So much of what I had believed only years ago to be future probabilities, are revealing themselves to be present-day realities. There is so much I’ve felt I wanted to say before it’s too late – like the whole world is burning, and yet I know that things happen in the time they need to. It reminds me of a saying I once heard: “There is not much time; We must go slowly.”

Personally, I’ve realized the profound need for me to slow down and tend deeply to my own body, heart and mind after having given so much outwardly towards this last birth. As much as I’ve felt a pull to “do more” for the world at this time, I have had to see that perhaps the most radical act of service would be for me to let myself R E C I E V E. It’s been a long process of closing up all the Rites of Passage...and now as I prepare to go inward and away from the world, I have to trust that the few missing pieces will land as I begin to land back within myself. I also need to trust that “the world” will continue to do its thing as it always has – and as much pain and forgetting as that involves – it’s not up to me to save the world.

These are indeed dim times. I say dim and not dark. Dim in the sense that the light of truth is dim. Because for me the dark is fecund, rich, alive - like fertile soil and melanated skin – not something to be feared as colonization taught us. And so these are also dark times – if we let them be. Many of us are waking up in this darkness.

As many of our great ones have passed away in the past few months - Malidoma Somé, bell hooks, & Thich Nhat Hanh (each major influences on my own life and work), and also the beautiful Tibetan master with whom I took refuge – Khenchen Trinley Paljor Rinpoche - it is not a question of when change will happen, but of how we choose to show up in this Turning of the Ages. The end of 4,000 years of patriarchy/ dominator culture takes time, just as it takes time for our own bodies, hearts & minds to heal and re-member themselves. And it often gets worse before it can get better.

​In some ways, I have felt I've been in hiding these past years – protecting the baby that was Rites of Passage, and also my own heart. I know I am not alone in this as I’ve watched fellow visionaries & warriors also living with caution in an era of witch burning led most devoutly by those who declare that such things must never happen again. And yet they are. To speak is an act of defiance, and yet to stay quiet is a kind of self-betrayal that makes the soul small & weak.

I have watched with great sadness over the past two years as our innate human drive to care for each other has been co-opted by those with power to separate and control us under the guise of our safety. Meanwhile our collective anxiety has been manipulated toward agendas immune to democratic scrutiny, and critical discourse pushed out of the public sphere all together. At the same time that I've experienced waves of powerless & heartbreak, I've also felt fortitude & determination while uncovering deeper layers of the neo-colonial extraction that’s happening in our world - from the nature around us to the nature inside of us. ​

Underpinning my work and worldview for two decades now, has been storytelling as the primary means of shaping our personal & collective future. Who's story do we choose to tell? The dominator's? Or our own? And how do we know the difference? In my view, there are really only two paths. One is an indigenous or ancestral path. The other is the dominator's. It can be very hard to discern between the two because we've all been deeply colonized, and carry the weight of grief and trauma. The process of decolonization is arduous and long, and requires tremendous discernment, devotion and tenderness. But once we see the truth, we can't go back. And once we are willing to feel it all, we can't keep choosing fear.

In the power-over paradigm, nature and human life exist as extractable commodities and markets, rather than as possessing intrinsic value and inter-being. The "truth" matters far less that what's most convenient to those wielding power. And the biggest resource to be mined for profit is no longer just inside Mother Earth, but within our own minds... In this context, I'm increasingly wary of any dogma or establishment that demands our trust without having earned it. Narratives which claim to advocate for our well being are indeed penned by the very same powers who have always made us - women & BIPOC (and all living beings) - unwell since the disease of colonialism first spread through the planet over 500 years ago, and patriarchy over 4000 years ago. Where I choose to put my faith instead is in a re-membered & whole way of being with ourselves, each other and this home of ours - Gaia; one simultaneously fresh and ancient.

In contrast to a world ruled by a technocratic 1% with their Icarian promises of never-ending progress, in Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision, we embodied life-giving visions of what's possible when we hold the value of soil, water, seeds, flower & fruit above what's man-made - in the way our wise ancestors did - when we value connection over separation. I will continue to stand for and live into those visions, and continue to challenge the dominant narrative with the aliveness of this much older and more fertile story. Now more than ever, I encourage us to cultivate deeper knowing, and stay open, heart-centered, compassionate, curious and critical. Stay connected to what's real.

I will be taking a sabbatical year to dream into how best I can be of service during this Great Turning, and prepare for a fresh gestational cycle. As ever, my personal mission continues to be to preserve a whole transmission from my ancestors for the future generations. To do this I must embody it more fully in order to be able to serve others - especially women and BIPOC - who are ready & willing to release the colonial paradigm of fear and control over our bodies & minds, and step fully into a re-membered way of being. This will take time, more than 10 intensely-packed days of transformation. It will take our lifetimes.​

​I often talk about "The Village" in relation to Rites of Passage. I realize it can sound abstract to most folks - or romantic or antiquated. But the village is not a mystical concept, so much as it's a practical way of being and loving in the world. The village is born through  the place and the people with whom you build: connection, culture, memory, healing & resilience.  Birthing a village is really giving birth to a whole way of life.


In 20/20 Vision, we came home to a village we created for 10 days, and found sense of belonging that few of us had ever imagined possible. The Village Soul was alive in us then, and it longs to be known in our hearts & in all our communities because as human beings, we all long to belong...

At some point in history, all of our ancestors lived in villages- whether in one place or as nomads in moving villages. They breathed, bathed, grew food & harvested, grieved & celebrated, loved & lost as a village way of life. They tended the what Martín Prechtel so eloquently calls "the Village Heart" in every interaction, and in small everyday actions. They lived lives deeply embedded in the Earth, in season and in rhythm with the moon, the stars, and water bodies. They lived lives deeply indebted to each other, inter-connected to the rite of passages of one another's lives. And ritual is what tied all of it together in a way that gave meaning, coherence and beauty to the totality.
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To be without a village was to be bereft of soul. To have a village is to be home.

Rites of Passage brought to life what I and so many others had been longing for since forever – a living village that offered us a sense of belonging that's rare for most people in the colonized world, especially as Women of Color in the US. This is inherently healing. But as a temporary village, it was a moment in space and time, not the reality most of us lived in every day or would return to. And that truth is such a deep heartbreak for me – for all the villages and jungles lost to us and to my own people – for my own room “Sustenance” that literally disappeared overnight – echoing back to that first primordial abandonment, all to remind me eventually- that it’s all inside.

​This beauty and belonging are seeds we carry that can’t be lost - just waiting for the right conditions to sprout again into the blossoms of our basic sanity and at-one-ness with everything. Rites of Passage was a season in the garden of our ancestors remembered. And what a beautiful garden it was. But I wonder: Is it possible, in this time, for it to live beyond just one season? I don’t just mean a ritual house. I mean a way of life. A way of being, with Life.

On this International Women's Day, as war continues to break out in Ukraine, I want to acknowledge that it's women & children who suffer most with the fallout of war - in Ukraine, and also in Russia... I invite you to breathe into this collective moment along with all those that lay underneath it in the rubble of Empire. Can we expand our hearts' capacity to be present with the breaking - out there, as well as in here?

True peace requires us to FEEL, and as bell hooks & Thich Nhat Hanh taught so many of us, it is not in the the binary where we learn to live & lead in love, but in holding the Both/And and staying close to the heart within us all that breaks and yearns to be free.
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The machine of global Power wants us to do anything but be present with this heartache in a real way; to instead acquiesce to its binary answers and the "inevitable" interventions and mandates it promises will return our lives to peace & normalcy. Yet the reality is that we have not been at peace for centuries, and in some cases thousands of years. War & the fear of war has been our "normal". And the interests of governments are seldom in the real the interest of the People, but in what's most profitable, while they suffer.

What if we chose to link our hearts with both Ukrainians & Russians, and also with those in other parts of our world who are still suffering with the pain of war? Can we widen our circle of compassion to the ancestors of these peoples who's fabric of peace had been torn so very long ago?

And can we then ripple our hearts out to our own displaced ancestors; our own inherited cellular memory of war? Can we hold this much breaking? Can we be honest about the collective trauma we carry?

This is how we begin to truly mend what's been broken.

From this broken-open place, we can also more fully dream into a world without war, and what that would take. A world that values peace would also center women as life givers - not only as makers of children, but of art, healing, culture, and society.

20/20 Vision cure-ator  Cheryl R. Riley's visual language of "The Glyphs" - which were exhibited all over the walls of "SOUL KITCHEN" - offer a potent doorway into such a world. This language of a new matriarchy came to Cheryl when she read that women & children are killed the most in wars, and that matriarchal societies had no wars. In the language of The Glyphs in fact, there is no word for war. But there are many words for cooperation, creativity, and acts of sustaining Life. The Glyphs also draw inspiration from languages pre-dating the written word, thus moving beyond the binary by accessing the power of symbols, and are drawn on top of old encyclopedias which represent the patriarchal language & code of order.

Perhaps The Glyphs can guide us in envisioning a radically different kind of culture & language - a new/ old way of speaking & relating to peace - which begins within ourselves and our most intimate relationships, alongside an honoring of women in the deepest sense.

Armed with such a language, we might find the courage to keep believing in the victory of what the Tz'utujil  Maya call the flowering earth, and the ferocity to resist what threatens it.


image from Cheryl R. Riley's, Glyphs Oracle Deck