According to David Whyte a friendship doesn’t actually begin until we get a chance to forgive each other. So today, it seems, my friendship with my Maddie new priest friend, actually began. Because under the weight of too many deeply disturbing things flying at me all at once, too many very beloved youngsters trying to kill themselves with homemade guns, too many tumors appearing on beloved’s eyeballs, too many sisters Giving Up, too many wildfires suddenly, impossibly - I popped off at a friend, to relieve my own unbearable pressure. Carelessly and without courtesy. I’m sorry Maddie. You are one of the most nuanced, loving and tender people I know, and my pop off had none of those qualities.

It’s hard to describe the animal body’s response to an impossible-shouldn’t-be-happening-crisis so soon after another, impossible-shouldn’t-be-happening-crisis.

A few nights ago my primal nature came alive as we smelled smoke and started getting alerts on our phones. The things I used to know about where I live are so rapidly changing I have whiplash; climate safe haven, high humidity jungle, mountain protection against hurricanes and tornadoes. So when hurricanes happen that are so intense they’re called a geological event, or uncontrollable wildfires crop up 10 miles from my daughter’s house my response time is slow, lagging in the cognitive dissonance - this is impossible, this shouldn’t be happening. When I walk thru an airport and everyone is on their phones and no one sees anyone and we are in full blown Wall E dystopia my mind reels, this is sci fi, this can’t be happening.

The night of the wildfires followed one of the most humanly difficult days of my entire life, with a domino of personal tragedies. That night I manically sobbed to a friend “I thot the apocalypse would be more fun! Zombies are just so straight forward.”

But even in my very disregulated stress state, I began to hear a little inner voice nudging me to break away from the news alerts and to go be quiet with myself. Like a mother putting a child in, a tantrum, in a quiet room to recenter. I knew clearly that if I did this I would hear something different.

I absolutely did not do that. The adrenaline panic momentum was solidly established and I had nothing left to shift gears, so I very humanly flailed. But I heard a window try to open in me. And my family is becoming well versed in those kinds of windows opening.

The day before Hurricane Helene hit, my daughter Persephone called me in a tizzy because no one would listen to her about how she had a sense that a really bad storm was coming on. Because this had never happened here, and because it was supposedly impossible for it to happen here, no one listened to her and told her that her anxiety was getting the best of her. (I believe that chronic anxiety is not actually anxiety but an obsessive avoidance of your deeper life but real anxiety is our animal bodies giving us information: something in the now needs a different quality of attention.)

Persephone had to work thru her chronic anxiety to be able to discern the animal body stuff. I was far away from her so I did what I could, which was to tell jokes. And accept and validate. Pretty soon she slipped into a Listening state and I asked her what she heard from there. She rattled off a list of things to do. Move cars to high ground, water and candle up, create a burm with community to protect house from river, put together a package of fun and snacks for kids if it got rough. Then she went and boss bitched all these things into existence, which turned out to be the exact things, one day later, that saved her family, their home and their cars. The wisdom was inside her, that cosmic GPS that’s connected to All and has the birds eye view, way above the tree line of our daily lives.

I see many people waking up to the tiramisu of difficulties, that is necessary to living thru an epoch change, and the resulting collapse. If you look around at how people are dealing with it, most are somewhere in the five stages of grief.

Most are still in the pretend it’s not happening phase because they’re already taxed as fuck in their daily lives, their innate human capacities whittled by trying to live in an artificial environment.

Some are in the anger, hulk smash, men (fill in your villain of the day) are to blame phase. There’s a lot of life force to be reclaimed in embracing this phase. When I see people stabilize out here for a long time, they’ve come home in their anger instead of allowing it to be a bridge, a clarifying fire, a cleansing storm.

Some are in the desperate bargaining phase, which is “…a defense against the feelings of helplessness experienced after a loss. It happens when people struggle to accept the reality of the loss and the limits of their control over the situation.” — Some of the key characteristics of the bargaining phase are: Trying to predict the future and assuming the worst, wishing or praying for a different outcome or thinking or saying "What if…" or "If only I/wehad…" or "If I do this then…"1

Many, many people are in the depression part of their process, and because they’re largely experiencing that depression in both isolation and misinformation overload it is harder for them to move thru it by feeling it and working with it, instead, it’s just paralyzing them and addiction and depression are the best of friends, like two wheels on a bike stand, you pedal forever and go nowhere.

I believe the final phase of the grief model, acceptance, holds the key to accessing all the practical solutions locked deep inside our cosmic vessels. When we are not accepting something it’s because we fundamentally consider it to be wrong and bad. When we catastrophize life that way, we scare the shit out of ourselves and trigger our primal defenses and go into fight or flight (very very far away from the Hall of Deep Listening.)

I, personally, have found tremendous relief in accepting that we are the simultaneous systems collapse of a great change. I don’t love it, I accept it. I don’t love when my children have to go thru an experimental phase that feels edgy to me but I accept them in their totality. And acceptance gives me traction on true ground. It’s a yes to now.

By accepting any challenge we kind of put our arms around it, like a child we love and we can listen to it and hear what it’s been trying to tell us. Acceptance is the first step in being able to calm the Eff down enough to access your deeper listening place, the quiet grove in you where you cosmic GPS is regularly broadcasting.

People are actively looking for practical ways to move with grace thru the Great Change. Learning to access and cultivate this ability to truly Listen, and to calm yourself and others down enough to Listen, is at the tippy top of any advice I’d give. I think it’s actually the only thing on my advice list.

It’s the whole advice. In any situation, be one of the pillars that allows safe passage into the temple of true Listening.

Because the wisdom that comes thru is so different for each of us! It is unique, mission information-bytes on our pilgrim’s progress, the next lesson in our earth school curriculum. Sometimes the wisdom we hear is temporary, like, get out of the way and you miss some physical catastrophe. Sometimes it is a bigger change, taking this drug would bring a necessary relief and relaxation of pressure. What if we got so good at this kind of Listening that it became a habit, we kept Listening and kept adjusting, ever fine tuning, like the Waymakers of ancient Polynesia, charting their way across thousands of miles of open sea without any modern methods for navigation, instead paying exquisite attention to the curl of a wave, the particular trajectory of a bird.

In a larger, world-renewing kind of way, the wisdom we hear from that deep Listening is future food. Wisdom molecules we will all use to build a new way of being human. We are codiscovering the molecules of that way in our moments of deep Listening. And harvesting them one loving interaction at a time. Where one of us is soft enough to be a pillar to afford safe passage to the temple of Listening.

There are so many practical tips for how to get soft and helpful like this, for yourself, for others, with others. Accept what’s happening and feel all the feels that keep you from that acceptance, keep feeling until peace lets you know you’ve felt enough. Hold the symptoms of collapse in a larger context and try not to pathologize the dying of a system whose time has come. Lean outside of your vanity prison where it’s you against everyone else and instead of batting away another’s suffering try to find where it correlates in you. Ever been lost? Hauntingly lonely and ashamed of feeling so? Jealous and petty and super left out of the party? Anguished and collapsing under the weight of grief you can find the courage to neither name nor feel? Good, me too. Me too a lot. Connecting these dots softens, invites patience, returns the peace that allows a return to a true perspective.

But who actually listens to practical advice? Abraham says words don’t teach and goshdagnabit if that ain’t just all the way true. They might create space for true wisdom to emerge, they might even relieve something but only lived experience actually teaches. So here’s some recent living.

There’s this single flamingo on an island in northern Florida right now. He was blown off course by a climate fueled hurricane, and tho he’s an innately communal bird who does “…not do well on their own in the wild. These vibrant birds need a company in almost every single task that they do.” 2He’s there alone. And it’s not his nature or preference but he has to figure himself out while waiting for his zugunruhe to kick in, that migratory restlessness, the cosmic gps in birds. Ever since my partner told me about this bird I can’t stop wondering about him (we are actually going to that island in a week my obsession has grown so vast.)

When he finally gets the zugunruhe urge to go, how does he actually navigate? Birds can get compass information from the sun, the stars, and by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. Can we?

You need to know that I just learned that flamingos are born white and get pink by eating shrimp. And EVERYONE ELSE is like, duh, I was born knowing that.

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And nextly, at the center of a hurricane is a quiet, calm center.

While the destruction happens, the eye of the storm moves. What if we became eyes of the storm for and with each other? What if we carved out a little space to nurture the skills needed to do this? I don’t love calls out for people to be better without acknowledging it’s VERY DIFFICULT TO CHANGE and only tenderness creates an ecosystem where changes is possible.

I think we have to create a little distance from the outer chaos to establish inner stability. This is how my grandson does it: when Monte received and loved his first watch, being a largely watchless and often timeless family we all marveled at this news. A watch wearer! A time lover! In our very own family as if someone had just been nominated for the Nobel peace prize. But when Persephone leaned down to synchronize his watch and set it to the “right time” he pulled his hand away, “I don’t want to be on the world’s time Mom. I want to be on my time.

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You honor me with your perspective. I’m wondering how you’re navigating change right now. How’s your tender heart? Did YOU KNOW ABOUT THE SHRIMP THING???