This week I have been awake a lot in the middle of the night. Between a very amorous baby who prefers to sleep with my body wrapped around hers like a DNA helix, the bright moon which amplifies everything, and the ongoing strain of holding this broken world in tangible and abstract ways I didn’t get a lot of rest.

How about you? What is keeping you up at night?

As I thought about writing this, I thought about the narrative structure where I say it is hard and then I say but these things help and then leave it on some note about how we can do things or something, but honestly it just doesn’t coalesce into a story that feels useful or kind for this moment.

When I feel this kind of overwhelm I do this thing where I call in my pantheon. My pantheon looks like a ragtag bunch that are all together eating, laughing, and causing the right kind of trouble. They don’t pretend they can solve it but they still show up to do the cooking, kiss the babies, write the books, do the harm reduction. They offer waymarkers from their vantage points.

So here are a few of those stops along the way:

This book just came out and my god is it the time for befriending what is. I know Kate from a long time ago at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. What I remember from being in person with her was her magnanimity. She is powerful in her joy and fierceness for cutting through bullshit. And as we all know that is work of true friendship.

Last month Janice Mirikitani died. She was a poet, activist, and freedom fighter, and co-founder of Glide in San Francisco with excellent eyelashes and a dangerously good sense of style. I watched her memorial one Sunday afternoon and it was an incredible homage to her vastness but what really stood out to me was what a life looks like that follows passion and how it touches so many seemingly disparate but actually very connected parts of the world.

This teacher of mine, Shayne Case who I started learning from in the winter is offering a few classes online and they are about this moment and where we can begin from.

There is still tea if you need that in your life right now!

In the next few weeks, I’ll be coming out with some classes, with a bit of luck sharing a few more things from the studio, eating as many figs as I can squeeze in.

As always be in touch if you’d like.

Xo,

C

the re-enchantment

up in the middle of the night