Learning to Live in Liminal Space

Synthesis Statement: Sessions 1-5

October 2025 — February 2026

Recognizing the Polycrisis

This program is available to anyone, but it will likely resonate most with those who feel a calling — people deeply troubled by the polycrisis unfolding in the world and wondering how they might help. Not merely to observe or cope, or simply optimize what sits within their own circle of influence, but to help steward something genuinely better. That sense of calling becomes the entry point. It is also, in many ways, the first practice: saying yes to a path whose destination is not yet visible.

The world we are asked to face is real, and in many ways it is dire. Ecocide. The human-driven disruption of the climate. An unstable and concentrating global economy. The erosion of civility. The weakening of democratic institutions and the rise of autocracy. These are not distant abstractions. They are the living conditions of our moment. The uncertainty circles not around whether the Old Story is ending, but around how it will unravel and over what time.

What does the world look like 10, 25, 50, or 100 years from now? As artificial intelligence displaces entire categories of work, as climate change reshapes the face of the planet, as wealth and power consolidate in new and intensifying ways, these questions are not rhetorical. They hang in the air. They are the reason this work matters.

The complexity of these problems exceeds our capacity to solve them on our own. We must admit that hubris helped bring us to where we are and allow humility to guide us forward. While science works hard to find solutions, will it reverse climate change quickly enough? Will we find a way to halt species loss? Will our concern for ourselves individually allow us to see past ourselves and care for others? For marginalized communities? The world’s poor? 

Yet, the deepest truths of the world's mystical traditions remain the same. Stay humble. Stay open. Rumi writes: Be helpless, dumbfounded, unable to say yes or no. Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up…When we are able to make friends with that beauty, we shall become a mighty kindness. Jesus pointed out the difficulty for the self-sufficient man getting into paradise being comparable to a camel threading the eye of a needle. We need to be open, to be humble, and to be willing to receive help. 

Practice as Foundation

And so, in this program we practice. Daily. We commit to some sort of spiritual engagement. Prayer. Meditation. We find music that inspires. We find and create poetry and art. We write. We create community. We transmit and receive transmission. These practices are not decorative. They are the means by which we shift our interior space so that we can better face and serve the exterior world.

Through this work we begin to recognize something uncomfortable: the Old Story is not only out there, in governments and corporations and markets. It is deeply entrenched in our way of life. It is the story most of us were raised inside. It shapes our instincts about time, productivity, sufficiency, and control. The interior reckoning and the exterior reckoning are inseparable.

To move away from the Old Story we must begin, slowly, to detach from it. Not through rejection or rage, but through a conscious stepping away. We ground ourselves in a space that allows us to see the dying old clearly, to live among its institutions, and yet not be enveloped by it. We give it no heart. Only our witness, our grief for those harmed by it, and our energy directed toward what may come next.

The New Story and Its Seven Qualities

If the Old Story is ending, what replaces it?

The program suggests that the New Story cannot be built simply by opposing the old. The more we focus our attention on what is dying, the more power we inadvertently give it. Instead, we are invited to become a seedbed for what is emerging, placing our attention, imagination, and effort into what is life-giving.

Seven foundational qualities help orient that emerging story:

1. Respecting women and feminine principles

2. Respecting the land as sacred

3. Time no longer seen as linear

4. Non-hierarchical dynamics of power and control

5. Communities of all types

6. Oneness

7. Love

These qualities are not inventions. They represent the recovery of wisdom that has long existed in indigenous traditions, spiritual teachings, and the natural patterns of life itself. Their suppression has caused profound harm. Their recovery opens the possibility of healing.

As the program reminds us: Through it all will run the axis of love, from the center of the Earth to the center of the cosmos, present in every cell of creation.

Each of these qualities names both a place where the Old Story has failed us and a direction toward something more whole.

Stepping into Liminal Space

The program then turns toward one of its central teachings: liminal space.

Liminal space is the threshold, the space between what was and what will be. The terrain of transition. A sacred space. 

To enter liminal space is to consciously step away from the Old Story without yet having arrived in the New. This can feel disorienting. Our culture trains us to rush through uncertainty, to fill the unknown with activity and noise. This program asks something different: to dwell in the in-between.

From this vantage point we gain perspective.

When we make the subject the object, when we can look at the Old Story rather than only looking from inside it, its hold on us begins to loosen. We gain autonomy. We gain agency. We can live within the institutions of the old world without being captured by them.

Reflecting on this idea raises an interesting question:

Are we ever truly outside liminal space?

Once we loosen our attachment to certainty, life itself begins to appear as a continuous threshold, always unfolding between what has been and what may yet become.

To remain steady there requires practice. The simple orientation the program offers captures the posture well:

Witness
Grieve
Pray
Act

These four movements offer a way of orienting ourselves to the great challenges of the world. They describe a posture toward suffering and transformation. But they do not describe the texture of ordinary living.

For that, the practice of mindfulness, of stillness, of presence become essential. These allow us to inhabit each moment with awareness rather than reactivity. They are the ground from which witnessing becomes possible and from which compassionate action can emerge.

In some ways this is not unlike exercise or healthy eating. At first the effort can feel unnatural, even forced. But with time the body begins to recognize what is good for it. What once felt difficult begins to feel normal, even necessary. The longer we fall away from those practices, the harder it is to return. From the inside, though, it becomes clear that this way of being is simply the healthier place to live.

Witnessing, grieving, praying, and acting offer a way of responding to the world. Mindfulness and presence offer a way of inhabiting it.

Witnessing

Witnessing, we have seen, is a tool we use to allow ourselves to separate from the old. It allows us to recognize the pathologies, the hubris, the maladies, the corruption, the destruction — what the Buddha summarized simply as the suffering that emerges from the old story.

As we come into liminal space and allow ourselves to witness, we create that separation for ourselves. Not to dismiss reality, but to ground ourselves in a larger perspective.

Witnessing allows us to see and know much more, precisely because we realize we do not actually have to hold everything we see. We do not have to carry it. It is not ours. Or rather, it no longer needs to be.

And so the question arises: what do we do with what we witness? What do we do with tragedy?

We grieve.

Grieving

Grieving allows us to process the tragedy of the Old Story. It allows us to objectively see and understand it. It allows us to own our own participation in it and then let it go.

We must make peace with our shadow. We must make peace with our tragedy. We must make peace with our mistakes in order to move forward.

And so we grieve.

We grieve for the loss of what we love. We grieve for parts of ourselves and our communities that will never know full flourishing. We grieve for the losses and sorrows of the world. We grieve for what we expected but never received—for unconscious disappointment, loneliness, and a diminished experience of self. And we grieve for the unacknowledged and untended sorrow of those who came before us, for whom we can no longer help in any direct way.

Grieving opens the heart. If we allow it, it opens us to communion. One person’s grieving becomes everyone’s grieving. The more we allow for witnessing and grieving, the more we reconnect with our innocence and our deeper intentions, the more we allow ourselves to move toward love.

Operating from a place of love reshapes the world.

That is the basis of the New Story. A world created from love, from a sense of communion and oneness. From there hierarchy begins to soften. Time loosens its grip. The land is understood again as sacred. Masculine and feminine come back into balance. Communities begin to form around care rather than control.

Life begins to emerge in a more organic and unforced way.

And that emergence is seeded in liminal space, once we separate ourselves from the Old Story and choose to live differently.

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Listening to Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Summit on Crime Survivors: Commercial Sexual Exploitation

January 29, 2026 – Seattle City Hall

This week I attended the second annual Summit on Crime Survivors, focused specifically on Commercial Sexual Exploitation. I went because I knew this was an area I did not understand well enough, particularly as it relates to our region. I wanted to learn, to listen, and to better orient myself to a reality that is often discussed abstractly, if at all.

The morning included remarks from organizers, elected officials, judges, advocates, and service providers. There was discussion of efforts to support victims and to mitigate harm upstream. A recurring theme was the lack of stable resources—especially for prevention. Funding for services is often reimbursement-based and uncertain, which makes long-term planning difficult and proactive work nearly impossible. This pattern is familiar across the nonprofit and government world: we regularly affirm the value of prevention, yet struggle to fund it because its success is, by definition, difficult to prove.

Just last week, I spoke with the executive director of a homeless shelter who shared a variation on a story he hears often: “If I had just had $500 to fix my car, I’d be fine right now. Instead, I lost my job, my car, and now I’m here.” Money to keep shelters open or to provide food is easier to secure than money to fix the car before everything collapses. Different issue, same structural problem. We fund crisis response far more readily than early intervention.

What stayed with me most deeply, however, were the voices of survivors.

While there was a formal survivors’ panel of three women, the room itself was filled with survivors. Many of the people I spoke with casually—standing in line for coffee, chatting between sessions—were survivors. Their presence, their attentiveness to one another, and their quiet leadership were striking. One woman noticed I had taken a seat in the back of the room and immediately invited me to join her table. She was a survivor. She was kind, grounded, and extraordinarily aware of others. Throughout the day, she made space for people, checked in on them, and helped orient those who seemed overwhelmed. Without any formal role, she became a kind of unofficial host. Watching her care for others was deeply moving.

Another survivor I met while waiting in line for lunch—I’ll call her “T”—shared a sense of real discouragement. She had prepared extensively to testify before a legislative committee in Olympia on these very issues. She was scheduled to testify remotely near the end of the session, but as earlier speakers went over their allotted time, she was ultimately cut and never given the opportunity to speak. Preparing to publicly share a deeply personal story is not a small thing, and having that opportunity disappear carries its own harm.

When I mentioned that I had recently met one-on-one with the state legislator who chairs that committee, her entire demeanor changed. She lit up. There was surprise, relief, and something like hope all at once. She immediately recognized his name and role, and I could feel how much it mattered to her that someone in that position was paying attention. I shared that he had raised this issue himself in our conversation—that it clearly mattered to him, that he and his staff were actively researching approaches from other countries, and that this work was not peripheral for him.

It didn’t undo the fact that she had been silenced that day. But it did seem to lift something. There was a sense that her preparation hadn’t been wasted, that her voice belonged in that space even if it hadn’t been heard yet. The timing of that exchange—having spoken with him just weeks before, having this be the very issue he raised unprompted, and then standing in that lunch line with her—felt quietly profound. I felt genuinely honored to be able to share that moment with her.

The survivors’ panel itself challenged many common assumptions. Two of the three women had been groomed or manipulated into exploitation at a very young age. It was decades later before they fully understood themselves as victims. This is the reality of coercion: being forced into something in ways that are not always immediately recognizable as force.

Another panelist, a trans woman, shared that a roommate had secretly filmed and livestreamed her for years without her knowledge—capturing not only her body, but her transition. That detail mattered. Not because it made the crime worse in some abstract hierarchy, but because it revealed how exploitation so often intersects with vulnerability, identity, and moments of becoming. Her story made clear that exploitation adapts itself to whatever intimacy or exposure it can extract.

All of these women were used—unknowingly, non-consensually, and unwillingly—for the benefit of others. Two of the panelists were over sixty years old and had only been living freely for less than a decade. They were from here. They went to school here. They saw classmates drive by while they were trapped in circumstances they didn’t understand and couldn’t escape. One woman said that given the number of times she had been beaten, threatened, sold, drugged, and placed in life-threatening situations, “it’s a miracle that I’m alive.”

What I keep returning to is the cost of telling these stories.

Survivors are repeatedly asked to recount deeply personal trauma in rooms full of professionals—caseworkers, lawyers, judges, policymakers, and concerned citizens. This is not therapeutic entertainment. It is emotionally taxing. It takes something each time. And if listening is where it ends—if stories are gathered but systems remain unchanged—then even well-intentioned attention risks becoming extractive.

Listening is essential. Human connection is essential. Empathy formed through real encounter is different from empathy formed through reports or statistics. It shapes judgment. It sharpens discernment. It changes how decisions are made.

But empathy alone does not correct structural misalignment. Systems that reliably fund reaction while struggling to fund mitigation will continue to produce harm, no matter how aware we become. Prevention is harder to measure, harder to justify, and harder to defend politically—but the cost of neglecting it is borne by real people, often for decades.

This experience did not leave me with answers. It left me with a clearer sense of responsibility: to stay attentive to where human connection should inform decision-making, to question funding structures that privilege symptoms over causes, and to remain unsettled when awareness is mistaken for action.

That unease, I think, is where the real work begins.

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A Veil to Protect Community

When a veil of ignorance is better for connection

I had an interesting experience at a recent council meeting.

In the run up to the election, some residents were expressing discontent about government transparency. Similarly, there is a community issue now that some residents feel has not been appropriately publicized with enough time or opportunity for the public to affect change. Putting facts aside, both the Mayor and I have discussed improving community communication and transparency in our new terms, and I have no doubt other councilmembers feel the same way.

So, at a recent meeting, our City Administrator shared that she intended to start publishing a report following council meetings that would summarize meeting activities and decisions made. I don’t know if this was her idea, the Mayor’s, or someone else’s, but I thought it sounded great. It felt like a practical way to meet people where they are. Not everyone has the time—or frankly the inclination—to watch a two + hour meeting or dig through packet materials. A short recap is one small way to reduce friction between what happens inside Council Chambers and what community members experience outside it.

She followed that announcement with a question for council: would we be comfortable publishing how each councilmember voted on each item in those reports?

The question itself was reasonable. Our meetings are already open to the public. Community members attend in person, meetings are livestreamed, and recordings are available afterward. Anyone can go back at any time and see how any of us voted on any item. Still, there was something a bit awkward about the moment—not because of the question itself, but because we were being asked, publicly and in real time, to name our comfort level with a particular presentation of transparency.

I felt deeply conflicted.

At a fundamental level, I believe in truth. I believe that we are all entitled to the truth, and that the obfuscation of facts is what so often leads to mistrust and conflict. All of our votes are public record. Anyone can watch the meetings and hear the discussion that led to those votes. So why the inner turmoil?

The Mayor went around the room inviting each councilmember to share their thoughts. One raised a concern about personal safety, noting that attacks on political figures seem to be increasing nationally. Importantly, that councilmember also expressed support for transparency and suggested that we could try publishing names alongside votes and reassess later if it became a problem. Others largely agreed that transparency was good and that sharing names and votes was acceptable.

Then it was my turn.

This is where circumstance mattered — but not quite in the way I first thought. I happened to be attending the meeting remotely. I’d been fighting a bug and didn’t want to risk passing it along. What mattered most wasn’t that I couldn’t fully read the room — it was that I couldn’t feel how others were holding the moment as I prepared to speak.

I couldn’t sense whether other councilmembers tensed up, or relaxed, as the question made its way around the room. I couldn’t see whether anyone felt defensive as they answered, or relieved, or simply thoughtful. And when it came time for me to speak, that disconnection somehow left me more alone. I couldn’t see heads nodding in agreement — or in disbelief. I couldn’t tell whether people were looking at me like I was saying something obvious, something risky, or something strange. I was speaking without knowing whether what I was offering was landing as shared insight or solitary dissent.

That aloneness may have heightened my discomfort — or it may have grounded me more deeply in myself. I’m honestly not sure. Without the usual cues, I had less ability to adjust, soften, or reassure in real time. But I also had less temptation to perform. I couldn’t read the room, so I had to listen more closely inward. And perhaps that made it easier to speak honestly about the tension I was actually holding, rather than the position I thought I was supposed to defend.

I tried to quiet myself and speak from my heart. I wanted to be honest about both what I believe and where I felt conflict. I said, essentially, that I support transparency. I stand behind every vote I cast and am always willing to explain how I arrived at a decision. I would never hide from that.

And at the same time, I wasn’t sure it was wise to print names next to votes in a summary report.

Why?

Because I think there’s a meaningful difference between accessibility of information and presentation of information. In the run up to the election, we saw how quickly debates can become contentious. I worry that a single vote — stripped of context and reduced to a line item — can start to function like a label. I would hate for a vote on one issue to cause people to feel that a councilmember is “on one side or the other,” and therefore not really representing them. I would hate for anyone to feel we are not accessible to them.

There’s also something about how we work as a council. Once we vote, we speak with one voice — the voice of the council. That doesn’t erase differences, and I’m not suggesting it should. But it does mean the action taken is collective. If a report starts to read like a scorecard — names next to votes, week after week — it may unintentionally train people to engage with us as fixed representatives of a camp rather than as neighbors trying to solve complex, evolving problems together.

So I suggested a middle path: publish the numerical outcome of votes, without names. “Council supported this measure unanimously,” or “This was a challenging 4–3 vote.” That information matters. A unanimous vote signals alignment. A narrow vote signals difficulty, deliberation, and real disagreement. The numbers tell a story without immediately personalizing it.

Keeping that thin veil between the numbers and the people might, in some cases, help preserve connection. Publishing names might just as easily deepen division.

This is where I find myself thinking about John Rawls, the American political philosopher who introduced the “veil of ignorance” in A Theory of Justice as a way of designing fair systems without knowing one’s own position within them — not in a strict philosophical sense, but in a way that feels relevant here.

That idea is usually about designing society without knowing where you personally will land in it. That’s not what we were doing. We weren’t designing society; we were deciding how to communicate decisions already made.

Still, the metaphor resonates for me. Sometimes a small, intentional veil can reduce the instinct to personalize and polarize. It can help people stay with the substance of an issue rather than immediately sorting the humans involved into categories. Not a thick veil. Not secrecy. Just enough to keep the focus where it belongs.

Importantly, the information would still be there. Anyone who wants to know how I voted can still find it. Nothing is hidden. The question is whether our summary should foreground individual names next to votes, or whether it should focus on outcomes and point those who want more detail back to the full meeting, where context lives.

Because context matters. A simple “yes” or “no” next to a name can mean very different things depending on the question. A vote against something can just as easily mean “not this version,” “not this timing,” or “I’m worried about unintended consequences.” A procedural vote — whether to advance a draft or bring something back — can get mistaken for a final position. Even in calm times, this happens. In polarized times, it happens faster.

When I finished, the Mayor acknowledged the perspective and emphasized that the meetings remain public and the recordings remain available. Anyone who wants to know how a specific councilmember voted can watch the meeting and see not just the vote, but the discussion that led to it. She then asked the council whether we were comfortable, for now, moving forward with publishing vote outcomes by numbers rather than by name. Council agreed.

It felt strange to voice something that felt slightly contrarian — even contrarian to my own instincts — and then see it accepted as our current approach. And it’s important to say this wasn’t about me persuading anyone. The City Administrator brought forward a good idea for improving communication. The Mayor facilitated the conversation thoughtfully. Other councilmembers raised valid points, including the idea that we could try full attribution and adjust later if needed. This was the council working through something together.

But sitting with it in the days and weeks since, it continues to feel right — at least for now, and at least in the context of a written summary report.

Sometimes hearing someone’s position on something creates division. And that position can be based on misunderstanding — either in your mind or theirs. That doesn’t mean the answer is less truth. It may mean more discernment in how truth is shared.

So it’s possible that this thin little veil — keeping the substance public while softening the personalization — will do more to protect the community than having everything out in everyone’s face at all times. The information remains accessible. Accountability remains intact. But the invitation stays open to see one another as neighbors doing difficult work together, rather than as avatars of a side.

And in a time when political division feels easy — and connection feels harder — maybe that veil is worth keeping.

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Imagining and Welcoming a New Story

Following Session 3: Imagining and Welcoming a New Story

December 10, 2025 – January 12, 2026

Synthesis Statement

This session offered an opportunity to examine how we have come to organize our lives with an overemphasis on the wrong values or qualities of reality, or, perhaps more accurately, a misunderstanding of the hierarchies in which we live. 

Many of us implicitly take the Market Economy as the primary driver in our lives. And in daily experience, it can often feel that way. However, more foundational than the market economy is the Human Economy. It is our human minds that created markets, as well as communities, systems of care, compassion, and expressions of wisdom. And even these are nested within an even greater Natural Economy, where the forces and rhythms of nature govern our very existence. And so, we have it backwards. We should instead ground our strength and understanding of reality first in the natural world, and then allow our modes of existing to align with that. This framing of nested economies is articulated by Vandana Shiva. 

When we fail to see the forest for the trees, our limited vision drives decisions that generate disharmony. That disharmony is now threatening our collective well-being, and even our continued existence within these systems. At the time of writing, we see rising inflation, persistently high levels of economic insecurity, mass incarceration, widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots, and increasingly turbulent weather events occurring with greater frequency and severity.

The path to course correction lies in immersing ourselves in recognition and practice of different foundational qualities: respect for one another, an appreciation of the world as sacred, an openness to larger natural rhythms

Report on Practice

This period was a bit different than the others – not because it was more profound, but because it was messier, slower, and more constrained by life as it actually showed up. I was quite ill for more than half of this period, and it unfolded amid the chaos of the holidays. My wife returned from her extended travels, and we had a readjustment period with another person living in the house. 

One goal this period was to select from a provided list of ‘foundational qualities’ and live into them personally and professionally. While we had reviewed and discussed these qualities as a group, choosing which ones to focus on in my own practice was itself a provocative endeavour. Do I go with what feels familiar and accessible? Or do I push farther outside of my comfort zone and attempt to engage what feels most foreign? What might be the healthiest for me long term? What might be best for the program? What might be healthiest for me in the long term? What might be most generative for the program? What might open my eyes in ways others would not?

I went back and forth for some time. Eventually I quieted down and allowed a few qualities to speak to me. The truth is most of them resonated as true and meaningful. Many were qualities I felt I already felt I lived into in various ways – not perfectly, but not superficially either. Still, there were three in particular that called to me just a bit more loudly during this cycle. 

Non-Hierarchy

This quality posed the greatest challenge for me. The idea was that today’s hierarchies are problematic for a multitude of reasons and that a healthier future will function in a much more non-hierarchical way. I offer this reflection primarily to highlight my own struggle. 

I was not able to discover a non-hierarchical truth here. Perhaps I will one day. I can agree deeply that our current value hierarchies are misaligned with structures that would be more globally beneficial. And yet, hierarchies seem inevitable in nature itself: atoms into molecules, into cells, into tissues, into organs, into systems, into bodies, into families, into cultures, into, into, into. It’s turtles all the way up, and down. 

Bureaucracy, for better or worse, becomes a necessary tool for organizing complexity at scale. Can we do better? Yes. Should we? Absolutely. Does that mean looking deeply at our current structures and potentially disrupting them? Certainly. But does that mean that hierarchies themselves are inherently bad? I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. 

Oneness

Can we include all people as we think through problems? Can we make decisions that treat everyone equitably? We certainly should try. How do we value everyone and everything for what it is – as a foundational orientation – before we begin making decisions? This feels like a noble effort, and one I attempt to embrace in my work as an elected official.

I tried to meditate daily on this idea, and to notice where my openness to oneness breaks down. I thought of professional experiences in which people failed to honor commitments, cheated, lied, or acted out of greed or self-interest. In situations where I experienced myself as the “victim,” it was those individuals with whom I struggled most to feel a sense of oneness. It is easy to feel that “we are all in this together” in the abstract. It is much harder when someone has taken from you, overtly or covertly. 

In a conversation with my program partner, we discussed this struggle, and he reminded me of the value of forgiveness. That immediately clicked. Forgiveness became a doorway to oneness. 

As I reflected further, I realized that not forgiving is a way of holding onto the past. It keeps turbulent emotions alive within me, while the other person may not be thinking about me at all. Much of my pain, I noticed, was actually anger at myself for not seeing warning signs, for not protecting myself, for how I responded in those moments. 

In that sense, forgiveness is largely about forgiving myself. It allows me to move forward without forgetting what happened. I can remember who those people showed themselves to be and choose not to give them what I once did, while also recognizing that they, too, are living in their own limited worlds, shaped by their own interpretations of life and reality. And in that, we are the same. 

I am not fully there yet. I know that certain situations may still bring emotional turbulence. But I am closer to oneness than I was when this practice began, and for that, I am grateful. 

Living in Harmony with Time Rather Than a Strictly Linear View 

Throughout my life, I have had many experiences that have broadened my perspective of time. I have experienced moments of déjà vu where I recall memories (sometimes even recalling the memory of having the memory) only later to find myself living through the event. I have also  experienced moments where intentions or desires manifested not through effort or force, but in their own time, when they were naturally ready to come about. 

A recent and relatively mundane example helped clarify this distinction for me. 

For some time, I had anticipated the need for an additional car. My son is now driving and needs transportation for school, extracurricular activities, and time with friends. We had been sharing cars, but it reached a point where doing so created more conflict our schedules could comfortably support. So, I began shopping for a car and eventually made a purchase in the second week of December. 

Because the car was out of state, it needed to be shipped. I also authorized the dealer to send temporary plates so I could drive the car while awaiting for permanent plates – a fairly standard process. Around this same time, I became quite ill, likely with some form of the flu. Despite this, my project management instincts kicked in. I tracked timelines, followed up with the dealer repeatedly, monitored shipping details, and pushed to resolve outstanding issues such as registration paperwork and infotainment system pairing. 

Despite my efforts, progress was very slow. The dealer was at times unresponsive, and it wasn’t until the second week of January that everything was fully complete: the car was in my driveway, the system was connected, and the temporary plates arrived. 

Looking back from a broader perspective, I can see that during the holidays my family’s schedule was more flexible. While I was sick, I wasn’t driving much anyway. When I actually needed an additional car, there was one available. By the time school resumed and schedules tightened, everything was in place. In other words, we had exactly what we needed, when we needed it. 

I don’t share this to suggest that one should never intervene. In fact, the dealer made an error and failed to process the temporary plates until I followed up. But the larger rhythm of events unfolded differently than the timeline I believed was necessary. The car became legally drivable when I truly needed it, and not before. 

When I widen the lens further, this pattern appears elsewhere in my life. After the stress of nearly losing my wife to cancer (she is thankfully in remission), the loss of my daughter, and deep vocational burnout, I needed the world to slow down. And in many ways, it did. I was given time to step into a meaningful role on the City Council, time to be more present with my son, time to grieve, and time to begin reimagining how I want to live the next chapter of my life. 

That work continues. Daily meditation helps me stay present – feeling what I feel, thinking what I think, evaluating options, reshaping habits, and slowly stepping into a New Story. I still don’t know exactly what that story is, but I am becoming more comfortable with not knowing. 

In our last session, someone shared the idea of emptying ourselves so we can be a vessel for input from Spirit. I am finding increasing comfort in that emptiness. We also heard the words: I don’t need to see. I don’t need to know. I only ask to be of use. That feels like one of the only sane aspirations in a world that so often feels absurd. 

Poem

Finally, this period, we were asked to write a poem that expresses our sense of our collective need for a new story. Here’s mine:

Nurture has dominated Nature.
The masses are exhausted.
I am exhausted.

What do you see, little bird, as you look down upon the world?
Do you see the angst? Do you see the confusion? 
Animals pushed out of developments. 
The “unsophisticated” pushed to the margins. 
Culture pushed out for power. 
It’s cheaper to feed than cage, 
but caging feeds the powerful, 
and the powerful are hungry.

And where is healing? How do we find solace? 
It’s here. 
It’s now. 
It will be present, 
when enough people are too.

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