finding the quilled cave goddess

This photo really doesn’t do this mountain justice, but I wanted to share it as an invitation to make like a mountain and lie down on the land, let your head sink just as hers does, nose nestled into the evergreens, and settle in for a small story.

I’ve come to call this mountain “the great woman”, a name my 4 year old coined when I showed him the hip, the fleshy arm, the sinking head. Do you see it?Most people call this place Mt. Toby, and although I’ve looked and looked for an older name, one that encompasses more of it’s majesty, I haven’t found one yet. I circle this mountain daily, enamored by how much quiet attention it - or she, or they - demands. In the picture, over on the right, half way down from the hip line, there’s a cave. It’s technically a dark cavern created by two huge slabs of rock that fell together after a glacier slid away, but to me it feels very much like a place where bones meet, the birthing bones of a resting woman.

There was someone else in the cave yesterday.  I sensed a strong presence, and swung the headlamp around.  The dark seemed to devour the light, but I decided there was no bear; perhaps it was the closeness of the wet bone-like rock making it’s presence known.  I stepped deeper into the dark, willing away all the younger versions of myself that would certainly be afraid. I scanned again with my small light and found what my senses had detected.  There in the corner, tucked up as far into the crevice as she could get, was a beautiful, big porcupine.  Don’t ask me how I knew her gender, I just did. Her body faced the wall, but her little soft face turned around to take me in with her eyes.  It was so dark, and yet we could see each other clearly.  With such a formidable defense as a body full of quills, it’s curious how safe I felt.  But knowing she knew how to take care of herself, I knew I didn’t need to be overly cautious or accommodating.  Talk about some protective chi, there’s no need for inflammation here, in body or speech, a porcupine knows they are safe.  What if we humans knew, deep down, that we are safe? How might our reactions soften towards all we encounter? Turning the flashlight off, I sat down on the damp rock and listened as we breathed together. She began a little cooing song, which I added my own soft hum to. The scent of old rock, bathed for millions of years in darkness competed with the smell of earth, full and bright in my nose.  The sound was wholly consumed by the layers of rock. I wondered that there was no shrine here, no homage to some goddess or another, but then turned my attention back to the shared song happening deep inside the mountain, right then.

I remembered that the ones who say the least are often the ones who have the most wisdom to share. This porcupine didn’t let off her stinky protective scent, or quiver her teeth as me.  Instead, the look on her little face seemed to me a look of longing, of uncertainty about what’s to come, and a deep soft grief.  I wanted to protect her, but then remembered how brilliantly protected she already is. She found shelter in the womb of the mountain, her soft vulnerable belly close to the stone. She requires nothing of me, which comes as a small shock to my system - so used to giving, offering, supporting as a woman and mother in this time. I leave the little cave goddess before I’m ready, I could stay here all day truly, but the wisdom of that dark dwelling animal stays with me.  I allow her to be a metaphor for relationship, for non-verbal communication, for standing in my own skin, not reaching beyond my own clear boundaries. Metaphor for me isn’t just a nice way to evoke descriptive writing, it’s a way to weave the connected stories of our existence back into each other, like tucking the ends of the willow in for a finished basket. In this way, she is woven into me.

I drive home and stop to take in the view, snap the picture above these words.  The leaves that have covered the skin of the mountain, like fur, are all gone now.  The trees rise like soft hairs off the curves of rock and soil.  This mountain, this mountain I still barely know, is what I grip to like a holdfast of the wild California coast.  I miss the smell of bay so much my body aches, and the grandeur of oaks, redwoods, dancing bays and madrones is a sight I can only see in the dark now.  Here, the forest is not grand.  The forest is change.  The mountain is teaching me how to shape shift, how to appreciate the cold, the growth, the water pouring down like sheets. There is so much to be connected to, it’s dizzying when it really comes into focus. 

what do we know about unison?

Every year for the past decade, I’ve hauled myself out to the cold, windy, Sonoma Coast on January 1st, with many friends and strangers, to flock.

Flocking? This is one of those terms that we all know with our bodies, no matter how obscure it may sound to our minds. It’s the score we agree to when we walk down the street together in big cities, and what happens when we applaud a great performance. It’s also protesting, and marching. Flocking is simply moving in unison, but that sounds easier than it is.

When I was 22, I spontaneously went with a dear friend to Ocean Beach (SF) on New Year’s Day to watch the sunset. We walked lazily out on the sand, shoes left in the car, and stood facing the light. As the orange sun began melting into the horizon, I noticed many others had turned to stand and watch. There was complete silence in the human realm as the sun slowly descended, and then, suddenly and all at once, we began to clap. All along the beach, hundreds of people were applauding, laughing, and delighting in our collective response, like an infectious tickle. It sparked the ritual I now refer to as ‘murmurations’, always performed on new year’s day (gregorian calendar).

I engage the Cherokee folk dance known to most as ‘the Tslagi Dance of Life’. I was taught it by Shinichi Iova Koga, who learned it from his Butoh teacher, who learned it from a woman in Golden Gate Park. It’s a simple dance of reverence to locate oneself inside the landscape, with gratitude and awe.

Last year, it was just me and my sweet oldest child, bowing and moving with a mirrored grace in front of the cresting waves. It was solemn, given what was happening last January, but full of reverence, and no less aligning. We both felt the importance of doing something just to be beautiful - not productive or useful - to begin the year. In a sense, it’s quite the opposite of a new year’s resolution - it’s a gift to the waves, the passing birds, the shifting sand.

This year, I find myself far from that deep ocean place. I’ve stretched my roots such a long way from that coast, I can almost touch the other side. In these stark Massachusetts woods, I’ve spent the past several weeks inside this question:

what flocks here?

I’m looking for a bird, a bug, anything, to reflect that calming energy of unison in my new home. The birds have all flown south - except the individualistic jays and cardinals, the trees stand naked, seemingly apart from each other, and the deer have strangely disappeared (it’s hunting season). It’s all felt a little fragmented, not unlike the human realm.

Then recently, standing by the Saw Mill river that bends so sensually through the nearby forest I walk through, I found the unison I’ve been looking for. It’s right here, in the congruent, single-minded flow of water as each particle finds the slightest downhill slope and it braids it’s way to the sea. Water is what the trees of California told me to move toward, what I dreamt about before I knew I was moving, what stands as reflector, teacher, muse…not to mention the element all life hinges on.

There’s something truly profound about mirroring the qualities seen in the landscape with our own limbs and breath, and this year more than ever, it feels so important to do so. I read so many words typed into a screen or printed on paper about belonging, accepting, and reckoning during this time of the Great Turning, but find that the body is often left stagnant and uninhabited in that receiving. Words take up space - in our minds, “the cloud”, our attention, but a dance is simple a form of reciprocity…what’s taken is equally given.

This new year, may we take a deep collective bow of gratitude, all together, and align with what is beautiful in the landscape of our living.

in praise of illness.

Last week, after an overly full day of activity, I woke to find my smallest child sick.  This one, who is bright and fast and sometimes so loud I need headphones, was suddenly a limp little flower. 

The compass that locks into place around illness is clear and immediate for me:  slow down, attune to the physical, tend to what’s vital.  Bring out the jar of steam herbs to invigorate the shared air.  Go out to the tree with turkey tails for broth, to the thyme patch for tea.  Let the day be foot baths, warm foods, gua sha, long stories. This is not because I’m afraid of illness, but rather a communicative body deserves a response.  I’m not out to change or ‘fix’, just respond to what is being expressed, and model attunement for these young ones.  We are more body than anything else, and ignoring what it’s saying seems just plain bizarre, if not dangerous. 

To reorganize around someone’s body, not their ambitions (or my own) is quite a shift from the bizarre normalcy of our culture.  Normal these days tends to be organizing around the pings and dings of devices and tightly planned, imposed schedules.  In contrast, we humans once organized around the curve of the moon, the generous language of songbirds, and our bodies.  

. . .

When someone in my family gets sick, I’m secretly almost joyous.  Even during a pandemic.  Even though I’m not immune to the ‘fear of covid’ either.  The real medicine here is the actual illness, not all the herbs and foods and care I respond with.  There is a reorienting to the physical that feels so profound - so human – I am instantly connected to all that is current and happening in real time.  Here, I’m allowed to linger in the present and let simplicity be medicinal.  The medicine is dancing between surrender and response – action and non-action.  Being sick is a healthy response to imbalance, and I’d rather look at imbalance straight in the face than carry on for the sake of normalcy. 

I think I do that most everywhere in my life – it’s why I heaved myself across the country from my deep home and community: to respond to what’s being communicated from the Earth’s broad body.  We are like a billion little worlds orbiting inside the curve of this green blue planet, and the way we each inhabit ourselves really is reflected in how Earth manages our presence.  It makes perfect sense that the imbalance we are calling ‘climate crisis’ or ‘bad weather’ is a healthy response to that deep dysymmetry.  The earth is as overmedicated as we are.

 . . .

Lots of folks these days are writing about how personal choices around ecology don’t matter much in the face of big policy changes that are needed in government after government across the continents.  To be honest, I don’t have any big hope in government.  I do wonder what would happen if we changed the story from the bottom up – re-spun the tiniest to the biggest tales about how we should live, what we need to do so, and why there’s really no way to exist without exploitation/destruction/control.  Just like there’s ‘no way’ to for medicine to exist without harm (the Hippocratic oath is so “out” in allopathic medicine these days).    

How about this:  we are all keepers of bits of starlight that needs the most profound care and tenderness to survive past our bodies so there’s light for the younger humans we love to see by.  And, we are all – even the assholes among us – worthy and deserving of a self-love akin to a mother’s un-afflicted love.  We were all once delicate new bodies, adored and cherished by someone. What if we still are – and acted like it?  What if the medicine to the biggest imbalances is the same as it is for the smallest ones?

 *    *    *

My little one eventually gets better, and seems older.  To physically struggle, especially when we’re little, feels like a ripening, a filling out into our next selves…a shedding of a skin.   I tell my child that being sick isn’t something to fear, it’s something to welcome.  Then I bring tea, and we count golden leaves as they fly - no longer a part of the trees, belonging now to the breeze and soon, to the soil.  I spin some story about the wild journey the leaf takes to become part of the water, the gold in chipmunk’s fir, his own laughter.  It’s a long, complex story, but very believable.

*    *    *

My love letter to California

After living for most of my life in the Bay Area, I have made the difficult (that’s and understatement) decision to move to the Northeast, in light of the ongoing and deepening climate threat of living with fire. This is my love letter to the land we call California.

Dear land, dear jagged mountains and soup bowl of deserts, dear fog shrouded coastline and California bay scent:

Thank you for growing me up. Thank you redwoods for being the first trees I gazed into with two day old eyes. Thank you San Francisco for catching me at 20, lost and looking for a true teacher. Thank you Death Valley for reminding me that inflammation is inhospitable. Thank you tides for enveloping the blood of my unborn ones and delighting the ones who made it all the way through. Thank you countless mountains for your hard lessons in body and heart. Your curves and wild ridges and even wilder coastlines have inspired me to continually widen my lens. You have grown me up like no other. You have emerged in me and through me and woven me into the fabric of belonging.  I know I belong with you.

But you are nebulous, wild, always changing. You have been many things before, and there is so much more you have yet to become. I have left you, mirroring your transformation with my own wide movement.  You are a powerful land demanding all animals heed your attention as you burn.  Move, you said.  Change with me, you said.  My heart breaks to leave my home, my biggest teacher, my land, my love. I’m not leaving you, but I am leaving. I love you, but I am leaving because I love you. I leave to stretch my running roots to find water, to not pull another drop out of your creeks for myself, knowing your depletion. The bear who passed through Sonoma County recently, where bears have always been but never are, she heard you too. I follow her lead now. I make room for her return. It is my great privilege to do so, but also a responsibility I feel in having heard you say go.

Humanity has criss-crossed your skin with highways and neighborhood grids and row after row of grapes and yet you remain wild in your oaks and slopes. So tenacious, so full of growth, despite exhaustion. I love you golden land. I love you mountains of fog. I love you bodies of brackish water. You bring me to my knees with your ferocious beauty. My land. Can I claim you as you have me? Can I take you with me? Aren’t I made out of you? Aren’t you me? Dear wild oak strewn land of the salmon and bear and hobo and hummingbird, are you sure I must go? I know. You’ve been clear. Time for you to transform, time for me to give space.

You are not just California, but the rich fabric of soil and memory that breathes life into my bone marrow. And if this is the case, I take you with me everywhere. I will find you under every rock noticed, every plant discovered, and every curve acknowledged of your great breathing body. I gather my rootlets and imagine them walking east, but my taproot remains forever with you, dear land of my birth, my heart, my love.

witness/be witnessed.

At the sound of a low-flying plane I look up suddenly into the white and grey. Instead of the familiar dead shape of a plane traversing sky, I see the bright white wings of an egret flying low overhead. The sound of the plane continues as the egret flaps its delicate wings, legs splayed in the oncoming wind. The juxtaposition between what I hear and what I see is almost comical, tinged with grief.  The egret works hard to traverse the sky; the humans above it’s head are likely working hard to forget they are thousands of feet from stability, traversing one movie to the next instead of one ridge to another.  We don't often see the bird that's incessantly calling to us until it's already fleeing our presence.  I wonder: what do we humans lose, spending most of our nights indoors?  How much do we miss out on without the night sky as a compass to live by, the smell of earth a constancy of daily tasks?  I know there’s bigger questions out there that need answering (they are probably coursing through your head right now), but really, doesn’t it always come back to engaging the heart enough to be in love with this little life we have? 

Once, recently, I found myself at the coast with a small group of humans, spontaneously singing, dancing, and throwing flowers into the waves and the setting sun.  I was just beginning to feel a bit silly and shy, when an otter bobbed their head up from just beyond the break.  They strained their neck high out the water, staring at the lot of us.  If an otter could drop a jaw, I imagine they would have done so.  The long necked creature bobbed along, floating in front of each of us, and somehow, the witness of that sea otter sealed my conviction: yes, humans know how to bow.  We know how to play, how to give thanks.  Watch me.  I spun around and swam in the sand with an otter’s delight.

A formula for falling in love with our life, moment after moment:  Witness.  Be witnessed. Not by other humans, but the leaning trees, the nodding flower heads, the passing stream with a place to go.  Earth body, human body.  Same body, ancient perspective.

tracking the story of human choice

We were walking close to a snail’s pace down the path, each one of us finding something new to point out to the other.  The tracker found the tiny chipmunk prints from a morning skitter, the birder rattled off names of which woodpecker it could be hammering it’s head into a nearby tree, and I wandered slowly, trying to train my eyes away from the plants and into the world of animal tracks.  We had just finished inspecting a dried up chunk of bird scat (junco, they agreed – somehow), when I glanced over toward a very familiar bay tree, only something vital was missing.

Towards the bottom of the 4 or 5 trunks that peeled out of the ground, there used to be a giant ganoderma, also known as artist’s conk, also known as reishi.  Now, there I see only a long, jagged saw mark.  I used to think of that mushroom as a bracket, helping to support the great weight of the towering bay tree.  While it’s possible some scientist came by and decided this bracket conk needed to go (and the verdict is still out on if these fungi have it out for their host trees, or not), but more likely it was an enthusiastic herbalist, excited to put that mushroom to good use.  The medicine of reishi spans thousands of years and several continents as an invaluable treatment of cancers, inflammation, immune response, the list goes on.  It also treats the heart, support for our own pumping center.

There were several smaller conks around, but this one was the most visible, so close to the trail you barely had to put a foot on the forest floor.  I stood dumbfounded for a moment, shocked that another herbalist would break the rules of the honorable harvest.  This indigenous wisdom, as laid out by Robin Wall Kimmerer, says don’t take the biggest, oldest, wisest beings for yourself.  It says take only what is given, and ask before taking (asking requires deep familiarity and scientific observation).  And perhaps the hardest one: take only what you need.   How much do our wants get entangled with our needs; what part of the heart do we use to interpret this rule? 

This path has a special place in my life, but I don’t live here.  The chipmunk, juncos, woodpeckers surely have much more of a say than I do about whether or not this mushroom that measured almost 2 feet across, was needed here.  The problem is, we barely know that others exist these days, beyond our human-centric experience.  Had I not been with other trained observers, I would have missed the junco poo, stamped out the chipmunk track, and only briefly wondered about the woodpecker.  How can we ask what’s okay to take if we don’t know who to ask?  And truly, what medicine might come our way, in leaving that special find where we spotted it, for all of us to know? 

More and more people are excited and interested in learning about foraging, herbal medicine, wild foods, natural dye plants, etc.  It gives me both hope, and pause.  I think the first question for any of us – myself included – in wanting this deeply connecting wisdom is this: how do I enter, and what gifts do I bring?  Like coming to a dinner party at a new neighbors home, we never arrive empty handed and let ourselves in.   Generosity is our guide, greediness will be our collective demise.  Generosity will lead us in the work of reparations, both with other species and our own. As far as I can tell, reparations are about relationship, and reckoning with what it means to not continue the trajectory of taking something – everything – and making it of use for our own benefit…be it the blood of the mountain, the sanctity of a dark star-filled night, or the support of a great old tree. 

What would it mean to leave what we find behind with a song, a nod of gratitude?  It seems our deeply human work is to stop trying to own everything, finding instead that we feel much more like we belong to something.

The cobwebs of humanity: a birthing basket.

My overgrown toddler and I were driving home the other day, him gazing out the window with the wind blasting his wispy tangled hair, just the way he likes it.  Suddenly he declared in a soft voice, “mama, did you know I love myself?”

All at once, in every cell of my body, I knew that he would be alright here.  That small proclamation set my heart at ease, knowing that kind of love is essential in order to love anything else.  I also know that if I water this child’s ability to feel his own self-love, I’m protecting all that he’ll come in contact with, including the planet.  Looking deeply into the rearview mirror I said with a shaky voice, “puppy, thank you for telling me that.”  

 Shaky, because it’s hard to love our species right now.   It’s pretty dismal out there from all angles.  The pervasive view of us humans is that we simply can’t help ourselves from engaging in destructive behaviors, and will eventually destroy ourselves and everything around us.  You feel it?  We ‘just can’t help’ creating waste, abusing animals for the sake of eating them, mining the depths of the earth to power our screens, pillaging the sea, the list is endless…and so we must just be doomed.  Why else would the richest people in the world be set on finding other inhabitable planets except to grab untapped ‘resources’, or secure an escape route when it all comes crumbling down?  The available story is one of destruction, superiority, and fighting for our place.  But these stories damage our sense of self worth and self love collectively, keeping us rooted in shame.

 The toxicity of what human supremacy has turned us into is not our true nature, but it has eroded our ability to love ourselves as a species, and for many, as individuals.  A dominator has to turn away from their reflection, lest they see the harm they’ve done.  This separation has had a profound impact: we’ve stopped being able to fall in love with the earth in a way that a child does mother, without domination or desire leading our hearts.   Instead, our relationship has turned quite abusive.

A young girl was visiting my home recently, climbing around in the cherry tree that graces the center of the herb garden.  She said something about “your tree”.  I toyed back with her that the tree wasn’t mine, to which she said, “Yes it is!  You grew it didn’t you?!”  I didn’t, the tree has been here much longer than I, but her words rang like an out of tune bell.  I remember saying back to her, “your mama grew you, does that mean she owns you?”  For an independent five year old, that was not a welcoming thought.  

This planet is so much more than the sum of it’s parts—or  resources—than our human supremacy mentality has reduced it to.    This idea may not feel present at first, but it’s deeply lodged in all of us, all the time.  If you had to describe the human relationship with Earth, what would it be?  Honest, selfish, abusive, generous?  Equal?  The truth is painful.

When this burden presses down and grief feels like a brick on my heart, I force myself to come outside and practice laying my mind down on the land.  I do mean come, not go.  Being out is taking a step inward, like stepping onto a compass and suddenly feeling oriented.  Grief is right there, but with the heartbreak is also gratitude.  They spin around each other like

one big disco ball,

lighting up my chest. 

Through breath, they swirl into each other.

So into to the garden I go.  In this practice, I am not learning through a program, for a degree, or with books.  No certification sought.  I am learning with my body.  I Feel the curve of the rock echoed in my own sacrum, see the reach of the branch reflected in my spine.  Looking out and in simultaneously.  Noticing the invasion of certain species and the invasion of certain thoughts and seeing how those two things are not separate.  How does the light change the color of the moss, and my skin?  How does looking closely reveal the hidden stories—through tracks, birdsong, plant growth?  It’s not about knowing all the birds, being able to read all the tracks, or having vast amounts of information stored away in my head (much less a device).  It's about being inside of my own book, and learning to replace the language of thought with the language of sensation.  What does it feel like to be a part of something? 

 Here, with my senses eager to engage, my presence makes sense, is important even.   Hands reach to tend reflexively.  If I didn’t tend this wild land, diversity would collapse into a few aggressive characters (you know who I’m talking to, Crab Grass!).   And native plant diversity, well, that’s what invites the hummingbirds alongside the raptors, the flicker and the oriole pair…the fox in the back field, the deer family and quail family, the incredible gopher network and the occasional bobcat.  Even the wind would pass through differently without me here, holding this parcel of land with two hands.  I am a keystone species, if I choose to be.  Here in the garden, the kind of human I am makes sense…hands are for holding, tending.

And one doesn’t need a garden—or  have the obscure “green thumb”—to  know this.  There are many entry points to the land, because what we call land is simply a great tangle of webs that we are all weaving together.  We know ourselves by knowing the web, knowing the terrain and the weather that we live inside.  Think of the body as a landscape, the landscape as a body, and lean in. 

It’s this work that will remember us to ourselves, and heal the pathways of love between our own species and the earth.  There’s a simple-ness to it that makes it unbelievable, but simple is often where the most profound shows up.  When we are in love, how could we possibly destroy and turn away?  I know, grief is here too, where heartbreak happens.  It’s not an easy emotion to metabolize, but it’s not something to fear.  (remember the disco ball.)  Grief is what lets us know what and who we belong to.  With a strong sense of belonging, what might our grief help us discover about how generative and vital we are here, what new story might emerge?  It could be the story of our present selves - with all the history we've been through - making choices that bring us back into a healthy relationship with the earth, and therefore ourselves.  We have all the tools we need to be well, right here in our bodies.  They include our eyes, our olfactory senses, our porous surface, but the key ingredient is our willingness to drop the power play and return to a listening stance rather than a demanding, domineering one.  Although this message does not have anything to do with policy or politics or machinery, all of those things would transform were we each to do this work of returning language to the land and listening.  To put the book down, to walk out in the rain, and wait until the rhythm of the droplets blooms in our minds. 

Like the hummingbird making use of old threads to weave this year’s nest, we too can turn the cobwebs of humanity into a birthing basket.  And it is a birthing moment.  We’ve all gestated our personal, diverse questions about humanity this past year, had our own physical challenges and spiritual reckonings, just like every pregnancy.  And just like any birth, the presence of love is palpable.  Now, holding new possibility with tenderness—and our own raw hearts with the deepest love possible, what might beat into existence?   

What might be different if we could all simply declare, with innocence, that we love ourselves?

*special thanks to Altair Bay for his continued teachings as a lively human, not 4 years here.

where do our voices cross?

I notice so much noise from humans these days, so much coming through from all the feeds, folders, mailboxes, pings and dings (and I don’t even do social media). Anyone else feel completely inundated with thoughts to process and things to read? It’s hard to find a corner to sit my mind down and listen to the emerging birdsong frogsong windsong firesong. A computer is supposed to be a tool, but I have to ask myself sometimes: what does it fix, and what gets broken in the fixing?

When a species has a mode of communication all its own, what happens to the possibility of connections outside that group? Where do our voices cross? What other species has ever survived so alone?

As I try to teach my child how to produce a story he’d like to tell, we flip flop from writing (not fast enough) to typing (too unknown) to computer dictation (ridiculously inaccurate). He becomes so frustrated trying to find the most efficient way to get his story in writing that he soon gives up, and the story scatters with the out swing of the door. He’s gone out into the wind and changing sky, the palpable weight of clouds and cool air, and I let him go. Finally, when something happens magical enough to report, he returns with the most brilliant story of all, only he doesn’t have to tell it to me, I can see it in the color of his eyes, the ruddy glow of his skin, the authentic excitement. Instead of writing down a story, he’s just lived one.

Yes, there’s so much good that’s come from this technology: so many sweeping ideas, movements, even revolutions sparked from the ticking of plastic keys under blue-white light….perhaps so much that it’s impossible to see what’s being lost.

How does human supremacy keep us from hearing the stories we need to be listening to right now? As we humans emerge from a year of collective struggle and tension - what does the trickle of the stream say? Why might it be crucial to hear inside this Great Unraveling?

There are many questions here. Letting these questions hang in the equinox light seems the only possible worthy answer…letting the birdsong frogsong windsong firesong be the answer that begins a conversation with someone other than ourselves. Here on the cusp of ‘opening’, we humans need to listen to the elemental wisdom about how to open, and what to open into. I wonder what you think. I wonder who is pushing on your senses, waiting to be heard in your circle of belonging…