the threshold of reckoning

there's no time left for anything but love stories

Today’s post is short & sweet. If you’re craving more, I suggest you check out last month’s article:

Onto today.

a tree grows upside down out of a cliff

Today I read an article by Sophie Strand, a beloved young author who has been on the threshold of mortality for years now, living ceaselessly in a liminal space of not knowing whether her body will continue to hold her spirit for another day in this realm.

She spoke of the intimate dance with her mortality bringing her breath to breath with the urgency of Now. She spoke of the wild urge to experience and make art about love in the now. She spoke about trimming the fat and casting off the chaff.

She wrote:

“The takeaway has been simple but profound.

No tomorrow is a given. Live today ecstatically and fully. Do not plan too far ahead. The Now is all we have.

Every second is precious. Do not waste a single second on crafting a pithy Instagram post or performing moral high ground online.

Even though I want to be a mom, I may not be able to be a mom. Even though I want to be married to a loving partner, I may not experience that. This is not personal. It is not a curse or a punishment. It is a big invitation to feel the love and relationships already present today. Right now.

Can you be satisfied? Can you feel your life as being enough?”

Today I also listed to another podcast episode of The Great Simplification, finishing a many-hour run of two extremely nerdy and well spoken white men talking about how exactly the interwoven political/economic/cultural systems, philosophies, and beliefs of our civilization are inevitably leading to a colossal Break, unless we can somehow make it Bend.

The small and the big exist at once, and it’s beautiful and confusing and hard to hold.

I feel the Big Picture presenting a clear yet unsolvable puzzle hovering over everything I do. I feel the obvious paradoxes of our civilization meeting their match with Time, at last beginning to lose the duel woefully, shamefully, painfully, predictably.

I feel the truth that my loved ones and I will live through this Big Meeting, where the inevitable principles of Earth Mama, thermodynamics, physics, and spirit catch up with the wild, hurtling cyclone of chaos that our civilization has set into motion. As they catch up, the Big Mama of it all will set the cyclone of chaos in its resting place, even if this means creating more chaos in order to reach an ultimate balance.

I also feel the truth that life is Now. That there is “no time left for anything but love stories.” I hold Strand’s directive to live ecstatically and fully in one hand. Do not plan too far ahead. Do not waste a single precious second. Now is all we have.

I hold our species’ imperative in the other hand: consider what you have done. Consider how to create a future out of / within collapsing systems. Consider how to survive, how to thrive, how to create compost of this putrid waste.

I know that I might live many more decades. I know that I might not die tomorrow. I know that there is a need to hold the future in one hand, to plan and to try.

I want to write love stories, and also I feel called to play some part in the Great Turning.

Do you feel this too?

The balance is strange and daunting. It’s sometimes hard to move from presence to systems-wide thinking and back to presence again.

I suppose where I settle down, back in this moment, is here, once again:

I’d like to lend a heavy hand to the part of the ride where we attempt to re-seed a culture that is built on earth-reverence, animism, self-awareness, emotional stability, accountability, deep ritual, deep relationship, gratitude, preparation, and community tending.

I feel willing and prepared to continue building containers where we can practice these things together, whether that be Animist Forest Circles, or Grief and Rage Ceremonies, or Full Moon Ceremonies, or Offerings and Needs Circles, or something else. I feel willing a prepared to seek mentors to become more skilled and more ready.

I hope these containers can support you in creating space for your unique gifts too. Maybe it creates support for you to be an engineer, or a healer, or a teacher, or a builder.

I hope when we take breaks from our work, we are living and writing love stories.

I hope we can find ecstatic joy in these times as the cyclone of civilization arrives at the threshold of its reckoning.

I hope we can find deep satisfaction in fulfilling our functions by helping one another through the times of despair and destruction, by feeling into how deeply and profoundly we are needed by one another.

I hope we can tap into the spiritual technology of our bodies to process the grief of what we have done to the animals, the air, the water, the soils, our bodies. I hope we can feel the great cosmic release that occurs when we let these waves wash through us.

I hope we can dance around fires, even when the great minority in power takes away another lifeline. I hope we can feast, I hope we can laugh, I hope we can attend holy births and create portals for sacred deaths. I hope we can be fully alive - as alive as the imperative of these times asks of us.

Thank you for being here with me.

Happy May Day.