The flowers were on the table. The burned food had successfully been vacuumed from the stovetop, an innovation I remain willing to defend. I had changed clothes. Luzy had entered the particular state of ex…

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Not heavy rain, nothing dramatic. Just the kind that seems to settle over a city rather than fall upon it.

The light had dimmed enough that I had turned on the kitchen lights even though it was barely two in the afternoon.

Behind me, dinner was still cooking in the oven and Luzy moved somewhere nearby.

Our guests would arrive in a few hours.

And I remained beside the window, pulling the flowers apart gently, giving each stem enough room to occupy its own shape.

I had been thinking about freedom.

About the strange luxury of standing there on a Friday afternoon with nowhere else I was required to be.

About the eighteen years I had spent arranging my life around uncertainty rather than pretending uncertainty could be eliminated.

About the job I lost without warning.

About the husband I lost after four weeks of knowing I could lose him.

About all the structures I had once called certain simply because they had continued long enough for me to mistake continuity for permanence.

And as I watched the rain, something about the metaphor became almost embarrassingly obvious.

The weather was terrible, at least according to me, I dislike gray days.

They change something in me, the world feels flatter.

My energy drops and everything seems slightly less inviting.

If the sun appeared, I knew I would immediately feel different.

And yet I did not look through the window and conclude that Philadelphia had become rain.

I did not assume the sky was permanently gray.

I did not reorganize my understanding of the city around what the atmosphere happened to be doing at two o’clock on a Friday afternoon.

It was raining.

That was all.

Real and inconvenient. Affecting and yet temporary, even if I didn’t know exactly when it would change.

Somehow, I had not always extended the same generosity toward my internal weather.

A couple of days earlier I had awakened feeling raw.

That was the only word available at first: Raw.

As though too much reality had become available at once.

My internal weather felt almost impossible to describe because it seemed to be doing several things simultaneously.

Sunny.
Overcast.

Stormy.

Electrified.

The conditions changed so quickly that by the time I found language for one state, another seemed to have appeared beside and at the same time, inside it.

There was sadness.

There was tenderness.

There was agitation.

There was something almost luminous underneath all of it.

And at some point I noticed myself saying something unusual.

Not: I am sad.

But: There is sadness in the field.

The difference was immediate.

Suddenly I could perceive space.

Not enormous space.

Certainly not transcendence.

Just enough distance between the sadness and the awareness noticing sadness that they were no longer indistinguishable from one another.

And because I have spent enough time around spiritual language to distrust convenient enlightenment, my next thought was almost immediate.

Am I bypassing myself?

Was I simply finding more sophisticated language for refusing to be the human being who was experiencing the emotion?

Was “sadness is present” just a spiritually dressed version of:

I am above sadness?

Because I did not want that. I never want to rise above human emotions.

I have no interest in becoming so spacious that nothing touches me.

I do not choose awareness at the expense of intimacy with my own humanity.

I refuse to stand somewhere outside my humanness narrating weather reports about the woman getting soaked below.

If sadness is ever happening, I want to feel sadness.

If joy arrives, I want joy to remain real.

If fear moves through me, I do not want philosophical language to make fear less legitimate.

So I did what I usually do, I kept watching. Not trying to decide whether the language was correct. But trying to understand what had actually changed, and eventually something became clear.

The sadness had not become smaller, but rather the field of awareness had become larger.

This difference matters enormously.

Because differentiation can look remarkably similar to distance from the outside.

Both can produce space.

Both can produce language like:

There is fear here.

There is happiness.

There is longing.

There is anxiety moving through the body.

But one movement creates exile from the experience.

While the other creates intimacy with the experience.

Distance says: This is not me.

Differentiation says: This is happening within me, but it is not all that is happening. And it’s certainly not me.

Distance attempts to escape the weather.

Differentiation notices the sky.

And then, you still get wet when it rains.

You still cry.

You can still rage.

You can still ache so deeply that the body folds around itself.

You can still miss someone.

You can still want something with enough intensity that desire seems to have occupied every cell.

The storm does not become less meteorologically legitimate because you remember there is a sky around it.

Rain is still rain and thunder is still thunder.

A hurricane does not become a gentle breeze merely because someone understands atmospheric science.

But neither does the sky become the storm.

I think this is where identity and identification become interesting.

The English language makes things deceptively solid.

I am devastated.

I am anxious.

I am angry.

I am afraid.

Sometimes these sentences are simply ordinary human shorthand and nothing is wrong with them. But experience can move so quickly into identity that we fail to notice the transition.

Something happens.

The body responds.

Emotion appears.

Thought interprets.

And suddenly what began as an experience becomes the location from which the whole world is perceived.

I am devastated. Therefore the future looks devastating.

I am afraid. Therefore reality looks dangerous.

I am anxious. Therefore every unresolved question begins presenting itself as an emergency.

The weather becomes climate.

Then climate becomes geography.

Then geography becomes identity.

And before long: We feel certain that this is who I am.

I began noticing it most clearly after my husband died.

In the beginning, I was afraid I was going to die too.

Not eventually… any second.

Death had moved so quickly through my home that the ordinary assumption of continued existence no longer felt particularly convincing.

My husband had been alive.
Then he was diagnosed.
And only four weeks later he was dead.

Something in me seemed to conclude that if reality could change that quickly once, it could change that quickly again.

So for a while, fear organized itself around my own death.
What if I die?

Then, eventually, that fear loosened enough for another one to take its place.
What if I cannot do this alone?

I had a newborn daughter. A life that had been built for two adults had suddenly become mine to carry. There were mornings and nights and diapers and money and decisions and grief, and no one beside me occupying the place my husband had occupied only weeks before.

The fear changed shape.

I was no longer primarily afraid of dying. I was afraid I would not be able to cope with living.

Then that changed too.

Somewhere along the way, I began to realize that my capacity had not disappeared entirely. Despite the fear, I was already coping.

Not elegantly.
Not without pain.

But Luzy was alive and I was alive.

Days continued arriving and somehow I kept meeting them.

And almost as soon as that fear became less convincing, another appeared.

I am going to die alone.
Not merely live alone.
Die alone.

My mind leapt decades into a future that did not exist and found me there without a beloved beside me.

The image felt devastating and for a while, it carried all the emotional authority of fact.

Then life moved again.
People appeared.
Love appeared.
Possibility appeared.

The future became less empty than the one fear had drawn.

And then another question began circling.

What if I never find a way to be of service again?
What if the work is over?
What if everything I have learned has nowhere to go?
What if the part of me that believed I was here to offer something to the world has mistaken itself?

Different fears.
Different subjects.
Different futures.

Yet eventually I began noticing something almost embarrassing in its consistency.

The story kept changing.

The weather did not.

Fear had moved from death, to motherhood, to loneliness, to purpose, and each time it arrived carrying the same announcement:

This is the problem.

This is what must be solved.
This is what determines whether you are safe.
This is what your future depends upon.

And each time the content changed, I believed the new content was the reason I felt the way I did.

Until enough of those fears passed that I could finally look backward and see the pattern.

The forecast kept changing.
The pressure system remained remarkably similar.

But eventually I became exhausted enough to notice something almost funny.

My mind did not appear particularly invested in any specific problem.

It appeared invested in remaining fearful, because the fear had been real.

Every one of those questions touched something consequential.
But the subject was interchangeable.

I could die.
Parenting alone was difficult.
I could experience loneliness.
I did not know what my work would become.
The mistake was not that fear existed.

The mistake was allowing each fear, while it was present, to become the entire available description of reality.

When I feared dying, life itself disappeared behind death.
When I feared raising Luzy alone, my capacity disappeared behind overwhelm.
When I feared loneliness, every relationship and every future possibility disappeared behind an imagined empty room decades away.

When I feared losing my purpose, everything I had already created and everything still unknown disappeared behind the possibility of failure.

Different weather reports from the same storm system.

The storm had clouded the horizon, and because I could not see beyond it, I mistook the horizon for the edge of the world.

At the time I had spent years believing understanding could create freedom, so my instinct back then was to investigate each one.

What is this about?

What does it reveal?

Where did it come from?

What does it mean?

But the more I engaged, the larger the storm became.

Not because the questions were illegitimate.

Because attention itself was feeding the weather system.

I had encountered this mechanism before. In an earlier inquiry I called it self-referential interference, the way attention can become occupied by interpretation before reality has fully arrived.

And that particular afternoon standing by the window, I began noticing another consequence of attention.

When attention collapses around one experience, the rest of reality becomes less available.

Not absent.

Less available.

This is what storms do.

They narrow the horizon.

Standing inside heavy rain, it can become difficult to remember that somewhere beyond the clouds another part of the sky is blue.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

The sun did not disappear because Philadelphia was gray.

It simply became inaccessible from where I stood, but I am certain it was sunny elsewhere in the world.

And I believe internal weather works similarly.

When fear occupies enough of the field, love can become difficult to access.

When grief becomes enormous, joy may seem almost fictional.

When anxiety becomes loud, safety can become cognitively unavailable even while nothing dangerous is occurring.

When anger fills the aperture, tenderness may still exist but become impossible to perceive.

The other conditions have not necessarily disappeared.

Our access to them has just narrowed.

This is different from telling someone:

Everything is fine.

Because sometimes everything is absolutely not fine.

People die.

Relationships end.

Bodies hurt.

Money runs out.

Plans collapse.

Fear can be responding to something real.

Sadness can be completely appropriate.

Anger can contain information that needs to be heard.

The point is not to discredit the weather.

The point is to stop confusing one condition with the entirety of the atmosphere.

This became particularly clear to me days later when I woke up feeling anxiety.

I understood what was happening.

Intellectually, I knew my thoughts were not facts.

I knew anxiety was magnifying uncertainty.

I knew the stories my mind was producing were disproportionate to the available evidence.

Yet none of that helped and this interested me.

Because I could see the weather.

I could name the weather.

I could understand the meteorology.

And I was still standing in the storm.

Knowledge was suddenly not enough.

I have written before about this developmental gap.

A realization can be genuine while remaining inaccessible under pressure. Capacity is not the absence of activation, but the increasing ability to remain in relationship with reality while activation occurs.

That morning, someone’s words returned to me.

If the issue is happening in the head, perhaps the head cannot be the very thing attempting to solve it.

So I moved my attention downward.

Not metaphorically.

Into my chest.

My heart.

I did not ask the thoughts to leave.

I did not argue with them.

I did not replace them with better thoughts.

I simply allowed awareness to widen enough that the thought stream was no longer the only information available.

And almost immediately, something changed. The thoughts stopped.

Not forever.

Not because I had defeated anxiety.

Because another dimension of experience had become available.

Body.

Heart.

Breath.

Presence.

The room.

The morning.

Life happening outside the anxiousness in my head.

The storm had occupied the entire screen.

Then the screen widened.

This is what I mean by making internal space.

Although even that phrase may be slightly inaccurate.

Because I know we don’t actually need to create the space.

The space is already there. Awareness is infinite.

The storm simply makes it difficult to perceive.

A few months ago before my most recent Inquiry (Link to love that Remains) I might have imagined the work as creating distance around an emotion.

Making the container bigger.

Expanding awareness.

Building enough capacity to hold what was happening.

Now I am beginning to see that even doing that requires too much unnecessary effort.

Awareness does not need to create room around experience.

It simply needs to notice the room experience is already happening inside.

The sky does not expand when the storm begins.

The storm simply occupies part of it.

This difference feels subtle.

But somatically, it changes everything.

If I have to create enough space for my anxiety, then anxiety becomes another task.

Something I must manage correctly.

Something I must become large enough to contain.

Something I must regulate.

But if the space is already present, the movement changes.

I am not trying to become larger than the experience.

I am remembering that experience was never the entirety of me.

This is also why I hesitate when people speak about non-identification as though it were simply a cognitive correction.

You are not your anxiety.

True.

Perhaps.

But when anxiety is flooding the organism, that sentence can feel almost insulting.

Because phenomenologically, in that moment, anxiety may be almost everything that is available.

The body is anxious.

Thought is anxious.

Attention is anxious.

The future appears through anxiety.

Trying to simply stop identifying can become another demand placed upon an already overwhelmed organism.

Now be less anxious about being anxious.

Wonderful.

Thank you. No, the developmental question interests me more.

What makes enough differentiation available that anxiety can once again become something occurring rather than the location from which reality itself is being perceived?

Sometimes philosophy helps.

Sometimes breath.

Sometimes movement.

Sometimes another person.

Sometimes medication.

Sometimes therapy.

Sometimes sleep.

Sometimes time.

Sometimes nothing works until the storm has moved enough on its own.

The mechanism may differ.

The recognition remains: experience can be fully real without being total.

There is enormous compassion available inside that sentence.

And because I no longer have to invalidate what I feel in order to remember that more exists.

I can say: There is sadness.

And cry.

There is fear.

And ask for help.

There is anger.

And set a boundary.

There is longing.

And want what I want with my entire body.

There is anxiety.

And still make lunch.

There is grief.

And still notice something beautiful.

Not because beauty cancels grief.

Because grief never had to cancel beauty either.

And I believe this is where my understanding of freedom becomes embodied.

Freedom Within Experience proposes that reality does not have to change before freedom becomes available.

But The Weather Report asks the obvious next question:

How?

And perhaps one answer is differentiation.

The capacity to remain close enough to experience to feel it completely while maintaining enough context to know that it is not the only thing here.

Not: I am not devastated.

But: Devastation is here, and I am still here too.

Not: I am not afraid.

But: Fear is here, and reality contains more information than fear can currently perceive.

Not: I should stop being anxious.

But: Anxiety is the weather today.

And somehow life continues inside it.

Which brings me back to the flowers.

Outside the window it was still raining.

The sky had not improved.

I still preferred sunlight.

Nothing about remembering that rain was weather made me suddenly adore gray afternoons.

But the flowers remained beautiful.

Dinner still smelled good.

My daughter was still somewhere behind me living whatever enormously consequential life a toddler lives between snacks.

People I was looking forward to meet would arrive later.

There would be conversation.

Food.

Wine.

Laughter.

My beloved.

The rain occupied the window but it didn’t have to occupy the entire day.

And that is exactly what I am learning internally too.

The weather report matters.

It tells me something real about conditions.

Bring an umbrella.

Cancel the picnic.

Rest.

Cry.

Wait.

Move carefully.

Ask for help.

But a weather report is not an identity and it is certainly not a prophecy.

It is simply information about what is happening now.

Maybe this is why experience can feel so absolute while we are inside it.

Because consciousness has an extraordinary capacity to become intimate with whatever occupies its attention.

A storm can become the whole world.

A heartbreak can become the whole future.

A desire can become the only conceivable path.

A fear can become reality itself.

Until something widens.

And suddenly: the storm is still there.

But so is everything else.

The sky.

The flowers.

The child.

The body.

The beloved.

The possibility.

The strange, enormous field of reality continuing beyond whatever weather happens to be passing through it at that precise moment.

And once I began seeing experience this way, another question emerged.

Because weather does not merely exist.

Weather moves.

Conditions shift.

Storms gather and dissolve.

Heat rises.

Pressure changes.

Clouds separate.

One state becomes another without asking permission.

Experience behaves similarly.

Nothing in the field remains perfectly still.

Fear becomes curiosity.

Longing becomes contact.

Grief becomes tenderness.

Joy becomes sadness.

Certainty becomes confusion and sometimes confusion becomes wonder.

Reality is continuously changing shape.

And in many ways I had spent too much of my life interpreting that movement as instability.

But now I believe movement itself is telling me something else.

I don’t think that reality was ever intended to remain still long enough for any of us to secure it.

Now I see that change is not merely what happens in life.

But that it’s exactly how life plays.

And that brought me somewhere I did not expect at all: Leela*

*Leela is the Hindu concept that the universe and all existence are a spontaneous, joyful expression of divine play and creative freedom rather than a product of necessity.

I will be deepening into this subject in my next essay.

In the meantime, if anything in this essay stirred something within you, I invite you to share it with someone who may resonate or consider supporting my work here.

And if you would like to deepen your spiritual life and bring what you know more fully into lived embodiment, my inbox is always open to inquiries about working together.

In beloved continuity,
EagleSnake

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I opened my eyes and, sure enough, she had scribbled on the wall. The beautiful white wall. I hurried to clean it and scrubbed until most of it disappeared.

Then my phone pinged. It was a photograph of me. My beloved had taken it a few nights prior and sent it.

I stared at it for a moment and it struck me how different I looked. I had never seen myself from there.

It captured an angle I had never explored before, a position in relation to myself that I cannot occupy. I could stand in front of a mirror for the rest of my life and never quite see myself from where he had that night.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, we say.

I had always understood that sentence to mean that beauty is subjective.

I now think it means something far more interesting: the beholder offers a vantage point.

And yet there are other things about us that no vantage point, however loving, can reveal from the outside.

Some things cannot be taught because they must be developed, just as some things cannot be given because they must become available.

You can open every curtain in a room, but that does not make someone else’s eyes ready for the light.

You can make the room bright and still, you cannot make another person see, because the opening belongs to the one seeing.

For me, this is one of the quiet griefs of loving another person.

We can create conditions.
We can offer experiences.
We can speak.
We can remain.
We can open every curtain we know how to open.

But there is somewhere we cannot follow.

The place where another human being becomes.

No one could metabolize my pain for me.
No one could reorganize my life.
No one could undergo the developmental processes that slowly changed what I could perceive, receive, carry, or inhabit.

People accompanied me.

Some held me.
Some challenged me.
Some loved me.
Some left.
Some stayed.

And while all of them affected what happened, none of them could make it happen.

There is a chamber inside every human being that can only be inhabited by oneself.

Not because it is hidden or secret.

Not because the door has been locked against the world.

There is no door.
There never was.

There are simply places where no one else can become us.

This is what I named the Untouchable Chamber.

Not a protected room somewhere behind the personality.
Not the final secret we refuse to disclose even to those closest to us.

The Untouchable Chamber is the nature of first-person experience itself.

Only I can know what pain and love feel like from inside my body.

Only I can inhabit my prayer while it is happening.

Only I can experience the strange interior rearrangements through which one understanding becomes another.

I may describe them later and offer language that allows another person to witness their consequences.

But description is not inhabitation.
Understanding is not realization.
And witnessing is not becoming.

There are experiences that no amount of intimacy can transfer.

And for me, nowhere is this more poignant than in love.

Sometimes I wonder how I can make my beloved know how much I love him.

I like words.

So I give him words.

Poems.
Letters.
I tell him.
Again and again.

And still, sometimes, the question remains underneath them all.

How can I make sure you know?

For a long time, I might have believed there was an answer. That with enough openness, enough intimacy, enough language, two people could finally cross whatever distance remained between them.

I no longer think that.

Only I can know what it is to love him from inside my own body.

He will never stand where I stand, just as I will never know what it is to love me from inside himself.

I know that he loves me because I hear him tell me and I watch him show me. I receive the gestures that emerge from it.

But I cannot experience their source.

I cannot know what loving me feels like from inside his body.
I know the tenderness that never quite becomes language.
I know the thoughts that appear when I look at him and disappear before I can speak them.
I know the ways the world rearranges itself because he exists within it.
I know every invisible movement that eventually becomes a kiss, a sentence, a meal, a hand reaching across the bed.

And I cannot give him that experience.

I can tell him.
I can write it.
I can touch him.
I can spend years attempting increasingly precise translations.

But he can only receive what crosses from my interior into the shared world between us.

He cannot experience its source.

I think this is why lovers repeat themselves.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

Because repetition is not always a request for reassurance.

Sometimes it is the inevitable frustration of trying to communicate something that cannot be transferred.

How can I make you know?

How can I show you how much?

How can I bring you here?

We cannot, none of us can. And for a moment, there is something unbearably lonely about that.

After all the words and nakedness and years and promises and mornings and love, there remains somewhere we cannot follow one another.

Some distance even love cannot close.

But I don’t think love was ever asking us to close that gap.

Because while the gap remains, something does cross.

I cannot enter his chamber, but I can affect it.
He cannot enter mine, but he can affect it.

The chamber is untouchable, but it is not impermeable and this distinction matters.

The people I have loved have affected me, I have changed beside them.

Something crossed. Not instruction as such. Rather contact.

I watched.
I experienced.
I loved.
I was loved.

And somewhere inside the chamber where no one else could follow, something became available that had not been available before.

The curtains mattered even though they could not make the eyes widen. The light mattered even though it could not make the eyes see. The person standing nearby mattered even though they could not accomplish the seeing. This is one of the ways relationship participates in our becoming.

Another person cannot become for us. But they can choose to become part of the conditions in which our becoming occurs.

Words can enter.
Consistency can enter.
Tenderness can enter.
An apology can enter.
A boundary can enter.
Years of being treated differently than one has ever been treated before can enter.

And then, somewhere beyond the reach of the person offering them, those things can become something else.

They can become recognition.
They can become trust.
They can become capacity.
They can become a different relationship with time.
They can become eyes increasingly able to remain open in the light.

We may never know exactly what our love becomes inside another person.

And for me, that is part of the grief too, because we may spend years offering something whose deepest consequences we will never witness.

But this is also why love cannot be reduced to what we receive from one another.

Love asks something more interesting of us.

What can I offer?

Not: What can I extract from you so that I finally know I am loved?

Not: What must you become so that I can remain comfortable?

Not even: How can I make you receive what I am giving?

But instead:

What can I bring into the shared world between us?

What can I offer without demanding control over what it becomes once it reaches you?

This is devotion in union.
Not the disappearance of separateness.

Not possession.
Not access.

Offering.

We meet somewhere between two unknowable interiors.

In words.
In touch.
In choices.
In mornings shared.
In the thousand ordinary consequences of loving and being loved.

Relationship is precisely this territory.

The place outside two untouchable chambers where our offerings meet.

There is somewhere inside another person I cannot enter, and there is somewhere inside me they cannot enter.

Intimacy does not abolish this distance.

It learns how to live inside it.

And for a while, I thought this was the end of the inquiry.

But there is another consequence of this distance that I had not considered.

If another person can never stand where I stand, then I can never stand where they stand either.

And that means there are not only things about me another person can never know.

There are things about myself I can never know in the same way another person does.

They say people are mirrors.
That relationship is a mirror.
I think this is reductionist.

A mirror can only return an image and what relationship does is far more interesting.

Another person encounters us, and encounter requires a position from which the encounter takes place.

There are things about myself I can never know in the same way my beloved does.

Not because I lack self-awareness.
Not because I have failed to understand myself deeply enough.

Simply because I cannot occupy the position from which that particular knowledge becomes possible.

I know what it feels like to laugh, but I cannot know what it is like to encounter my laughter from across a room.

I know what happens inside me while an idea is forming, but I cannot know what my thinking looks like from outside of myself.

I know my intentions, and at the same time, I cannot fully know their impact before they meet another person.

I know the history beneath a gesture while another person simply encounters the gesture.

I live among the scaffolding.

The hesitation.
The internal revisions.
The contradictions.
The memories attached to every movement.

Another person encounters what all of that becomes when it reaches the world.

These are not better and worse forms of knowledge, they are different coordinates. Their otherness does not merely prevent them from knowing us completely. Their otherness also makes another kind of knowing possible.

There are aspects of me that cannot become visible from inside my own position because I am the one occupying it.

There are aspects of another person that become available to me precisely because I am not them.

And this is exactly why intimacy produces depth. Not because two people eventually see from the same place but precisely because they do not.

There is something akin to parallax in it; two points of observation separated by distance allow depth to become perceptible.

If both our eyes occupied exactly the same position, something would disappear.

I think relationship works this way too.

The distance between who we are is not merely an obstacle intimacy must overcome.

The distance is what allows another dimension to appear.

This makes relationship irreplaceable because there are now two mysteries facing one another.

There is knowledge of me that intimacy cannot give you and there is knowledge of me that aloneness cannot give me.

There are things about myself only I can know because only I live inside myself and there are things about myself I cannot perceive because I cannot stand where another does.

Neither person possesses the whole, not even the self.

But this does not mean another person becomes the authority on who we are.

Another person’s perception does not outrank our own experience. Their interpretation of us remains an interpretation.

But sovereignty doesn’t require isolation.

I can remain the authority on my interior experience while admitting that I am not the only witness to my existence. Other people encounter consequences of my presence in their lives that I cannot experience.

Patterns I cannot observe from my vantage point.
Expressions I do not see.
Ways of being that become perceptible only once they enter relationship.

Intimacy asks us to hold both truths at once.

You cannot tell me what it is like to be me.
And I cannot tell you what it is like to encounter me.
And yet something emerges from the relational field between us.

This is where the ancient language of Sacred Union, Hieros Gamos, becomes useful to me.

Not as the fantasy of two people becoming perfect simply by being together.
Not as the disappearance of two human beings beneath some spiritually perfected union.

Almost the opposite.

The Untouchable Chamber leaves us with an I.
Parallax leaves us with a you.
And because neither can be eliminated, there must also remain a between.

Not an empty gap separating two people, but a place of encounter, a territory neither person possesses and both participate in creating.

I.
You.
Between.
And then, somehow, within.

This is where relationship becomes more than a philosophy of intimacy for me.

It becomes a form of spiritual embodiment.

Because what becomes available between two people does not necessarily remain solely between them.

Something can arrive through relationship and then become recognizable within.

How we love.
Trust.
Forgive.
Become erotically alive.
Devote ourselves.
Repair.
Ways of being we could not access alone can become available through encounter and, eventually, become ours to inhabit.

The other person does not put these things inside us. They are not the source of our capacity. They do not complete what was incomplete. But they participate in the conditions under which something already latent becomes available to experience.

This distinction matters to me because I do not believe another human being completes us. Nor do I believe that completeness makes relationship unnecessary.

Completeness is not the same thing as fullness of expression.

We already contain capacities that can only become lived experience through contact.

I cannot know myself as lover without someone to love.

I cannot know forgiveness in the abstract in the same way I can know forgiveness after someone has actually hurt me.

I cannot embody repair without rupture.

Trust requires relationship with something outside myself that I cannot entirely control.

Devotion requires relationship to something that is not merely an extension of my own will.

There are forms of myself that do not exist as lived experience until reality gives me something to encounter.

The other is not required to complete me.
But the other may be required for certain dimensions of what is already complete in me to become available to experience.
This is what makes relationship spiritually consequential to me.

The two remain two.
And something more becomes possible because they meet.

This is why, for me, the sacred does not only arrive in contemplation.

It arrives in the lover.
In the child.
In friendship.
In sexuality.
In disagreement.
In apology.
In being misunderstood and remaining.
In being seen from somewhere we cannot stand.
In a toddler scribbling on a pristine white wall while we chant Om with our eyes closed.
In the ordinary collision between the world as we imagine it and the world another consciousness is simultaneously creating.

Divinity does not merely wait beyond relationship to be discovered once we transcend it.

Divinity also arrives through relationship.

Through the space between.

And then more of our own Divinity can become available from within.

This is fundamentally what Hieros Gamos means to me: Divine participation.

The Untouchable Chamber establishes sovereignty.

Parallax establishes otherness.

Hieros Gamos establishes participation.

I remain myself.
You remain yourself.
And something else becomes possible between us.

And when what becomes available there is eventually recognized within me, I discover that it was not foreign to me after all.

Relationship did not give me something I lacked. It helped make something available that I could not yet experience from where I stood alone.

And through that encounter, I can return more fully to myself.

There will always be somewhere inside my beloved that belongs only to him.
There will always be somewhere inside me that belongs only to me.
There will always be somewhere he stands that I cannot stand.
Somewhere I stand that he cannot stand.

Through this inquiry I have learned that intimacy is not the defeat of those distances. On the contrary, intimacy becomes possible because of them.

Because what cannot be entered can still be affected.
What cannot be inhabited can still be loved.
What cannot be seen from here can become visible from somewhere else.

Something can arrive through the distance without abolishing it.

A word.
A hand.
A meal.
A life.

I love you.
Again.
I love you.
Again.
And again.

Not because the last time failed, but because there will always remain something of love that cannot be transferred.

And still, somehow, love keeps crossing the distance anyway.

I may not be fully available to you and I may not be fully available to myself. Neither of those facts is a failure of perception.

They are consequences of having a vantage point at all. The beauty I know from inside my chamber is mine to behold. The beauty another encounters from somewhere I cannot stand is available from their vantage point.

But through experiencing myself in relationship, I can become more available to myself.

What I could not see alone may become recognizable through encounter and, eventually, inhabitable from within.

Neither perspective contains the whole but neither needs to.

Every beholder stands somewhere.

And that is what I now believe the old saying has always been pointing toward.

Beauty is fundamentally in the eye of the beholder.

Invitation

If Love That Remains has opened something in you, stay close.

This inquiry began with love and led into sovereignty, otherness, intimacy, participation, and the strange territory between two people who can never fully inhabit one another and yet can profoundly affect what becomes possible within each other.

And somewhere inside that inquiry, another one began.

What happens when we begin to live this deliberately?

What happens when difference is not something love must overcome, but one of the conditions through which love reveals?

What happens when relationship itself becomes spiritual practice?

That is where the next inquiry begins.

Hieros Gamos

An exploration of sacred relationship not as fusion, perfection, or transcendence, but as participation.

Devotion without possession.
Intimacy without disappearance.
Sovereignty without isolation.
Union without collapse.

The body.
Eroticism.
Conflict.
Repair.
Difference.
Tuesday afternoon.

The ordinary places where one consciousness meets another and something becomes possible that neither could access alone.

Over the next series, I will be exploring Hieros Gamos not as something we achieve, but as something we practice.

A way of remaining ourselves deeply enough that the space between us can become alive.

Love That Remains brought us to the space between one another.

Hieros Gamos begins with what becomes possible when two people learn to consciously meet there without either one disappearing.

In embodied completion,
EagleSnake

When I began writing these essays, I believed I was writing about intimacy. At least, that was the word available to me at the time.

I did not have an agenda and I definitely was not trying to prove a philosophy or explain my framework.

I was simply following a question wherever reality insisted on taking it.

Each Movement answered a question and each answer quietly gave rise to a new question.

Looking back, I can see that no essay ever truly ended, rather each one became the threshold of the next.

What began as an inquiry into intimacy gradually revealed itself to be an inquiry into Love.

Not romantic love, or devotional love. Not even the love between a parent and a child.
Something far more fundamental.

As the inquiry deepened, I watched each essay dismantle a definition that had become too small for what was being revealed.

Intimacy first appeared as being seen by another, then it became the willingness to meet reality without standing between myself and what was happening.

By the end of the fifth movement, I believed I had reached the heart of the inquiry.

I was wrong, Reality handed me one more question.

This sixth movement changed more than any other essay in this collection. Each time it seemed complete, reality refused the conclusion.

Sometimes gently.
Sometimes violently.

The inquiry widened, the language changed, the center of gravity shifted, yet the essay remained.

Eventually I understood why.

It had never been searching for a better conclusion.

It had been searching for a better question, a more fundamental one. Because every genuine answer reorganizes the landscape from which the next question emerges.

And the questions this movement finally follows are deceptively simple.

The first asks:
What is Love?

The second asks:
How does an organism become increasingly available to inhabit Love?

The first inquiry is ontological while the second is developmental.

The first inquiry invites us into the nature of reality.
The second reveals the nature of the one who lives within it.

This movement follows both, because together they reveal something neither inquiry could reveal on its own.

ACT I

What Is Love?

There are moments in a life that reorganize everything that comes after them, not because they answer every question. But because they make certain questions impossible to continue being asked.

For years I believed the deepest truths would reveal themselves through transcendence.

Silence arrived before the light.
Not the absence of sound, rather the kind of silence from which music seems to emerge.

Then came the choir of cherubs.
Then the visions.

An angel of impossible proportion.
Nearly ten meters tall.
He never touched me.
He didn’t need to.
My consciousness rose toward him as though lifted by thought alone.

The body remained where it was.

I did not.

I arrived at The Gates and they opened to receive me.

As I entered.
Something began expanding.
Not around me.
Inside me.
My body felt as if it were growing from within.
The ache was extraordinary.
Not the ache of injury.
The ache of vastness.

As though every atom were slowly separating from every other atom while some invisible force barely held them together.

The dense weight of the body disappeared.
Bones disappeared.
Skin disappeared.
Edges disappeared.

I could no longer distinguish my chest from my hands.
My head from my feet.

There was only an immense field of something astonishingly light.

As though my entire body had become a single breath held together by the finest thread of magnetism.

The shaking began and it could not be stopped.
Not because I lacked discipline.
Because there was no one left to stop it.

My bracelet was strung with tiny bells.

They rang uncontrollably as my body trembled beneath the force of whatever was moving through it.

The sound became part of the experience itself.
Almost unbearably beautiful.

I tried to open my eyes.
The room was dark.
I closed them again.
The light was blinding.

Not because it shone upon me.
Because it was everything.

There was no source from which it radiated.
No direction.
No center.
Only light.
The totality of it.

My eyes could not remain closed.
They could not remain open.
It made no difference.
There was nowhere the light was not.

The point of reference I always called “me“ had disappeared.
There was still awareness.
There was still witnessing.

But the witness and the witnessed no longer occupied different places.

The distinction dissolved.
There was only immediacy.
Only impossible intimacy.

A love so immense that the organism could barely contain it.

Tears came.
Not because I was sad.

Because beauty had exceeded every structure through which I had ever known how to receive it.

Time disappeared.
Forever and an instant became indistinguishable.

When awareness of the room slowly returned, I was convinced an eternity had passed.
Very little time had.

My body insisted it needed to release.
I hurried to the bathroom.

Nothing happened.

It was as though every signal within the nervous system had briefly forgotten how it was meant to respond to stimuli.

Only later, sitting with my journal, did language begin emerging with a name.

The symbols that carried me there had been Christian.

Archangel Michael.
Saint Peter.
The Gates of Heaven.

But what waited beyond them belonged to no religion I had ever encountered.

I called it Source.
Because it felt like the place from which all ideas, even God, seemed to emerge.
And it was also the largest word available to me at the time.

Years passed.
My daughter died.
My husband died.
One evening this particular ceremony came to visit me.
What visited me had not changed.
The memory had not changed.
The experience had not changed.
The territory was exactly the same.

However after everything I’d lived I could no longer call that place Source.

I began calling it Love and this became the central mystery.

Why would reality rename the most transcendent experience of my life?

For a long time I assumed ceremony allowed access to the deepest truths.

Over time, I came to see that ceremony does not so much reveal the deepest truths as introduces us to them. It offers us a first encounter with a territory that is far too vast to inhabit all at once.

Reality, however, has extraordinary patience.

It keeps bringing us back into contact with the same truths, again and again, through joy and grief, through relationship and loss, through ordinary mornings and interrupted plans, until what once seemed extraordinary becomes available in ordinary life.

Reality behaves like fire.
It reveals.
Everything that is not,
simply burns away.

Reality brought me death.
Death removed the shape of Love I imagined the future would carry.

It removed the future I thought would hold us.
Plans.
Assumptions.
Identities.
Every ordinary form through which I had known our life together.

The bodies disappeared.
The voice.
The laughter.
The beautiful blue eyes.
The mornings we would have shared.
The future I had imagined.
Everything that should have carried Love disappeared.

And yet Love remained.

But for a long time, I struggled to name what, exactly, had remained.

I called it memory.
Meaning.
Devotion.
Grief.

But none of those words were large enough.

Memory fades. Meaning changes. Devotion fluctuates. Grief evolves.

Yet something had continued.

Quietly and persistently.

One evening I was dancing alone in my kitchen when grief returned without warning.

“I wish Nick were here to share this moment with me”.

The tears arrived before language. I knew his blue eyes did not remain. His hands did not remain. His laughter did not remain. His body did not remain.

Only Love remained, and slowly, I began to realize this was not only the love I felt for him. It was a Love that continued shaping the way I met the world long after my relationship with him had changed form.

And for a while I believed the teaching had been learning to let go.
The greatest lesson of my life.

I was wrong.
The teaching was learning to recognize what remains.

The way he taught me to laugh.
The way he taught me to sing to coffee.
The way he taught me to meet life.
The way he taught me to love.
The way he continues shaping the woman who remained after he was no longer in his body.

And as I began recognizing the architecture through which Love had remained.

I believed the fire had finished its work.
But reality wasn’t finished.

Grief revealed that Love survives death.
Reality was about to reveal that Love survives life.

My stomach dropped.

A cold sensation burned my throat as the words left my mouth.

“Do you want me to leave?”

That was the question I asked.

The real question was different.

Did I want to leave?

For the previous ten days I had been immersed in the kiln, watching myself burn away once again, or rather watching the parts I had mistaken for myself slowly loosen their grip.

The fire of Tsegyalgar West was relentless.

Humid days. Hot evenings. Endless dreams. Ceremonies. Long hours in the heat. Land clearings. Meditation in the Gompa. Ocean tides. Sleepless nights. Lovemaking. Silence. Arguments. Reconciliation. Green Tara. Quartz points. Akashic readings. A toddler who rarely left my side. A man who loved me deeply while I quietly lost access to the woman I believed myself to be.

Something in me was reorganizing faster than my nervous system could make sense of.

I arrived feeling expansive, welcomed by the feminine presence of the land, carried by visions, dreams, and an unmistakable sense that consciousness itself was inviting me into a larger participation with reality. For several days everything seemed illuminated. Symbols appeared everywhere. The land felt alive. Love poured through my body with an intensity I had rarely known outside of ceremony.

Then my bleed began.

Almost overnight my availability to reality increased dramatically.

Love remained.
So did fear.

Not fear that he did not love me.
Fear that I was not worthy to receive the love I knew to be there.
The more certain I became of Love, the less certain I became of my ability to remain open to it.

Every ordinary interaction seemed to arrive amplified.

A happenstance landed like rejection.
A practical comment became uncertainty.
A simple event felt like abandonment.
A passing remark echoed for hours.

Meanwhile my own body felt foreign to me. My face changed. My mind shifted. Time itself seemed strangely discontinuous, I would fall asleep and wake up inside a slightly different version of myself without remembering how I had arrived there. Over and over.

I wondered if I was losing something essential.
Instead, what I was losing was what no longer belonged, what was never Me.

The land slowly revealed something I had spent years overlooking.

I had become extraordinarily skilled at surviving.
Extraordinarily skilled at excavating meaning.
Extraordinarily skilled at carrying.
But I had not yet fully learned how to receive without having to earn it first.

The question that eventually emerged had almost nothing to do with whether he or even I wanted to stay.

It became:
Will I remain with myself as I learn to receive?

Because if I abandon myself…
Who is there to receive?

That realization changed the entire experience.

Not because the fire ended, but because I stopped trying to escape it.

Reality continued burning and it brought me into deeper intimacy with my beloved and myself.
Distance disappeared.
Fantasy disappeared.
Curation disappeared.
Idealization disappeared.
The polished versions of ourselves disappeared.

Relationship became ordinary.
Two human beings remained.
Sometimes exhausted.
Sometimes frightened.
Sometimes misunderstanding one another.
Sometimes failing.
Sometimes succeeding.

Conflict arrived.
Childcare arrived.
Disappointment arrived.
Reality arrived.

Love remained.

Again.
And again.
And again.

Eventually, something else became impossible to ignore.

Love is not proven by favorable conditions.
Love is revealed by their removal.

And I was reminded once again that fire does not create.
Fire reveals.

Reality had answered the first question.
Love is the organizing principle.

The forms change.
The organization remains.

The answer to the first inquiry immediately gave rise to the second.

Because if Love is the organizing principle…
If we already live within Love...

What then allows an organism to inhabit it?

ACT II

Identification

There is a difference between being loved and being able to receive Love.
These are not the same developmental achievement.

Love may already be present.
The organism may still be unable to receive it.

Love may already be arriving.
The organism may still be organized around conditions that prevent it from receiving what is being given.

Love organizes reality.
The organism, however, may still organize itself around something else.

For a long time I believed people needed healing in order to become available to Love.
Now I believe something even more fundamental.
What people need is to learn how to inhabit a reality already organized by Love.

But just as many others’, my life had organized itself around a hidden equation.

I deserve to be Loved because I am...

Useful.
Helpful.
Strong.
Aware.
Capable.

Each answer filled the blank.
None questioned the equation.

And the equation interfered with my ability to receive Love unconditionally.

This is how Love can be everywhere and remain inaccessible.

At Tsegyalgar the equation became visible.

Not as another belief.
Not as another wound.
Not as another insight.
As an identity.

The woman who believed she had to earn Love.
The one who believed she had to explain her fears.
That she had to struggle in order to deserve what had already been given.
And the moment I stopped identifying with her...

The recognition arrived.
The words arrived.
The body reorganized.
My stomach released.
My chest opened.

Nothing outside me changed.
Everything inside me began reorganizing.
Recognition alone had not reorganized my life.

My life began to reorganize because my body finally became capable of carrying what realization had revealed.

Only then could I see what had been happening all along.

My bleed was already doing what my mind had not yet understood.
In its own intelligence, my womb released what I could no longer carry.
The land amplified the fire.

There is a difference between recognizing Love and inhabiting Love.
The first changed my understanding.
The second changed my life.

Reality had not changed.
Love had not changed.

My organism had.

And when peace arrived, it was not because reality became easier.

Peace arrived because the organism no longer required reality to become something else before participating in it.

This, I have come to believe, is Liberation.
Not freedom from experience.
Freedom within experience.

The gradual increase in our availability to inhabit the Love that has always been here.

I had spent years believing Love needed to find me.
Reality revealed that Love had been here all along.
I simply had not yet become available enough to perceive and inhabit it.

The question had changed.
It was no longer whether Love was present.
It was whether I could remain available enough to fully inhabit the reality already organized by it.

That is the work.

Everything else follows.

INVITATION

Entering the Field

If Love is the organizing principle of reality, and availability is what allows us to increasingly inhabit that reality, then the work has never been to become more lovable. Nor has it been to become more healed or more spiritual.

The work has always been to become more available.

Not available in the sense of endless openness.
Not available at the cost of discernment, boundary, rhythm, or self.

Available as presence.
Available as the capacity to remain inside our own experience while reality reveals what is here.

In reality, we do not seek Love.
For in Love we live, move, and have our being.

Hence, the invitation is not to seek.
It is to become available.

This is the field I tend.
Not an idea I teach or a framework I explain. It is a living organism: something we enter, something that responds, something that becomes perceptible through participation.

Inside it, insight is not the destination.
It is the beginning of relationship.

We listen for what is already organizing beneath the language. We notice what the body can recognize, what the organism can carry, and what remains unavailable even after the mind understands. We do not force experience to yield an answer before it is ready. We create the conditions in which what is already known can become recognizable, inhabitable, and available in ordinary life.

The field is not separate from reality.
It is a way of entering reality.

A way of reducing the interference that prevents us from recognizing what is already here.

A way of remaining present long enough for contact to deepen, for availability to increase, for capacity to emerge, and for liberation to begin.

You do not need to arrive certain.
You do not need to become more spiritual before entering.
You arrive as you are.

With the grief that is there.
With the desire that is there.
With the uncertainty, beauty, resistance, longing, and Love that are already there.

Nothing must be exiled before reality can be met.

The question is not whether you can transcend your experience.
The question is whether you can become available enough to fully inhabit it.

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If something in these essays has felt less like information and more like recognition, perhaps you have already touched the field.

This is your invitation to enter it deliberately.

Not to find Love.

To discover what becomes possible when nothing stands between you and the Love already organizing your life.

With embodied presence,

EagleSnake

Sunlight entered through the open curtains beside the hospital bed that had transformed the living room over the previous days.

Most of the house was still asleep. His parents were in their room and my nieces were upstairs with our newborn daughter.

Nick had been trying to sit up when I woke up from the makeshift bed at his feet and rushed to help him.

He lay on his left side because the drainage emerging from his back made every other position painful. As he extended his right arm toward me, I pulled gently, helping him leverage himself upright.

The movement seemed impossibly difficult. A month earlier he had been a strong man and now the effort of sitting up required assistance.

When he settled himself, he asked me to sit beside him, then took both of my hands into his.

His skin felt rough against mine, cold, thickened by years of working the land.

He held my hands quietly for a moment before looking directly into my eyes.

The cancer had taken nearly everything, his face had become impossibly thin. The bones beneath his skin stood in sharp relief.

His beautiful blue eyes seemed larger now, peering outward from a face no longer able to conceal the architecture beneath it.

For what felt like a very long moment he simply looked at me, then he closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath.

Finally, with his eyes still closed, he said:

“I am ready.”

My chest tightened.
Not in panic.
Not in grief.
Something far stranger.

The room seemed to narrow around the words.

No tears came.
They did not even attempt to come.

In their stead, I felt a strength rise inside me.
Not from above.
Not from below.
But from within.

As though invisible rods had been deployed along my spine, holding me upright.
Steady.
Immovable.
Available.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

The question emerged almost casually.
As though we were discussing the color of a car rather than the end of a life.

He opened his eyes.
“Yes.”

I nodded.
The answer did not surprise me.
Then he spoke the last words I ever expected to hear from him.

“Would you be my doula?”

For a moment, the room disappeared.
I knew exactly what he was asking.
And I knew exactly what it would require.

The wife would have to step aside.
The woman who loved him beyond measure would have to wait to enter the scene.

The man I loved did not need a wife at that moment.

He needed a doula.

Someone willing to accompany him to the edge.
Someone willing to lend strength when his own body no longer could.
Someone willing to walk beside him for as long as the path remained shared.

“Yes,” I solemnly replied.
Understanding what was being asked of me.

He nodded.
Then, with the same quiet certainty that had marked the entire conversation, he said:
“Assemble the family. I will announce it to them.”

That evening we held a ceremony. Not one intended to help him fight, we had held many of those before.

This one was different.

This one was intended to help him meet what was coming, and just after midnight, the ceremony ended.

One by one, everyone drifted upstairs and the house grew quiet again.

Luzy slept heavily against my chest, safe in my left arm.
Our daughter was forty-six days old.

The room was almost completely dark except for a couple of silhouettes. A woman knelt beside Nick.

I watched quietly from the floor at the feet of his bed.

I remember becoming intensely aware of every movement.
Every gesture.
Every shift in the room.

Time itself seemed to loosen its grip.
Every moment felt significant.
Every gesture seemed illuminated from within.

The boundaries felt thinner.
The filters fewer.
Reality arrived with unusual immediacy.

And at that precise moment in the dark, I was not sitting as a practitioner or a teacher.
Not even as a doula.

I was simply a woman holding her newborn while witnessing another human being meet what was coming.
Nothing stood between me and what was happening.

The woman kneeling beside him offered her hand.
Nick lifted it toward his lips and kissed it softly, reverently.
As though greeting someone he recognized.

“I welcome you,” he said.

I could barely see them, let alone hear them, but the moment he spoke, I knew.
Not intellectually.
Immediately.

He was welcoming what I couldn’t see.

I reached for his foot and began rubbing it gently with my right hand while Luzy remained asleep in my left arm.

Life in my lap.
Death at his bedside.

And somewhere between them was me, witnessing a moment far larger than I knew.

For years I believed intimacy was primarily relational, something that happened between people.

A husband and wife.
A parent and child.
A friend and another.

Thinking about being beside Nick that night, I have begun suspecting something else.

It may be that this is why the moment has remained with me.

Because the intimacy that remains most vivid in my memory was not occurring between him and me.

It was occurring between him and reality.

And I am beginning to suspect that intimacy is not fundamentally about another person at all.

Perhaps intimacy is the degree to which nothing stands between us and reality.

For a long time, I assumed the deepest fear surrounding death was the unknown.

That what frightened us most was uncertainty and the inability to know what happens next. But the more I sit with that contemplation, the more it has begun to feel incomplete.

Because standing at the gates of death does something unusual.

It removes many of the places we hide.

Before the gates, there is still room for negotiation, miracles may happen and recovery may come. The future remains unwritten.

Beyond the gates, mystery begins.
But standing at the threshold is different.

At the threshold there is nowhere left to stand except in relationship with reality itself.

The gates cannot be unopened.

The future that was imagined cannot be restored. The possibility of life continuing as it once was has quietly disappeared.

Reality stands before us exactly as it is.

Loud.
Raw.
Impossibly true.

And a question begins to emerge.

What does reality ask of us when there is nowhere left to hide?

The more I contemplate that night, the less interested I become in death itself.

The mystery that continues to hold my attention is Participation.

What allows a human being to remain in relationship with reality when reality refuses their deepest preference?

Nick wanted to live, he loved life, he loved our daughter, he loved me, he loved the future that was being taken from him. His desire to live was immense.

And yet his desire could not conquer death.

What moves me now is not that he died.
What moves me is how he met what could not be changed.

He did not collapse.
He did not pretend.
He did not abandon himself.

He yielded.

Not as resignation.
Not as defeat.

As Participation.

There is a form of courage that receives enormous attention.
The courage to win, to overcome, to triumph.

But the courage I witnessed that dark night was quieter.

A man looking directly at what could not be conquered and remaining himself.

Dignity remained.
Humor remained.
Presence remained.
Courage remained.

Love remained.

Months later, I began noticing something that had been invisible while I was inside the experience.

Not because I didn’t know it, but because I couldn’t access it.

My husband was dying.
Then he was dead.
I had a newborn daughter.
No clear future.
Everything in me was organized around survival.

Looking back, I can see that my Aperture had narrowed considerably.

Most of the field had disappeared.
My own experience occupied nearly all of it.

What I understood much later was that there was something I wanted from the people around me that they could never actually give.

At Nick’s bedside, I had accompanied him to the edge. And for months afterwards others accompanied me to mine.

Different thresholds.
The same reality.
No one could cross for either of us.
And yet everyone kept reaching.

For years I assumed intimacy meant reducing the distance between people.

Now I am less certain.

I am beginning to wonder if intimacy is not the disappearance of distance at all.

What if intimacy is what remains when two people come as close as humanly possible to one another and discover that a threshold still exists?

A place no one can cross for us.
A chamber of experience that remains irreducibly our own.

Not because love failed, but because consciousness itself is first-person.

Every relationship eventually reaches a threshold beyond which it cannot accompany us because experience is lived from within.

The beloved reaches the gate.
The child reaches the gate.
The teacher reaches the gate.
The friend reaches the gate.
And still there remains a chamber no one enters for us.

And yet.

Despite knowing we cannot become one another.
Despite knowing we cannot carry each other’s experience.
Despite knowing we cannot cross each other’s thresholds.

We continue reaching for one another anyway.

We sit beside hospital beds.
We hold hands.
We make soup.
We answer late-night phone calls.
We remain.

Not because we can become the other person.
But because we cannot.

And so perhaps love is not the elimination of that threshold.
Perhaps love is the willingness to remain in contact with another person all the way to its edge.

I still do not fully understand what I witnessed that night.
Some thresholds can only be known from within.

What I know is simpler.

I watched a dying man welcome what he could not change.
I watched him remain in relationship with reality when reality offered no path backward.

And in doing so, he revealed what I am still trying to understand.

Intimacy may not be primarily about closeness to another person.
It may be the degree to which nothing stands between us and reality.

And perhaps the gates of death reveal this so clearly because there is nowhere left to hide.

A Quiet Invitation

Most of us spend our lives trying to create distance from what is difficult.

From fear.
From grief.
From uncertainty.
From the realities we would rather not face.

Yet life has a way of bringing each of us to thresholds we did not choose.

Moments where familiar certainties fall away.
Moments where reality asks something of us.

If you find yourself standing at such a threshold, you do not need answers before you begin.

You do not need certainty.
You do not need a particular spiritual framework.

Only a willingness to remain in contact with what is already here.

If these reflections touch something you have sensed but struggled to name, I invite you into deeper conversation.

Not a space designed to eliminate uncertainty.
A space designed to increase contact.

With reality.
With yourself.
With what remains available when there is nowhere left to hide.

With embodied presence,

EagleSnake

Above me, the stars stretched endlessly into the darkness.

I was eight years old, the Sierra unfolded in every direction.

No distractions. Just trees, firelight, silence, and a vastness that felt almost alive.

Night after night I would curl beneath that blanket and stare upward until something inside me began to ache.

Not in pain.
In recognition.

An unbearable tenderness toward something I could not name.

For most of my life, I thought I was seeking intimacy.

I wanted deep conversations, meaningful relationships, the feeling of being seen and above all, the feeling of being deeply met.

I wanted the kind of connection that allows two people to sit together and feel, if only for a moment, that neither is alone.

For years I assumed this longing belonged to relationship, it seemed obvious. If intimacy was what I craved, then another person must be the answer.

Yet over time, something about that explanation began to feel incomplete.

Because the longing is older than any relationship I had ever known.

Long before I fell in love.
Long before marriage or grief.
Long before I had any language for it.

The longing was already there, but at the time, I simply assumed I was a sensitive child.

Years later I began calling it connection, then, intimacy.

Now I am no longer certain whether either word is precise, because when I follow the thread honestly, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

The people change but the longing remains.
The relationships change but the longing remains.
The circumstances change but the longing remains.

Again and again, different faces have appeared. Different loves and different seasons of life. Yet beneath all of them I have encountered the same movement, the same pull.

The same ache toward something larger than myself and eventually I had to consider a possibility that I had spent years overlooking.

What if I was never seeking another person?
What if I was seeking a return to something I couldn’t even name?

Something that felt impossibly familiar and impossibly distant at the same time.

Not union with another.
Simply, union.

The kind that sits quietly beneath ordinary experience.
The kind that seems to dissolve a distance I could sense, but never name.

One morning, that possibility became impossible to ignore.

As I awoke before sunrise, I immediately felt immersed in love.

Not love for anyone, not even love from anyone in particular.

Simply love.

Before thought.
Before sensation.
Before narrative.

An enveloping warmth so complete that it felt as though I had awakened inside a current that had been patiently waiting to be noticed.

As I lay in bed, faces began appearing in my awareness.

People who loved me.
People who cared for me.
People whose lives had touched mine.

But something about the experience felt strangely poignant.

Love appeared first, the people appeared afterward.
The experience arrived before I could name its source.

Days later, as if life were handing me clues, another observation began quietly challenging my assumptions.

For years I believed fear and love were opposites.

Yet on this particularly quiet day I found myself capable of feeling both at the same time.

Sadness appeared.
Fear appeared.
And somehow love remained present and available in my field of awareness.

The pattern was becoming difficult to ignore.

Until then, I had unconsciously assumed that love began with people.

That they either created it or awakened it in those around them.
That love originated in relationship.
That a loved one was the source.

Yet the more closely I looked, the less complete my old explanations began to feel.

What if relationship does not create love?
What if relationship merely reveals it?

The question continued widening.

Because once the possibility appeared, it began showing up everywhere.

I loved Nick.
Then Nick died.
But love remained.

I love many people.
Yet somehow that love does not remain confined to them.
It spills into strangers.
Into children.
Into grief.
Into ordinary moments that have nothing to do with romance.

Which left me with another uncomfortable question.

Does love belong to the beloved?
Or is the beloved a doorway?

Perhaps this is the hidden purpose of relationship.
Not possession.
Not completion.
Not even companionship.

Perhaps relationship is one of the ways reality teaches us to recognize love.

Not merely in another person.
But everywhere.

My beloved once wrote:

“Let the love I feel for you show me how to love a homeless person.”

The sentence made me pause, not because it was poetic.
But because it was true.

And now it was calling me back, as something in me immediately recognized it.

Because love for one person had somehow become training for a larger capacity for love.

The relationship had become a doorway.
The beloved had become a teacher.
The circle had widened.

And perhaps what we discover through one person was never meant to remain limited to that one person.

I do not know exactly what love is, that question doesn’t belong here.

What I know is far more simple.

That the longing I once projected onto relationship existed long before relationship ever arrived.
The vastness I sought through another was already waiting beneath the stars.
And the love I believed belonged to particular people seems increasingly difficult to contain within any single form.

And perhaps intimacy works the same way.
Perhaps intimacy is not the destination, perhaps intimacy is the doorway.
Perhaps intimacy was never teaching me who to love but teaching me how to recognize what had been there all along.

A Quiet Invitation

Not every longing is asking to be fulfilled.
Some longings seem to deepen no matter how many times they are answered.

They move through relationships.
Through accomplishments.
Through identities.
Through seasons of life.

And yet something remains.

Not because something is missing.
But because the longing may have been pointing somewhere else all along.

If these reflections feel familiar, if they touch something you have sensed but struggled to name, I invite you into deeper contact with the work.

I am beginning to open small spaces for people standing inside similar questions.

Not spaces designed to provide answers.
Spaces designed to increase contact.

With yourself.
With reality.
With the quiet movements that often become obscured beneath explanation.

No particular belief is required.
No spiritual framework is necessary.

Only a willingness to remain present to what is already here.

If the work is already speaking to something in you, you are welcome to reach out.

With embodied presence,
Liz EagleSnake

Not ecstasy.
Not transcendence.
Not revelation.

Something quieter.

The way in which a knot softens when tension is no longer being applied.

My heart seemed to expand, bridging the physical distance between us.

We sat in silence for a moment.

Then he smiled.

“What do you think happened?”

I sat with the question.

Because while nothing external had changed.

Something had happened and something felt different.

“I think we’re closer.” I replied.

“Me too.” He paused.

“Like whatever was removed had been quietly sitting between us.”

In the previous Movement: Relationship as revelation, the inquiry shifted away from the content of my thoughts and toward the mechanisms that organized them.

What interested me was no longer the specific story I was telling myself.

It was the process by which experience became organized into a story in the first place.

I began noticing how perception, interpretation, identity, memory, expectation, and protection could quietly shape reality before reality had fully arrived.

And as that became visible, something else became apparent.

Understanding the mechanism did not necessarily free me from it.

I could recognize a pattern and still find myself living inside it.
I could understand interference and still interfere.
I could see what was happening and still lose access to that knowing under stress.

This left me with a different question.

Why?

For weeks I had been focused on the thread.

The protection.
The realization.
The interference.

But now I could finally pay attention to what happened after it was gone.

Not the realization itself.
The consequence: the increased intimacy.

For many years I had been making a mistake.

I had thought realization, insight or understanding was the goal.

But when I was faced with the impossible truth that death handed me, understanding did not necessarily change my life.

My realizations were genuine.
Many insights true.
My awakenings had been authentic.

Yet somehow my ability to live from those realizations collapsed after the most catastrophic event of my life, and my inquiry began through the missing question.

Not: How do we realize something?
But: How does realization remain available long enough to become inhabitable, even under pressure?

And what eventually emerged was not an answer, but an architecture:

Knowledge understands.
Knowledge can study, explain or describe a teaching.

Realization recognizes.
What was previously understood through knowledge becomes directly recognizable through experience.

Somatic Contact touches.
For a moment, the truth becomes directly accessible through sensation, the realization becomes available inside the organism.

Stabilization sustains.
The realization stays available for the organism through ordinary life long enough for reorganization to begin.

Reorganization adapts.
Neuronal patterns, perceptions, habits and reactions begin rearranging themselves around the realization.

Capacity emerges.
The organism becomes increasingly capable of remaining with the realization under changing conditions.

And as capacity increases, continuity becomes possible.

Not because truth became stronger.
Because the organism became capable of carrying it.

In simpler words:
The realization was genuine, my organism could not yet carry it.

This explains why insight does not automatically become capacity.
A person may genuinely realize they are loved and still lose access to that knowing when friction arises.

The realization is not the problem.
The capacity is.

And perhaps love follows the same developmental arc.

Being loved is not the same as receiving love.
Receiving love is not the same as carrying love.
Carrying love is not the same as remaining available to love as conditions change.

This is where I began noticing something surprising.

Many of the moments that increased intimacy were not moments of agreement.

They were moments of contact, where reality remained available despite discomfort, despite misunderstanding, despite fear, despite uncertainty.

Capacity may not be the ability to avoid disruption.
Capacity may be the ability to remain in relationship with reality as disruption occurs.

Most people already understand this intuitively in relation to the body.

A single workout does not make a person stronger. Strength emerges through adaptation.

A stimulus is applied - the organism responds - recovery occurs - capacity increases.

The weight of a dumbbell itself is not what produces growth.
Adaptation does.

The nervous system appears to operate in a remarkably similar way.

Conflict does not automatically increase capacity.
Neither does grief, intimacy or realization.

A stimulus is received.
The organism adapts.
Capacity increases.

This is why two people can encounter the same teaching, the same ceremony, the same relationship, or the same loss and emerge with profoundly different outcomes. The stimulus may be identical, but the adaptation is not.

Then perhaps capacity is not a trait, perhaps capacity is an adaptive response. The organism learning, over time, how to remain in relationship with increasingly intense experiences.

Likewise the first time a disagreement disrupts the field, it can take days to find our way back to center.

Not because the love disappeared.
Not because the realization disappeared.
Not because the contact disappeared.

But because the organism could not yet carry them under load.

Another time, the return happens more quickly.
The third time, faster still.

Eventually something surprising becomes noticeable.

The disagreements themselves may not be changing very much.
The nervous system is.

The activation still appeared.
The misunderstanding still appeared.
The discomfort still appeared.

But the return became easier, faster, more available.
The realization remained available for longer.

Capacity is not the absence of activation.
Capacity is not learning how to eliminate every stimulus.
Capacity is learning that not every stimulus requires that we organize around it.
Capacity is the ability to return to center again and again.
Until returning becomes more natural than leaving.

A realization can arrive overnight.
A thread can be severed in a moment.
A truth can become visible instantly, but capacity unfolds differently.

The first return is difficult.
The second less so.
The third begins to feel familiar.

Eventually what once required enormous effort becomes natural.

Not because reality became easier.
Not because the realization changed.

But because the organism adapted.

A quiet invitation

If something in this essay feels familiar, if it feels like a bridge you are already standing on, I invite you into deeper contact with the work.

I am now opening a small group space.

The work is still revealing its deeper architecture. The space itself will be simple.

A held field.
Silence.
Presence.
Sound.
Conversation when needed.
Periods of non-interference.

An opportunity to remain in contact with yourself without immediately rushing toward explanation, resolution, or reconstruction.

This is not therapy.
Not performance.
Not optimization.
And not a promise of transformation.

It is simply an invitation into proximity with the field itself.

A space where nothing false needs to be maintained.
And nothing true needs to emerge before its time.

If the work is already speaking to something in you, you are welcome to reach out.

With continuity,
Liz EagleSnake

“I said what?”

The question stopped me in my tracks, I had replayed the interaction innumerable times.

Turning it over from every angle, examining the wording, the implications, the meaning, the feeling it had left behind.

I knew exactly which sentence had hurt and what I thought it had meant, above all I knew exactly why it had affected me so deeply.

So when he asked me with genuine confusion, something inside me paused.

Not because he was denying the conversation, not because I feared my experience wasn’t real.

But because his confusion was genuine.

For days I had been living inside the consequences of something that, from his perspective, had never happened in the way I experienced it.

The event occurred.
The conversation happened.
The feelings were real.

Yet somehow we had been living inside entirely different versions of the same conversation.

And the more I sat with that realization, the more interested I became in a completely different question.

How does the same moment become two different realities?

In the previous Movement: Chinnamasta severs a thread, the thread that was severed was the need to continuously translate.

To explain.
To clarify.
To help another person understand what I was seeing.

What interested me afterward was not the severing itself, it was the question the severing left behind.

What was the nature of that need?

Because what stayed with me was not the story I had constructed, it was the fact that there was a story at all, and I had been relating to that story as if it were reality.

And once that became apparent, a different question emerged: How does interpretation happen in the first place?

For a long time I thought intimacy was the deepest thing relationship offered.

I no longer believe that, or perhaps more accurately, I no longer think intimacy means what I thought it meant.

Most conversations about intimacy focus on being seen.
Being understood.
Being accepted.
Being loved despite what another person discovers about us.

All of which matters, of course.

But over the last few months another question has been quietly following me, a question I have not been able to shake.

What if the thing preventing intimacy is not whether I am seen, but whether I am present at all?

Not present to another person.
Present to my own experience.

Because before another person can meet me, I must already be there.

That’s why I think relationship equals revelation.

Relationship reveals what we love, what we fear, what we protect, what we avoid, what we assume, what we worship, what we believe.

And perhaps most importantly, it reveals how we organize reality:
through presence or through story.

It reveals the invisible architecture through which reality becomes a different experience for each of us.

And this is what I have become increasingly interested in.
What I’ve called self-referential interference.

The tendency to encounter ourselves before we encounter what is actually happening.

What does this mean about me?
Am I safe?
Am I loved?
Am I enough?
What should I do?
How should I respond?

Most people assume these questions create closeness to experience.

I am no longer convinced. Sometimes they can create distance, not from another person, but from reality itself.

Because attention becomes occupied by interpretation before contact has fully occurred, and relationship exposes this relentlessly. Because it illuminates what is already there.

And perhaps this is why relationship can feel so confronting.

Not because relating to another person is inherently difficult, but because another person makes visible what would otherwise remain hidden.

What we discover in relationship is not only the other person, we discover the structures through which we experience them.

And through them, ultimately, reality.

Again and again.

Through attraction.
Through conflict.
Through longing.
Through misunderstanding.
Through devotion.
Through love.

And perhaps this is where my understanding of intimacy began to change.

Because what relationship was revealing was not only another person, but the way I was meeting life itself.

What if intimacy has less to do with being seen and more to do with contact?

Which brings me back to what kept getting in the way.

Self-referential interference doesn’t look like avoidance in the traditional sense.

People are there, they show up, they speak, they engage, they connect. But something is slightly off.

Not broken. Not dramatic.

Just… slightly filtered.

It’s not that people are absent, it’s that part of their attention is continuously occupied.

And that changes everything.

Instead of consciousness meeting experience directly, there is a middle layer.

A constant, low-level orientation toward:

What does this mean about me?
How am I coming across?
What should I say next?
Is this safe?
Am I too much?
Not enough?

Even when silent, it runs in the background.

Not always as words. Sometimes as tension, as a pause that doesn’t belong, as a quiet disconnection from the immediacy of the moment.

And this is where the feeling of disconnection first begins.

Not between people, but within the person themselves, because intimacy does not begin between two people.

It begins when nothing stands between you and reality.

When you are not monitoring, adjusting, or positioning yourself inside your own life.

When you’re simply… there.

In my experience most people don’t lack desire for intimacy, what they lack is access to undivided presence.

And so we often mistake intimacy for:

negotiated closeness
mutual regulation
shared vulnerability
emotional exchange

All of which can be beautiful, all of which may accompany intimacy.

But none of which are intimacy in its pure form, because intimacy does not require effort, it requires the absence of interference.

And this is where it becomes confronting, because self-referential interference is not something we consciously choose.

It’s patterned, protective. Forged through years of needing to orient, adapt, survive, belong.

And what it calls for is not condemnation, only the willingness to notice.

When the interference is seen clearly, without trying to change it, something begins to soften.

The referencing loosens, the internal distance collapses.

And what remains is something very simple.

Contact.

Not intense, overwhelming, or performative.

Just direct, unmediated and alive in a way that does not need to prove itself.

And perhaps this is what intimacy feels like when nothing is standing in front of it.

I have had the opportunity to touch this kind of presence before.

Not in isolation, but in relationship.

Where nothing was being managed internally.

No self was being constructed in real time, and yet I was fully there with the other.

Without leaving myself, without inserting myself between me and the moment.

That is intimacy, not something created, but something revealed when what interferes is no longer running the show.

And maybe this is why it feels so rare.

Not because it is hard to reach, but because we rarely are not interfering.

So the question shifts.

From: Why does intimacy sometimes feel just out of reach?

To: What is it in me that is constantly placing me at a distance from reality?

And what happens when, even for a moment, that stops?

Over time I have come to think of these as two modes of experience.

The first: self-referential interference.
The second: non-referential coherence.

Some traditions call it abidance, others call it presence, union, or non-dual awareness.

The first organizes experience through the self.
The second allows experience to be met before it becomes organized into meaning.

Not because the self disappears, or because identity dissolves, but because experience no longer requires constant interpretation in order to be touched.

The moment arrives and is met.
The person arrives and is met.
Reality arrives and is met.

Without the immediate need to manage what is happening.

This does not feel like detachment, if anything, it feels like greater intimacy.
Not intimacy with another person, intimacy with oneself as a pathway to intimacy with reality.

And while the traditions have described this state in many ways, what interests me is not the terminology, what interests me is that relationship appears capable of revealing both its absence and its possibility.

Because relationship continuously exposes the places where consciousness contracts around identity.

And occasionally, through love, grief, beauty, devotion, or simple presence, those contractions soften.

For a moment the self is no longer standing between awareness and experience, and reality becomes startlingly close.

The irony is that it often arrives dressed as something completely ordinary, not because nothing is happening, but because so little stands between awareness and experience.

It does not feel extraordinary from within itself, but there is a characteristic spaciousness to it.

As though awareness has become wider than the thoughts attempting to describe what is happening.

More room around experience.
More room around thought.
More room around oneself.

It is only later, in reflection, that one realizes how extraordinary the experience was, because for a moment there was no distance between awareness and experience.

The sound of rain arriving without immediately becoming a memory.
A conversation unfolding without preparing the next sentence.
A moment of grief that is allowed to be grief before it becomes a story.
The face of a loved one appearing before the mind begins comparing, evaluating, remembering, anticipating.

Reality simply arrives with less of me standing in front of it.

And reality becomes unobstructed.
Not enhanced, not transcended, not improved.
Unobstructed… allowing for contact before interpretation.

Because thought is no longer standing between consciousness and experience.

There is less management.
Less positioning.
Less negotiation.
Less performance.

Reality simply arrives and finds awareness already paying attention.

And perhaps this is all non-referential coherence really is. A temporary absence of interference, a moment in which experience is allowed to be itself before it becomes about us.

Ultimately, one could say that non-referential coherence is not the absence of self. But the absence of self-preoccupation.

Therefore:

I no longer think intimacy is something we create.
I think intimacy is what remains when interference softens.

When explanation pauses and certainty relaxes.
When reality is allowed to arrive before it is interpreted.
When obsession with the self drops.

Not creating perfect contact or permanent contact.
Just contact…

Direct.
Immediate.
Alive.

And perhaps this is why relationship matters so much.

Not because it completes us.
Not because it validates us.
Not because it saves us.

But because relationship is not merely something we experience.

It is one of the ways reality reveals itself.

Relationship is the teacher.
Presence is the syllabus.
Truth is what emerges.
And Love… Well, Love is what remains.

An invitation

If anything in this essay feels familiar, I would like you to sit with a few questions:

Where in my life am I relating to an interpretation rather than reality?

What forms of protection have become so familiar that I mistake them for myself?

What becomes significant to the people I love that I myself rarely notice?

What experiences continue asking for my attention?

What truths keep returning because they are asking to be seen?

And perhaps most importantly:

What remains when I stop defending who I have been long enough to discover who I am becoming?

And if you are ready to deepen in your experience of love, I invite you into our collective field, these are the questions that gave birth to Love That Remains.

Not a space devoted to fixing relationships.

A field devoted to revelation through relationship.
A place where curiosity becomes more important than certainty.
A place where truth is given enough room to emerge in its own time.

And where together we discover what remains.

In loving presence,
Liz EagleSnake

“You are identifying, my Love.”

And while something in me knew he might be right, I hated it.

So at the time, I disagreed.

Or perhaps more accurately, I defended.

I explained.

I refined.

I contextualized.

I generated increasingly sophisticated reasons why the situation was more nuanced than he understood.

The conversation itself was not particularly dramatic.

There was no rupture, no crisis.

No declaration that changed the course of our relationship.

And yet his words followed me.

For days.

I replayed the conversation from every possible angle.

I examined my reactions. I examined his reactions.

I elaborated on the language, the context, the implications, the subtle layers beneath the obvious layers.

I called it inquiry.

Looking back, much of it was interference.

At the time I couldn’t see that.

I only knew something in me had become trapped.

And no amount of understanding seemed capable of setting it free.

Normally, inquiry creates inner space.
Normally, the act of looking allows something to loosen.
Normally, if I stay with an experience long enough, the architecture reveals itself.

This time it didn’t.

Every answer generated three new questions.
Every insight produced another layer.
Every explanation created another explanation.

I was moving no doubt, but I was not getting anywhere.

Later that evening my soul felt cold.

Distant.

Lonely.

I sat in the darkness of my living room replaying every word, every exasperated sigh, every pause.

The pauses were the worst of all.

They kept pushing us farther and farther away.

We had been going back and forth for days, and I knew something in me needed to give way.

I did not know what.

That is the part that still astonishes me.

I did not know what.

I only knew that something ancient had become visible at the edge of my awareness.

Not visible enough to name and certainly not visible enough to understand.

But visible enough to feel it.

The endless elaboration.
The need to explain.
The compulsion to make sense of everything.

The feeling that I needed to be translated before I could be fully received.

I could tell the mechanism was old.
I could tell it was protecting me.
But above all, I could tell it was not serving me.

And while I did not yet know what it was protecting, I knew it was there.

So that night I did what I do best, I called a Higher intelligence that could help me reorganize. My intuition told me to call upon Chinnamasta.

The goddess who severs when severing is the only solution.

Not because I knew what needed to be cut, but because I knew something did.

The following morning I bought a red jewel.

I threaded it myself and consecrated it at Her feet.

I placed it around my neck and invited Her into my field.

That day I chanted Her mantra.
I danced.
I prayed.
And above all, I listened.

Again and again I returned to Her.

Not asking for answers, only asking for truth.

The next morning I woke with a strange clarity.

Not an answer.
Space.
Something had dislodged.

I could see it as clearly as a scaffold dismantled overnight and how for years I had mistaken it for part of the structure.

Now I could see it was only ever supposed to have been temporary.

A framework.
A support.

A way of holding something together, but it never dismantled because something in me had never felt safe enough to do so. And as the scaffolding came down, it tore scabs with it.

The grief did not delay its arrival.

Not grief for those I buried.
Not grief for a particular event.
A deeper grief.

A grief that felt strangely personal… as though I were mourning a version of myself.

Or perhaps a way I had learned to survive.

That same morning I dreamed I was wearing orange robes.

Not as a Buddhist.

As an initiate.

The feeling inside the dream was unmistakable.

Presence.

Awareness.

A direct contact with experience that existed prior to interpretation.

For a moment I wondered whether the structure Chinnamasta had removed had been keeping me slightly outside of life.

Not disconnected.
Not numb.
Just one step removed.

Experience - Meaning.

Experience - Explanation.

Experience - Understanding.

As though my awareness moved so quickly toward interpretation that it never fully rested inside the experience itself.

And while this insight felt true, it was incomplete.
The grief lingered.
The fear remained.
The tenderness stayed.

Time passed and life continued.

The answer did not arrive. Embodied answers follow their own timeline.

Then one afternoon I was speaking with my mother.

She asked a question about my relationship.

A simple question.

But a question that only a week earlier would have tightened my chest.

It would have activated the familiar urge to explain.

To elaborate.
To provide context.
To make sure I was understood.

Instead, I simply answered.

That was when I noticed something strange.
That space…

Nothing happened.
No contraction.
No defensiveness.
No need to negotiate her perception of me.
No impulse to manage the story she might create.

The question passed through me and disappeared, awareness remained.

Suddenly I could see it with astonishing clarity.

The answer was lying at my feet.
Next to my severed head.

Not because it had been obvious.

Because I could finally see the mechanism from outside of myself.

And as I sat with it, I realized something even more important.

The need to explain had never been the issue.
The need to make meaning had never been a mistake.
The elaboration had never been the problem.

These had all been there as protection, ways of caring for a very old wound.

A child who felt deeply, who cried over stories others found insignificant, whose heart hurt in ways that did not always make sense to the people around her. A child who learned that if she could explain herself well enough, perhaps she would be understood.

And if she was understood, perhaps she would belong.

And if she belonged, perhaps she would be loved.

And so there it was.
The thread.
Not a belief.
A thread.

One so old I had mistaken it for part of my identity.

One so familiar I had mistaken it for truth.

If I am understood, I am lovable.

The grief I had been carrying was not grief for a person.

It was grief for the child who built an exquisite structure to protect her heart.

And while the structure had worked, while it had carried me for decades, while it had ultimately become one of my gifts, my writing, my meaning-making, my ability to translate experience into language, something deeper was revealing itself.

The voice that saved me was never the issue.

The issue was believing I needed the voice in order to be loved.

Yet here I was, potentially misunderstood by my mother and entirely loved.

Love had survived misunderstanding.

And that was the final movement of the severing.

Because if I did not need to be understood in order to be lovable, then I did not need to understand another in order to love them.

In her iconography, Chinnamasta stands holding her own severed head.

The head remains alive.
The blood continues to nourish it.
Consciousness remains.
Only identification has been interrupted.
The head rests on her hands.

And that is why the answer appeared there for me.

Not because I had found an explanation, but because I could finally see.

A single thread had been cut.
A much larger knot began to unravel.

Even when the knot wasn’t the target, the tension holding it together was gone.

And that is what remains most notable to me.

Not that the thread existed.

Not that the realization arrived.

Not even that Chinnamasta severed it.

But that my body knew.

Before the explanation.

Before the insight.

Before the words.

My body had already recognized the thread.

My nervous system had already felt the activation.

My instinct had already called for its severing.

The understanding, the explanation, the revelation, all arrived later.

The somatic intelligence came first.

And the more I observe these phenomena up close, the more I wonder:

How much of life is already speaking to us all before we have the capacity to listen?

Not because there was an emergency.
Not because she was crying.
Not because anything had gone wrong.

But because I missed her so intensely that my body began quivering inside the silence of my own home.

The house was still.
Too still.

I sat on the balcony with a cup of coffee on a cool sunny afternoon while my solar plex…

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A word that didn’t fit.

For a while, I kept calling it jealousy, but it wasn’t that. There was no bitterness in it. No contraction. No desire to take anything away from anyone.

Just a quiet, persistent feeling when I saw certain people.

People I admired, yes, but not for what they had. For how they moved. For what seemed to …

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His words landed softly like a feather on a pond and disappeared into the evening, but the ripples inside me kept turning around them long after our conversation ended.

That night I dreamed I was carrying Lulu.

We were at some gathering with people and children and movement all around us. I remember talking to some…

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Not the fear inside grief itself.
Grief has its own gravity, its own density, its own certainty. Even in its devastation, there is something strangely solid about it. You know what has been lost. You know why the pain is there. The wound is visible.

This fe…

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And the thought arrives, soft but undeniable:

I am filthy rich.

Not as a statement, more like a recognition that slips in when I’m not trying.

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I was told early in the morning, half awake in that quiet in-between hour where the mind has not yet fully entered the day. I already knew he was in the hospital. I knew the infection was bad. I knew he was in the ICU. But somewhere inside me I still held the small hope that he might stabilize, that there would b…

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Both call themselves sacred.
Both claim divine authority.
But only one remembers to be human.

This is a personal cautionary tale

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Not dramatically. Not in spectacle or revelation. In the quieter way a figure returns through dreams and transmissions until you realize she has been guiding the work all along.

Persephone.

When she appeared during the winter solstice ceremony, she was not teaching descent. That part of the journey had alr…

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People talk about the waves of grief. The sadness, the anger, the emptiness. They talk about how time softens things.

But very few people talk about the moment when life begins to open again and how terrifying that can be.

Lately I have been noticing something in m…

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