Not Alone

We are amidst rains of biblical proportions this training week. Walking between anything is not easy. Last night I lay serenaded and sometimes scared by sounds of serious storm atop my sleep space.

I open my eyes to morning light with gratitudes and truth on my lips - Water Is Life. We are in priestess training as water protectors at Oceti Sakowin are surrounded and readying for threatened violent eviction off their treaty lands on Wednesday. We are in Hebrew priestess training on mountains that were home to the Nisenan peoples until less than one hundred and fifty years ago, as JCC's are being evacuated due to bomb threats and Jewish burial grounds are being desecrated.

I prefer to teach by state transmission, and to let the content come second. I cultivate myself as a radiant vessel of embodied spirit and offer that as a resonance, a model, a guide and an invitation.

This trip so far, my body aches, my spirit feels slightly stale and it is all I have been able to do to simply show up. I was raw at opening circle, not even knowing quite where my vulnerability lived to offer that. I wondered how I will do - how I will be in - this week well.

The answer, which keeps coming, is Not Alone. I didn't have so many words besides gratitude prayer last night. I opened the way for our ritual sharing which we call "Me Too's."

What emerged was a chorus and cacaphony of powerhouse beings who have been and are on a path of peeling back the myriad layers of their lives. Epic joys and creations and sorrows and commitments to justice and no clue what to do. Humility, power, laughter, tears, readiness to show up, to tend self, other, world through this chrysallis.

Inside a training week I don't feel quite ripe to lead in the way I prefer, though the schedule is strong and the sessions are prepped, I am called into reimagining resource. Caring for myself and this community, and blessed by a body which needs more slow, requires me to make more space for the songs of devotion and transformation these women are so ready to guide. The lullabies, the calls to action, the healing balm and the fire dances. We are just twelve hours in and already they are singing us home.