?

I take a breath and pause the Ink and look up toward the Mountain. The clouds have lifted to reveal Mountain white with snow! My heart, heavy in the exploration of separation, fills with gratitude and warmth that lift me beyond the separation. I know that I am not separate from this! My heart sings the gratitude I feel for the nourishing moisture that has fallen over several days.

I’m aware that as I’ve opened into greater, deeper interest and curiosity of what we call Nature, my knowing the Earth, my recognition of Her and Her family of Life as kin has become a part of who I Be. I know that I am not separate and that all Life are my relatives. How do I live more fully into that with my fellow humans?

While I didn’t expect that digression, I find it carries me right back to the threads of whether or not we will choose to allow our differences and technology to further separate us from one another and from all Life. The agendas of those who profit from the lack of care that separation breeds seem clear: divide in order to conquer; and squash care.

So I wonder, how will we regenerate the deep care for ourselves, our communities, and All our Kin that restores our knowing the truth of who we Be? How will I listen long enough for the deeper truth to surface?

More Snow Under These Clouds?? I wonder …

Puddles & A Morning Walk in the Rain

A Welcome Puddle on the Morning Path

We wake into the Equinox: autumnal in the north, spring in the south. For three days the entire planet, and all of us with it, is in perfect balance and harmony. Day and night are of equal length in both hemispheres, even as each moves toward a different season. Here in the north, this is where we begin the trek toward winter, the outbreath of Earth herself. These marker moments are in our DNA. Since the beginning of humankind we rose and fell with the Sun's journey, and it has only been a handful of generations since we stopped. We even have a gland in the middle of the brain so sensitive to light that our bodies remember what our minds have forgotten. Dr. Michael Lennox – Daily Astro Alert September 23, 2026

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. Gary Snyder (quoted in Pam Montgomery’s Co-Creating with Nature: Healing the Wound of Separation)

A gentle rain fell briefly yesterday evening and later I woke in the night to the glorious sound of more rain on the roof. An Equinox blessing for this parched ground! I wonder if the rain will move the needle downward from the current ‘extreme drought’ and ‘exceptional drought’ designations here in the San Luis Valley and the southern Sangre de Cristo mountains.

As I sit early, pen in hand, I feel the balance of this Equinox more deeply than I did yesterday at the precise moment of summer’s ending, autumn’s beginning here in the northern hemisphere. I reflect on the reminder that our ancestors understood the equinoxes and solstices as multi-day events. Although their lives were much more aligned with planetary rhythms, indeed with Life itself, we each have this knowing deep within.

I often experience it as a longing for my knowing to be more present, more accessible in my life. The woods out back, the tree and rock beings, Mountain likely chuckle at my human lack of satisfaction and of wanting more. Perhaps though they and the unseen ones above and below ground are simply joyful that I recognize them as kindred. Kin who I want to know and experience more deeply.

As I felt the dampness and looked toward the shrouded mountains on my walk this morning, I thought of how many people would label this overcast day ‘dreary’. I recalled a line from a musician friend’s song back in my days in Lubbock, Texas: we pray for the rain, then we curse getting wet, and I noticed how joyful my heart felt as rain began to fall and a flock of pinion jays landed on the ground nearby, sheltering under the brush.

I wanted to sing in the rain, yet its sound kissing the Earth was so beautiful that I kept my song in my heart. I listened. I watched. I slowed my pace even as more drops fell, blessed by each reminding me of just how blessed I am. Let the rain fall!

As the world out there becomes more chaotic and uncertain may we remember our home and call upon the balance of this equinox time to remind us of where our true home is and of the harmony and balance that lives and breathes there, accessible to one and to all.

Shrouded Mountains — Will There Be Snow When They Break?

Dancing with Joy and Mama Bear Anger

Passionate Presentation by the ERA Team

Anger is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt. David Whyte (Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)

Joy is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside… . … joy is practiced generosity. … To feel a full and untrammelled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious, worried self …  David Whyte (Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)

This blog day finds me riding a wave of joy and gratitude in the wake of participating in last weekend’s 37th annual Crestone Energy Fair and hosting the young, brilliant, creative, caring Earth Regeneration Alliance team here to share their vision of a thriving world aligned with Life. A vision near and dear to my heart.

In the midst of the joy my Mama Bear anger appeared as I both witnessed and later experienced personally what felt like a threat to a member of the team I care about and later another threat to the team and to my personal sovereignty and that of the home and land I occupy and steward. While disconcerting and uncomfortable, I discovered that Mama Bear’s anger can co-exist with my joy without dampening that joy. Unless I choose to allow Mama Bear’s care to do so.

Both/and not either/or. A delicate path on the road of nurturing relationships among those who are working to bring to life new systems as the patriarchal systems of the past that are not aligned with Life dissolve. And each of us operating within those systems, sometimes hanging on to them out of habit, conditioning, perhaps seeking what appears to be safe in an evolving time of change, as we seek to migrate to new ways of BEing and doing with one another and with Life itself.

The roads of change and creation are bumpy ones – individually and collectively. Seeking to be guided by and align with Life is not the way of the world that is crumbling. Yet, consciously or not, this is the path we find ourselves on, knowing that how we have been is not the way forward for ourselves or for future generations.

May we embrace the joy that is present when we are generous and grateful both in giving and in receiving. And in that joy may we walk too with the prickly feels that arise as we co-create a new world together.

Blessed Rain & A Double Rainbow at the Energy Fair’s Finale

From Conflict to CommUNION

Beauty - As Above So Below

While I’ve always felt a sense of being guided as the Ink flows onto the page, writing The Pivot feels different this week. As I sat under our star kin before dawn this morning a thought (? Or an insight? A message or just what??) came about losing our true power when we grasp for control.

The words feel like both a message of what I observe and experience in myself as I attempt to manage (or perhaps manipulate) something to an ego-driven outcome, to having my way. I observe it in our world where those who seek power choose conflict over communication and commUNION, where true power lives.

Here is what arrived before dawn this morning perhaps from the star beings I was blessed to be with:

As we grasp to control more and more in our lives, we lose our true power: the power of guidance from Life, the deep wisdom and knowing that comes from within, from our BEing in communion with All that IS. With the wise I Am. This is true individually and collectively, and as we drift further away from this communion divisive rises. Conflict within becomes conflict with others. This is the aberrated world we create in living as if the illusion of separation is the Truth.

The New Moon coming tomorrow seems to invite me to sit with these words both as a point of reflection and one from which to observe both self and world in the days ahead. Perhaps you’ll join me.

And More Beauty

Called to a Contemplative Reset

Tangles, Blooms, and Mountains

The jumps we make in our own thinking can create a leap in the overall consciousness of our planet. From the perspective of the quantum, the next step in humanity’s evolution is not to grow bigger, but to reclaim the transformational power of the small. Asia Suler (Mirrors of the Earth)

I opened Suler’s book to the page where these words did a leap of their own. From the page to my heart, they arrived amidst a week of contemplating an ever-present question: What is mine to do now? ‘Rest.’ The not surprising answer came quickly, followed by annoyance, resistance. ‘Rest? Really? But I have things to do.’

Things that apparently the time has not quite ripened to. Things on my list that perhaps won’t matter once I surrender to the call to rest and lean into the contemplative space that rest offers. I feel that I’m in a deep internal reset. Something that, by the way, is aligned with planetary movements and aspects over the past many months and is coming to some pinnacle of conclusion, so you might be feeling some of the same. (And, no, this does not mean that all the chaos and disruption in the world and in our lives is suddenly about to end and life will return to some mythical version of ‘normal’.)

Today finds me in contemplation of the possibilities and choices before us in this chaotic time of dissolution. I feel that what is being asked of us is to ‘serve Life’. This is of course not some sudden, aha moment of ‘oh, that!’ for me but rather a deepening of the question: How? What does it look like to truly serve and align with Life?

While we must each discover the answers that are unique to us, we find clues in the multitude of people engaged in answering through service as outgrowths and expressions of who they Be. Recognizing that we are all kin and that Mother Earth is our home, they serve that.

Small, random acts of kindness serve Life as do great acts of courage, creativity, and boldness. Acts of resistance against the oppressive, extractive, unjust systems that serve at the whims of the few and at the expense of the many and of Life itself. Acts of emergence, creating new, bold, Life-aligned systems. Imagine, for example, an economy based on all Life thriving, not just human life. It’s not only possible, such systems are being created now. One needs only open mind, open heart, and search as it won’t be covered on mainstream news.

As reflected in the decades-long work and writing of Wendell Berry who died this week, this is not new. His shared experiences of Nature invited us to engage with Her: And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces....I am less important than I thought. I rejoice in that.

But Berry also went deeper into systems. Although I’ve not been a student of his work, of particular interest to me is his deep thinking and writing about economic systems and contrasting ‘The Great Economy’ with ‘the little economy’. It’s not what you might think, but that’s a pivot for another day. For now, I step back into the call for rest and reset, knowing that amidst tidal waves of destruction are waves upon waves of regenerative, Life-aligned possibilities emerging. Let’s ride those waves together!

Clark’s Nutcracker - Doing What’s Mine to Do!