Hello, dear ones -

I've been trying to get this email to you all week and stuff just keeps popping up. Some weeks are putting-out-fire weeks. Some years are putting-out-fire years.

Many times our instincts, as humans, seem to tell us that when a challenge pops up, it's an obstacle. We drop everything we're doing and head in a different direction.

Even in much of the spiritual and wellness world there's this rhetoric that "when something's right, it flows."

That's a machine-based view of the world. Right = functioning properly and with no effort on my part.

Among more culturally indigenous people there is an understanding that life is maintenance. And this fits with animism where everything is relationship. As we know, real, deep relationships need tending. Abandon them and they often wither, like a plant.

This makes life harder in some ways, yes. But it also brings a depth of meaning and purpose. In a world where we aim for everything to be easy and done for us, we might struggle to feel purposeful. In a world where we have to do some work as part of our exchange with life, we have some responsibility and through that, purpose: to care for things, to make beauty.

And so these people might look at our efforts to build worlds that ask nothing of us, that require no effort on our part, and think it vacant of meaning, connection, and the sweetness of responsibility. They'd be right.

So let's hold the idea that life is (and should be) maintenance up next to our aversion to obstacles. What might it show us?

It might point to the fact that the obstacles are the path. That sometimes things flow easily and that's good. And sometimes we have to work a bit first. We have to be tempered through our efforts. We have to to court it and become capable of stewarding it.

The Living As Creature, Not Machine course is taking longer than I expected because it's working me first. It's showing me what it wants to become and making sure I can be the one to bring it through and tend it in the world. It's asking a lot of me. I'm finding myself in a beautiful and raw process with it. I suspect at some point I'll be ready to share more of that, but that time is not now. Sharing too early is another way we can kill off the vulnerable and sacred moment. Even with the best of intentions, many of us don't know how to truly treat things as sacred.

But all the gentle unraveling that's happening is part of what got in the way of inviting you into Embodying a New Paradigm. And it might also be part of the path.

So our first gathering of Embodying a New Paradigm is tomorrow. It's a monthly gathering so if you can't make tomorrow but you'd like to come in the future, consider scheduling yourself into an upcoming one so you don't forget and overbook yourself.

But Embodying a New Paradigm is designed around this idea that we have to be the change first and foremost within ourselves. That the obstacles we're facing right now in the collective aren't things to run from, but rather invitations to be tempered, to become *more* human.

It's a space to regroup and be held. To grieve and rage and judge and then get on with the business of metabolizing all that into something regenerative. Something that feeds more life.

A humble offering. But with a foundational simplicity that we need in these times.

(As I've been being worked by the LACNM course, I've been "taking some of my own medicine" and using old recordings of mine to help ground me and move things through. I can't stress enough how potent it is, when everything is crumbling, to go back to the basics.)

​Embodying a New Paradigm is PWYC. Whatever you pay is the right amount.

I hope you'll join.

Let me know if you have any questions.

with Big Love and prayers for wild mercy upon us,

Kate