This month’s question is from our dear friend Jessica in Canada:

A question is burningly alive this very moment as I am writing and drinking tea in the quietness of a slow morning:

I wonder where is home. No wait, what is home? A geographic location? An address where to receive mail? A warm room to gather family and friends? A place to sleep safely? Or drink tea peacefully? A place inside to rest? The belly? The forest? Is home where beauty lives or can be created? Is home the way we look at the world?1

From Debra …

Beloved Jessica, I have carried your beautiful questions like a sacred bundle ever since you sent them to us a few weeks ago. What is home? For me, one answer is the comfort of rituals where things stay in place: The cup is there. The grinder and coffee beans are there. The kettle is there. The moon is up there. The sun comes up over there. Joe is there and tends plants in a garden that is there. I feel anchored by these semblances of permanence in my life. And that can also change in a blink. Years ago, our house was claimed by the fire gods and later, a hurricane came close to blowing away the one we live in now. By grace, a felt sense of home remained intact within me throughout both adventures.

I also think of one of our most beloved elders, Uncle Bob Randall, who was a Yankunytjatjara Elder and a traditional owner of Uluru (Ayers Rock) in Australia. He was a great-hearted, inspirational man who worked tirelessly for Aboriginal land rights and the welfare of his community and culture. He and his wife Barbara were the very first guests to stay in our current home that had (eventually) risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the former house. Time with Uncle Bob was deeply magical and fostered a profound understanding of belonging, home and so much more.

When he was seven, Bob was forcibly removed from his family, one of many children who became known as the Stolen Generation. He was placed in a Methodist Mission for mixed-heritage children, thousands of miles from his home and people. He was given a new identity and date of birth. And he never saw his mother again. When he first arrived at the institution, he was beaten for speaking his own language and was left sobbing on the ground. As he tells it, there beside him at eye level was a small tuft of grass. It was what finally comforted him. He knew the earth as his mother and the grass was a relative … family that created home in an otherwise hostile environment. Miraculously, he never forgot his roots despite every effort to obliterate them.

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This month’s question is from our dear friend Aybike in Türkiye:

What does a person need to pay attention to in order to age and die in a way most natural to human nature? And how can one, while still young, take concrete steps and prepare for a dignified aging and dying?1

From Debra …

Dearest Aybike, your questions land at a tender and deeply auspicious time in my life. Joe and I have just returned from a trip to Arizona to distribute the ashes of a dear friend who passed away last June … our friend Carl, the magical bee mentor I was blessed to apprentice with for a year when the bees first slipped under my radar and colonized my heart. We accompanied his partner, our beloved friend Joan, and her precious sister Cindy to a place called Cochise’s Stronghold, a rugged, high-desert maze of massive rock formations in Arizona’s Dragoon Mountains. Here the great Chiricahua Apache warrior Cochise was born and died. He was a hero of Carl’s. Both were geniuses, committed to their people (for Cochise, humans; for Carl, the bee nation), fierce, and exceptionally imaginative. It was Carl’s dearest wish that his ashes be scattered on that holy ground.

Our journey on the day of the ceremony brought us to a piñon tree at the foot of stunning pink granite domes and sheer cliffs. It was extremely hot but we made due in the shade of that drought-hardy pine. The desert, with its astonishing annual cactus bloom all around us, felt like an altar consecrated for our sacred purpose. We all spoke, offered prayers and tears, were silent, and then handful by handful, commended the ashy remains of Carl’s body to the earth.

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This month’s question is a distillation from two of our dear friends, Pınar (in London, UK) and Berna (in Sydney, Australia):

In a world where genocide, violence, and marginalization have become normalized, what kind of community is needed for genuine inner development, sanity and capacity for compassion?

From Debra …

Your question is much on my own heart’s mind, Pınar and Berna. I offer you my experience from this week. Joe and I just spent a three-day weekend with a circle of people who are all part of the Eagle Condor Healing Intensive, a five-month program exploring Andean cosmology and earth-centered healing traditions with 21 people who now feel like family. We are doing a deep dive together about the very things you ask about: genuine inner development, sanity and capacity for compassion. This beautiful wisdom tradition understands the world as animate, responsive and profoundly relational … and is very resonant with other practices Joe and I already have.

Last Saturday, we spent a full day of exercises, prayers, healing, stories, and time on the land. In the evening, we participated in a potent ceremony about forgiveness … and then silently headed to bed. I stay off my phone and computer during these retreats, but that night, I used my phone to set the alarm and noticed messages expressing concern about my friends in Iran. This year has been particularly brutal for Iranians, but I could tell something else was also afoot. And of course it was. As I was about to go to sleep, my own country was dropping bombs on my beloveds’ community in Tehran. Another horrifying world event and a much more complex conversation than I have time for here. On Saturday night, I dissolved into sobbing as Joe quietly held me and later I drifted off with a book of poetry in my hands.

I woke up very early on Sunday morning, deeply sad, and went out to the creek beside our lodge. I offered tobacco, cornmeal, roses and prayers to the swiftly rushing water. Some of the petals flowed over the rocks, where I expected them to go. But others, surprisingly, circled back towards me, pushing into the stones along the shore like they were going to linger there, and then arcing back into the rapidly moving stream … eventually joining the other petals downstream. I could not see the hidden eddy under the surface that sent some of the flowers my way. There was an invisible undercurrent that only revealed itself to me because I sat there watching what was floating on the surface. I found myself suddenly calmed by something that was happening in its own timing and way. Not governed by my expectations. I took heart from that, trusting that something beyond what my mind can fathom is also moving through this world. How to befriend the arc of how long it can take for some changes to happen? How do we really do that? I think it comes down to connection and community.

I left the creek and returned to the lodge, sitting for an hour by myself in front of my altar, then went upstairs, cried in a brother’s arms, laughed at someone’s joke, had tea and toast, and rooted myself in the presence of generous people who are all committed to showing up in this life no matter the (especially human) weather.

We came home on Sunday afternoon and hadn’t even stepped out of our car before our friend River, who also lives on the land, called out that an owl had been injured. A screech owl had flown into one of his windows. We went right down and saw it was in shock but nothing was broken. I made a small shelter around it and all of us checked on it until well into the dark. By the next morning, Little Bit (as I call it) was still in the world, but still in shock, and so I drove it to the amazing folks at the Appalachian Wildlife Refuge not far from us. The owl was concussed and it turns out there are staff there who specialize in treating screech owl concussions. Who knew? I was so uplifted. Small moments can sometimes bring the greatest consolation.

The next day, I was talking with my wise compadre Sarah Whiteley from England. We have a mutual friend from Iran who lives in Turkey with his family. He is our touchstone for news of friends in Tehran and when I began this writing, there was none. At all. Phone lines and the internet have been down. People are desperate for news. His mother lives in Tehran less than two miles from a hospital that was recently bombed (named Mahatma Gandhi Hospital, for heaven’s sake). We spoke of grieving and Sarah shared something her mentor, Dr. Will Taegel, had learned from his teacher, Bear Heart, who said: “You haven’t relinquished what you are holding onto until you can be fully present in the circle with your bare feet on the ground with people who fully love you. … To relinquish in this way you need a tribe of people and all living things. You can’t do it just by looking inward.”1

I realized what has kept my bare feet on the ground since Saturday night were two streams: my offerings to the water, my altar, practices, prayers, wisdom traditions, tears, silence, conversation, poetry, laughter, and the comfort of tea; and community (both human and other-than) with my beloved Joe, that creek on Sunday morning, my Eagle Condor circle, other friends, and a small precious screech owl in need of help … who was struggling to stay in this world. As my friends in Iran and in so many other places, are also trying to do.

Where can we put our bare feet on the ground with people who really love us? Who is our community and where do we belong? What if there isn’t a tribe of deep divers right at hand? And what if we are isolating ourselves by misguided notions: like other folks have easier access to people who effortlessly love each other all the time … or that community has to be defined by always being with humans … or that true connection always take a long time to establish. (Sometimes the tiniest moment with someone, even a stranger, can root us in a greater steadiness.) We have relatives all around us … the two-leggeds, yes, but also the four-leggeds, wingeds, rooteds and other nations. We have elders, saints, teachers, poets, and neighbors; and also dogs, cats, birds, trees, clouds and soil. And if there is any one way I constantly lean when I cannot (or don’t want to) connect with people, but still want community, I take my sorrows, my broken heart and my questions to nature. Like last weekend beside the creek. And with that little owl. I am always met in those places. Always.

There is a lovely little poem by AE Hines called “Peace Treaty” about a man who makes peace with a tarantula in his shower. In it, he speaks of the territory they share: that thin wet line / between curious and afraid / where each of us must make a home.2 Let us help each other navigate this life, poised on that edge between curious and afraid. If ever there was a time to step out of our isolated sorrowing, it is now.

From Filiz …

My village in southern Türkiye is about 2000 km from the Iranian border and it would take me approximately 24 hours to drive there without taking any breaks. I once took a train from Ankara to Tehran with a dear friend and it took us 70 hours to finally step on the ancient and magnificent land called Persia. That was 13 years ago.

One day I dream to return to this sacred place of poetry, heart and hospitality

So as you might imagine, I am deeply troubled by the recent events in Iran and the rest of the Middle East, which is, unfortunately, history repeating itself and the worst of humanity shattering our common sense.

This intense and rapid escalation of unutterable injustice and violence at an unprecedented scale in recent years is shaking the foundations of our identity and belonging in the human collective. Our house is on fire! It is a moment of reckoning, and dizzyingly so.

Crossing and Navigating Liminal Thresholds

There was a time in my life when I would often quote Margaret Wheatley’s “Whatever the problem, community is the answer.” What I meant by community back then was people who either intentionally lived together or gathered around a common goal of learning something particular, a.k.a. a community of practice. For about 20 years, I was completely immersed in research and practices to cultivate collective wisdom through deep listening and conversations that matter. The deeper I dug into the maze of community processes, the more I realized how much we have lost through the cracks of contemporary culture, the bitter consequence of what we called progress and modernity.

Since my youth I’ve been personally in touch with the mystery that lies beyond the reach of the overculture founded upon logos, transactionality and violence.
I also sincerely believed that we can strategically manufacture change at a collective level if we were intentional about it. I am by no means an “expert” on change. However I no longer believe that large-scale change happens by being strategic about it. There are other countless, complex factors and mysterious, larger-than-life forces that come into play. Poetry, for instance, is more powerful than bureaucracy; myth moves people far more effectively than laws or even oppression ever could. A pandemic can erupt any moment and disrupt all of our plans. You get my point.

Victor Turner was a British anthropologist who did extensive field research into liminality and threshold experiences with the Ndembu tribe of North-West Zambia, studying their rituals and rites of passages. He also expanded his research into pilgrimages, countercultural movements, festivals, performance studies and theater. As a result, he developed his theory of communitas. Communitas is an intense and spontaneous spirit of community that emerges in liminal (threshold) spaces/times where people are temporarily free of their usual social roles and hierarchies. Turner focused on the interplay between social structure and anti-structure; liminality and communitas are both essential elements of anti-structure.

“Structure is the world of status, roles, offices and power while communitas is the domain of love, myth and of mystical unity with everyone and everything.”3

We need structure to maintain a certain level of predictability and stability in everyday life. Yet when those societal and cultural structures get very rigid, and power concentrates in the hands of few people and institutions, we start losing the plurality and diversity that sustain us. Consequently, chaos is bound to happen.

So, are we literally moving into an era of global anti-structure? Is there a massive planetary communitas afoot?

I trust life is orchestrating this movement—in the disguise of an outrageous burst of madness— from the unconscious towards consciousness. I believe in the rage and grief we feel which is bound to create new pathways for life to flourish. We too are life seeking its full expression.

The community we need at this time?

For me, the invitation in this question lies in surrendering and letting go of my old notions of community—and even the expectation and self-inflicted pressure to be in community. Because, let me tell you: I have never been so disconnected from human bodies and human community in my life as I am in this moment. And it is fucking scary with everything going on in the world right now.

Down the rabbit hole, I flip the original question to this one:
Do I dare to open myself up to participating in spontaneous emergence of communitas anywhere, anytime, with any life form?

Let us end on the wings of poetry, and with one of the strongest poetic voices of our time. A taste of my kind of communitas …

A BRAVE AND STARTLING TRUTH
by Maya Angelou

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth

And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms

When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil

When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze

When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse

When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets

Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world

When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe

We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear

When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.

Thank you Pınar and Berna and this Holy Mischief community for joining us on this new path of monthly enquiry. We encourage all of you to add your voice to the conversation in the comments below. We are not experts (about anything) and do not have The Answers. We are fellow feeling humans like you, concerned about this world, how everyone is doing and how to best show up in this life. We are very interested in what is stirring in your hearts and minds. We have learned a lot from your responses to the February post about thresholds (both on the thread and in person).

We continue to welcome your burning concerns, ponderings and questions which you can forward to: debra@holybeepress.com. We will circle round another one of them in April. All our hearts are breaking. May they break open together. It is good to fall down the rabbit hole with you.

🧡 Debra and Filiz.

PS from Debra: Our friends in Tehran managed to get a short message through a few hours ago that they, their families and our other friend’s mother are okay. But the situation itself is not and other people have experienced devastating losses. May peace be upon them and upon this world.

I check daily on the welfare of Little Bit the owl. So far all is well and I hope the staff at the rehab center will bring him back in these coming weeks to return to his forest and our shared neighborhood.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke1

Welcome to DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE.

Starting today we will be chasing some delicious carrots, also known as the most delightful questions in the universe, down the rabbit hole!

In our second season of Holy Mischief, in addition to our individual posts, we offer this monthly column. Let us explore new places and possibilities with curiosity and awe, as companions on the long wide road between our minds and hearts.

We would like to invite you to share your most heartfelt, burning questions:
Which ones are alive in you right now that most ignite your fire, passion and longing?

Extraordinary adventures begin with timely and beautiful wonderings.
Let us take the first leap together … down the rabbit hole! 🥕

This month’s question is from our dear friend Khushmita in India:

I am lingering at the edge of thresholds, at doorways, rites of passage, and the quiet turning of eras. What gives us the courage to step into the unknown? What carries us through passages that frighten us, unsettle us, undo us? And what opens us to the sacred, even as we grieve what is closing, even as we loosen our grip on what we have loved, even as we allow transformation to wash through us and re-shape our becoming?

From Filiz …

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.2

Dear Khush, as I sit with your question, Leonard Cohen begins to sing in my head and his wise lyrics and beautiful music move me to tears. In fact, there are many many tears these days for what is becoming visible and known in our world, for the suffering we humans cause one another and other beings, for my own struggles and aging body … And I keep thinking, as above, so below; as within, so without.

I know from my life that when the shit hits the fan and the dark night of the soul summons me, it is time to surrender, to let go, to learn and to grow in the direction of love and wholeness. There have been instances in my life when I did not know which step to take and by nature’s design, I was forced to bow down in humility, be with what is, and sit in the discomfort of not-knowing. And, to my great surprise, I was always guided by an invisible hand to my sacred next.

Ever since my first deep dive, my first descent into the dark soil of my own life, what unfolded within that elusive landscape planted a tiny seed of trust in me. I keep that seed close to my heart, cultivate it with care and attention, with intuition and prayer.
I would say this is the main practice that allows me to lean into change and not-knowing.

If the wisdom of cycles holds, if life’s organizing principle and creative force move the same way through a collective as through an individual life, then maybe this is not a crackdown, but the crack where the light gets in, as the poet says.

Back in 2010, when I walked the Camino de Santiago3 for five weeks, the pilgrimage became a profound training for surrender and trust. I didn’t have a plan, I didn’t have a map, and I didn’t have a smartphone; I simply followed a yellow arrow4 and my inner guidance for about 800 km, crossing the plains, valleys, mountains, towns and villages of northern Spain. Every morning I would set out walking and get somewhere, as far as my feet could carry me on that day, eat whatever I could find in that town or village, stay wherever I could find a bed to sleep on. Then I would do it all over again the next day.

This embodied experience instilled in me something that can never be taught in books or schools: Life is a mystery. Skills needed to live with this understanding— presence, deep listening, spontaneity—are quite different than those required when one is conditioned to strangle that mystery by controlling everything.

Ancient pilgrimage routes sprang up all around the world for one specific reason:
To teach people to take a leap of faith.

Without that leap, I could not have gone anywhere.
I would not have found Debra. What would my life be like then?

The only other thing that helps me reconcile with the unknown is poetry, which is another form of pilgrimage—one of language. Poems can gently smuggle us into the arms of mystery without frightening us. I often lean into my favorite poets’ verses to find courage and guidance, to put one step in front of the other when I can’t see far ahead.

May the spaces between our fleeting moments of presence and trust be brief.

THE WAY IN
By Linda Hogan

Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.

From Debra …

I feel deeply stirred by sitting with the cluster of Khush’s beautiful questions, each one like a bead on a mala5, my fingers moving from one to the next to the next. They quiet me and something moves inside, like holy water shaping the stones it flows through.

I wonder what a threshold really is? A door or opening in a wall? A ruin or modern structure? Is it stone, wood, paper, a piece of silk, a curtain of beads, feathers and bones? A color? A window? A mirror? A great unblinking eye? Is it moonlit or sunlit, have a fragrance, or particular temperature, quality of light, or frisson of energy?

These times are full of heightened spookiness and intense exhaustion for a lot of people. Not knowing … what to do, how to move forward, or how to make sense of what is happening … is a valid place, as important as resting in a yes or no even if it is more uncomfortable. When we know that we don’t know, we can take a pause, rest our minds and treasure the richness of what seems like an empty void, but isn’t. It is a field alive with information and sensations, whispers and intuitions, and all the navigational wisdom we need. It is a good time to listen, like sitting with an elder we respect who is taking her time to share a story. And it is helpful to let go of figuring things out in favor of noticing what is being revealed (which is the actual plot line). May we be patient with our impatience because this revelation is holy business and it is ours.

Our portal moments are not static, despite all appearances. They are part of a continuum and flow in our lives, where what we need to know can feel like a time-released vitamin capsule. Almost too unfathomably slow to tolerate sometimes, but moving nevertheless. And often we have already stepped through one before we have consciously registered it. It is helpful to breathe, do our practices, grieve, create, cook, have conversations, pray … and to keep our walking shoes close at hand.

A portal is also a place we can make offerings … to lay down tobacco, scatter flower petals, burn incense, to leave fruit and honey and prayers. It is a time to look around and take in the 360 degrees of every direction. Neither our paths nor our lives are linear: with one future in front of us, one past behind us, and a fixed-doorway-point in between. We live in a vast sphere of fluid possibilities and presence. Fear, impatience and discomfort can narrow our gaze and constrict our perception of what is true: that we are immense, multi-dimensional and wildly imaginative creatures … and we are not alone.

Who is there at these thresholds? Who is really there? At the end of his life, my Grandpa Roy waved at family on the “other side” before he passed; my mother saw puppies (in a dog-free house). Other friends at the edge have had engaging conversations with people I could not see, but were clearly real for them. Who is standing beside us or at our back? Who is before us, extending their hands (or trying to flag us down 😎) ? Who has left breadcrumbs? What nature beings, spirits, animals guides, ancestors, devas, deities, guardian angels, or elementals accompany us? When I take the hand or paw or wing of the one I’m with, I feel an inevitable rush of tenderness that reminds me that we have a much larger family of support than meets the eye and we are more loved than we can imagine.

We are all collectively swimming in the questions that Khush poses. Thresholds, portals and doorways feel like small pale words when faced with the magnitude of eruption and transformation we are all in. Every day I hear about events that utterly appall me and others that are so infused with kindness, courage and generosity that I am on my knees. In the last few days, Joe and I attended two elder circles with remarkable, large-hearted humans who are standing in the fire and who know we are born for these exact times. And as I have done many times over the years, I turn to this Rilke poem, one that has long sustained me:

GO TO THE LIMITS OF YOUR LONGING
by Rainer Maria Rilke6

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

My own capacity to stay steady and rooted in this not-so-quiet turning of an era is very much linked to my creativity, expressed in even the smallest of places and spaces. The other day I was inspired to draw red spirals on my left hand … a favorite symbol that reminds me of the continual unfolding and fluidity of life and the interconnectedness of all things … and that no feeling is final. A weird little DebraVerse cheat sheet for living. As I wash the dishes or see my hand on our car’s steering wheel, stir a pot, pick up clothes, hold a tea cup, wipe the table, or wave at a friend, I am reminded again and again that something benevolent and generous is always spiraling from the heart of life … something life-giving is always emerging amidst the rubble. I came to be part of that.

Thank you for joining us, dear Holy Mischievians, and for helping us to inaugurate this new path of monthly enquiry. We invite you to add your voice to the conversation in the comments below. We are very interested in how these questions land in your heart. And we also encourage you to submit your burning questions to debra@holybeepress.com. We will circle round one of them in March and do another deep dive. It is good to fall down the rabbit hole with you.

🧡 Filiz and Debra 🧡