The world is opening up again. But not in the way we thought and truth be told, we never thought we’d be here in the first place. Hundreds of thousands of deaths due to a virus we have yet to fully understand, and the streets on fire with passion for justice and deep dark sorrow rooted in a history we have refused to fully acknowledge as a nation. Underneath it all, the earth struggles to support us as we neglect planetary matters of life and death. There is so much to carry right now, for all of us. For the first time in a long time, there is no one who is not experiencing the same staggering circumstances.

I woke up this morning feeling lost, wondering what I can do, where to begin. As I drank my coffee, I began thinking about the power there is in acceptance. The degree to which we accept something is the degree to which we can change it. I’m not talking about submissive acceptance, or resigning oneself to status quo, that’s “just the way it is” sort of thinking. I’m talking about acceptance as acknowledgement of hard truth, as presence that allows for sharp intuitive response, for wise, intentional action. We are in the crucible. There is no escaping this moment. To ignore what is happening to our fellow humans right now is to lose a big part of ourselves, to die inside. There is too much death outside to let this happen.

This morning I wake to a storm, the rain falling steady on the rooftop, the thunder rumbling far away enough not to lightning strike fear, but just as I write this, it is closer. We are always “under the weather.” It is a fact we accept, argumentum non disputandum, an act of God according to both preacher and insurance agent. It is physically impossible to defy the weather successfully without losing our best laid plans, the BBQ and the band. Despite our white-knuckled efforts, black ice be damned, we go skating across that yellow line. In the blink of an eye, the wind can take the hat from your head and the rooftop too. We know this especially well right now, in Tennessee, in Arkansas, but it has always been this way.

My grandma loved to warn me about going outside with wet hair, “You’ll catch your death of cold,” she would say. And that is where the act of God converges with free will. God became man and dwelt among them and died of pneumonia after a fierce snowball fight.

Winter makes everything quiet. Here it is the first day of spring and snow is falling on the tulips half up and ready, half-frozen in fear. The birds, out in full regalia two days ago when the wind was a balmy 65 degrees, have renegotiated their contract and seem now to practice social distancing just as we all slowly, reluctantly move to “shelter in.”

I listen longer than I normally would, and off in the distance there is one bird still singing. And then another in the opposite direction, answers her call. In spite of the shift in events, the untimely snow, the community lockdown, there are at least two birds still singing.

My baker friend Sam

Once said

He channels his emotions

Into bread

In dream-tending we learn to blur the lines between waking world and dream world. I ventured into that liminal space last night; turns out it can be a dangerous place to inhabit. What I took to be the weather of a dream was fully in motion just down the street, as a dear friend of mine hid in her bathtub while the windows blew out and 2x4s pelted her living room. I wouldn’t learn this till later. Time and space… how can we be so close and yet have such opposite experiences in the same moment?

I was caught in that in between dream world space again, when Willow unlocked my door and walked through my apartment, calling my name. I could not place the action -- the action that requires reaction. It was like deja vu. Had this happened before, or did I know it was coming?