If you’ve read my first three newsletters of 2025, you may have noticed a continuous search woven through them, reflecting on what might be the most effective ways to relate to the flood of challenging emotions sparked by this time of turmoil we all feel on some level. As a woman just past the threshold of my seventies, the inevitable challenges brought on by my own aging body and those of my husband’s and friends’ has compounded those challenges. Surprisingly, though, a deep dive into the murky waters of grief, fear and anger has also opened a door into the gifts elderhood can hold, lying just beyond mindful attention to those powerful feelings, especially in community with sympathetic others.

It turns out that facing the inevitability of death, one’s own and those of everyone and everything we love and cherish, from people, to ways of life, natural systems and everything else, can turn up the vibrancy and value of the treasures of love, beauty and wonder within all that we value. It seems that the true power of those precious jewels can only fully come home to the heart when they’re understood and opened to as the fleeting sparkles of moving mystery that they are, rather than dependable, predictable rhythms of experience we have any power to control.

And there’s this, when a plant is dying at its apex, that point where its flowers and leaves reach toward the sun, saving it requires supporting what still thrives in its roots, where the energy of life rises in relationship with soil, the composted dead matter previously alive as plants and animals before chemically transforming into soil with the help water, sunlight, bacteria and fungi. Rejuvenating relationships of all kinds can happen in the same way. For instance, when political institutions (among the most complex and inflexible forms of human relationship) are collapsing, strengthening what’s healthy at the “grassroots” of local community can revive and creatively regenerate them. At the heart of that transformation are the daily personal relationships that create a sense of inclusive belonging.        

It’s become abundantly clear this year that times of great turmoil also call for feeding one’s individual spirit, or inspiration, take your pick of words, by periodically turning away from the stress of the continuous upheaval of politics, often coupled with corresponding community and family upheavals, in order to build emotional strength to enable wise engagement with daily challenges in whatever ways can be sustained.           

Thinking back, the emotional experience of 2025 resonates with another dramatic yet completely different time of impending change, upending multiple systems that had for years formed a steadily reliable structure for my daily life. In 2011 I repeatedly spoke to friends about experiencing a kind of vague subconscious rumbling, an odd sense that a huge life change was rolling in on a deep emotional tide, despite my contentment with life just as it was. I couldn’t put a finger on it. Trying to understand that sense felt a bit like trying to understand what creates a perceived flash of movement just beyond peripheral vision, something you know is there but can’t really see. Somehow I simply knew in my bones that big changes were coming, regardless of my desires. That feeling grew gradually into a bone-jangling flow of adrenaline by the end of the summer of 2012, while I helped with logistics for my eldest daughter’s marriage to a young man who had often been a source of family stress during the ten years she had known him.           

There was no way of knowing that five years later, in August 2017, I would be looking back to see both daughters married, my eldest twice, each also with a very young child; I would have retired from a consulting career I had never intended to end and would be married to the love of my life, a man with whom I had been committed in life-partnership for seventeen years, based on love alone rather than legal or religious contract, a settled matter for both of us it had seemed in 2012. Also by 2017, both daughters and I would each have bought a house with our husband and moved, or would be in the process, and my time with the women’s group that had provided crucial emotional support for fifteen years would have ended. Finally, this momentous time period was bookended by my dear nephew’s suicide in September 2012 and the shock of Trump’s ascendance to the U.S. presidency in January 2017, two utterly grief-laden experiences.         

As the combined forces of grief and joy played out through all these changes in the short span of five years, reverberations echoed through every emotional, psychological and physical realm of my being, aligning perfectly in their combined intensity with the sense of a rising tsunami of change on the horizon six years earlier. Reliance on the centering, healing power of meditation and mindfulness practices deepened considerably during that time, transforming a casual commitment into a reliable anchor of available calm in any moment. Those practices entwined with an increasing respect for and reliance on embodied intuition to reveal the most compassionate, practical response to any life situation.          

Staying as aware as possible of all aspects of each moment in the complexity of that rolling five-year learning process also deepened my faith in life itself, reconfirming the notion that there is no wiser rudder to sail this living boat of being than the deeply mysterious knowing rising each day in the energy of this body, discarding ego-driven thoughts and their appetite for certainty for humble attention to the flow of experience below the obvious.           

As the root from which creative imagination grows, intuition is born in the body, in its relationship with everything else in any moment, giving rise to fleeting, quiet wisdom when pausing to pay attention. When its physically energetic prompts can be recognized and followed, something that becomes easier with consistent contemplative practice, intuition leads down a path toward deepening love for the world and wiser ways to engage in the continuous challenge of living into the unending cycle of birth and death with which we’re all entwined.        

Cultural conditioning encourages us to find safety in the illusion of certainty provided by mental constructs generated by the communities into which we’re born. To regenerate ourselves and transform our culture into a life-giving, rather than death-dealing one, the challenge instead is to learn to release ourselves and each other from the bonds of certainty into the curiosity of faith beyond dogma and belief, increasingly knowing ourselves and everything else as mystery and movement, rather than solid form, and process rather than product.           

If you look carefully you may be able to notice that every solid thing or mentally structured system we can ever know is born, develops and eventually dies back into the rich compost of the mystery of creation, giving birth to something else never before imagined. Learning to let go into that process, to become the process, nourishing and practicing compassion for yourself and others as you do, opens a wondrous path of heart where pain and difficulty strengthen and teach right beside joy and gratitude for the kindness and community the gift of human consciousness has the capacity to create.           

Joanna Macy, in her profoundly inspiring wisdom, called that transformation of mind and heart active hope. Active hope is love in joyful service to the great mystery of life, facing all that presents itself to awareness and refocusing the energy of sorrow and pain into compassionate action. Channeling that empowering collaboration to envision healing steps toward a thriving future has the capacity to generate actions that nourish and lift up beauty, love and resilience, helping us to become the lights blinking on in the darkness of fear and bewilderment, illuminating a path toward a brighter future.           

Here is a beautiful poem to nourish your heart through this winter’s darkness.

A Prayer for Belonging 

by Joy Barry

May we remember

that we are not apart from the world,

but a part of its remembering —

its roots, its rivers, its rain.

May we listen

with the soft animal of the heart,

where trust takes root

and belonging grows wild.

May spirit move among us

like wind through the grasses,

reminding us that all things

are kin.