When the dying caterpillar first fully encounters the imagination held within these discs, the collection of cells is seen as enemy and invader. Though they arise from within, the discs and the possibility they contain are believed to be alien, terrorist, killer. The immune system fights these cells, fights against what they are and can be - fights against utter, radical, complete and total change.

But the imagination wins out….

What would it mean if we were all mothers to one another? The kind of mother that every one of us needs and deserves?

In this spring season, there’s an entwining that’s alive in my mind and heart. In conversations, in readings, in the natural world, I keep hearing the double pulse of joy and grief, joy and grief. This rhythm, these experiences that live inside and alongside one another, keep arising, and calling my attention. My heart turns to the Mother Trees, as it so often does when I’m trying to better understand something that feels central to this business of being alive…

… As we widen the circle of our attention, we widen our potential for compassion and love. Our lives and our world encourage us to close off, to collapse in, to create a small and manageable and known circle of care. What if instead we widened, became ungovernable - let our care and love become untamed? What could happen in a wild world of feral and diffuse love?

… And so, if we wish to, how do we create ritual in our lives? I believe that each breath, each gentle touch, each embrace, each candle lit, tea brewed, bread baked, each chant raised for liberation - they can all be a ritual. Within each of these moments, the mundane and the sacred weave together.

Being embraced by the darkness

Situating ourselves in Palestine and Israel, with the support of the other-than-human world

Singing a homecoming song, with a fierce and tender love

Rituals and containers as supports, as stepping stones into the stream of human life

Creating a bridge from past to future - braided of wonderings, worries born of love, and maybe even hope.

Intergenerational care - with trees, with humans

Love and weirdness - for our weird, loving world

Holding, weaving, knitting together - grief and pleasure

Walking through a guided Forest Therapy session

“Thank you for showing yourself to me…”