You know when you’re with someone and the “with” feels so alive? You can taste it, grateful it’s not a surface thing. There’s a difference between nourishing conversation and chit chat, just like there’s a difference between goat cheese and Velveeta or The Great Gatsby and Fifty Shades of Grey. When we’re in touch with our essential nature and the way it soulfully meets another, we’re connecting in the mystery.

I parked this clunky bracelet upon my left wrist 22 days ago and took the pledge: three weeks of no complaints. On Day Two I groused about early morning traffic, moved the bracelet to my right wrist, started over. I’ve had close calls in the three weeks, but super-amped awareness keeps me on course. I carefully catch comments and identify them as not complaint, simply observation. There is a technical difference. “There’s a lot of traffic” is not the same as “WTF, why is there so much traffic?”

Right before leaving to Belarus, a surprise call from Esalen came confirming admit to a workshop for which we’d been wait-listed. A spontaneous “yes” landed me (and hubby) at one of my favorite places on earth, barely home a week from the intensity of international travel. I was sleep deprived, still jet-lagged and relatively unclear about my sanity. But when has that ever stopped me?

“I thought of what her exile really meant---that perpetual rootlessness, the ceaseless sense of unbelonging, the warding off of bitter thoughts.” As I sat back on a plane taking me across the world, this early line from Philip Marsden’s The Bronski House captivated me. The riveting story of poetess Zofia Ilinska, whose family hailed from what is now known as Belarus, formed the scaffold of my experience as I traipsed through these same ancestral lands. The parallels were spooky uncanny, their family home a few miles from the very small town of Iv’ye where my grandfather was born.

I am, in general, an early riser upbeat kinda person, greeting each day with anticipation budding. Challenging as it’s been lately, I take in the daily distress of world news and then focus on what is possible in my community, my family, my home, myself. Don’t get me wrong. Each and every day I feel the hovering demons of doubt and despair move in on me. I whisper “hello again” and invite them to slither on into the back seat. Mostly they obey.

From where I sit the entire horizon is visible. There is so much I love about our cyber-connected world, yet it felt like a rare privilege to birthday after three days of total unplug. It’s how it used to be. We now have cell service after many days of disconnect. And I’m ready for Day 9, living and breathing in the lap of the natural world: wave-backed dreams; bird song on first rising; movement of sun, moon, tide; fire-tending. Joseph Campbell says “the goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.”

The ripe field of rooting was up for exploration with the onset of Spring this year. I am a no-gloves dirt digger, despite messy caked nails and skin roughness. I love encouraging desirable tender shoots and uprooting the less beneficial invaders. It is rooting season and out on the practice floor we follow this thread as it spirals up from earth. What is the nature of the bond between our own deep roots and our instinctual animal bellies? And when this coupling is palpable, what feelings emerge as we continue the rise into the flub-a-dub of our own heartbeat?

There are times I come to practice ho-hum habitual. It’s just what I do, this showing up day by day, week by week, moving on a mat or moving on a dance floor. Sometimes I do it because I know what happens if I do not. I like it better when I am drawn for other reasons, but this is just the truth. Sometimes it is pre-emptive. There can be physical fallout, emotional discombobulation, mental confusion…or interesting combinations of all three. When chaos ensues, when I need it the most, the reality of showing up for practice can hit the fan. In these moments, I remember the ancient wandering sadhu yogis who created a Sanskrit language to describe their discoveries about the body-mind union.

Never did sit down and write last week…not a moment to spare. The magnitude and intensity of a workshop like Hardcore Vulnerability requires production skill I’ve been honing for a decade. This pinnacle event delivered a significant chunk of healthcare, now rippling out on multiple levels in many communities. In a possibly futile attempt to help you sense that rippling, I offer a rendering of the personal territory traversed. Just multiply this story by 90 participants, including dancers from Canada, Mexico and Japan, to imagine the extent and profound value of revelatory reverberation.

The territory mined for teaching is usually pretty personal…some classes more than others. I sit with stuff like “well, what’s moving through me?” or “what truly is capturing my attention lately?” or “what’s happening in the communal field that is pressing?” It’s a gift, this vocation, never fails to engage me, never a paucity of material, the creative well feels bottomless, alive, teeming. This last Sunday was no different.

You gotta love living in California. Where else would you receive a birthday invitation where creating your own drum nudges out pin the tail on the donkey? Just being a smart aleck…I’m thrilled. And, as if that is not cool enough, there’s a choice of elk skin for calling in patience or buffalo skin for calling in abundance. Well, I only had to sit with that a moment because it was clear pretty fast. And apparently, out of eleven drum-making guests, I was the only one that felt called to summon in patience.

Disclosure: no better phrase wraps up the continual ways we seem to be drawn to working on ourselves than “working my s—t”. So if that vernacular bugs you, maybe you want to pass on this rant.

This just happened. I swear. I’m sitting down fireside to write about hardcore vulnerability. The doorbell rings. A burly black man stands at my door. We look at each other across a mile long cultural divide, though it is only a glass window. Me, safe inside my toasty home. Him, outside…wet with cold icy rain. I take a full breath and feel my vulnerability here. A deep interior soft and supple melting that includes an abiding compassion. It seems to far outweigh the fear I know I should feel. A woman, alone at home.

Grateful sitting fireside last night, my girlfriend cooking dinner. Friendship “can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses.” ***  Thankful for her immutable presence in my life, I sat quiet, peaceful, heart and soul awash with considerations, invitations, conversations garnered over a three day retreat with poet David Whyte.

A sense of twilit pause permeates this chunk of time prior to the new year…it’s so tangible. Uncharacteristic surround sound stillness, that final rhythm that seems to get lost in the buzz. In a working culture known for comparatively stingy vacation allowance, un-busy feels welcome healthy. I know this is not true for everyone. God bless the service industry. But you can picture me fireside in pajamas, sipping hot mug of java, looking out at another clear cold day, wondering what this 24 hour episode holds.

Cold early morning, snug toasty looking out at coated mountains that have hugged me all through the week. As soon as I landed here in Washington, an early snow cascaded out of the sky, carpeting grounded orange leaves with giddy surprise. I’m a rare and awe-filled visitor to snow. It’s fleecy sheen turns the mundane to marvel and, when I’m out in it, the bite in the air and potential slip of each step forces me into constant wakefulness.

The October 8 Sunday Sweat was all about letting go and then honoring the empty space created with that surrender, that space between what was done and what was yet to come. By Sunday evening hundreds of people in Northern California were force fed that teaching by a random act of god. The fire finger of fate burned into so many lives and extorted a full on let go, indiscriminately took everything away.

The rectangular glass table held sun’s gleam, kindling open faces around me, many deeply absorbed in conversations stimulated by the Esalen workshop morning. I turned to a mid-West pediatrician and asked about her experience with scoliosis, which is often detected in teen growth-spurt years. Over 17 years she tracked outcome in response to simple instructed exercise given each spinal curve-y youngster.

It’s those five, ten year milestones that get me reflecting. Realize I’ve been showing up on dance floors for fifteen years now. Always a student, sometimes a guide. I find myself listening for what keeps me coming back with such regularity and devotion. At the heart of showing up is something I believe we all share. I sometimes find myself frustratingly distracted by the speed and demand of the way I choose to live. Maybe you do, too. Awareness of this fact does not seem to mitigate its acceleration.

If it weren’t for geography’s random play, I wouldn’t be teaching 5Rhythms. Somehow I landed in the perfect storm, surrounded in northern California by movers and shakers.   Classes were here, workshops were abundant, I was completely swept up. Even after I began teaching, yearly support was generous: a Marin intensive in August, a January teacher refresh in Manhattan.