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That draws us to our full height, knowing what must be done,

clear about what must be stopped,

sparking us to stand for what we love.

How else can we begin the healing?

The web that holds our world together is tattered,

with all our hopes and dreams suspended in it.

No sutures, butterfly closures, or Elmer’s glue can fix it.

Only our tears can begin to mend its tattered strands,

tears and giving ourselves to keening, pining, grieving.

Mourning how much is dying, mourning so that the light can return.

The revolution must have dancing; the women know this.

The music will light our hearts with fire,

the stories will bathe our dreams in honey

and fill our bellies with stars.

The interlacing of our souls will infuse and renew our humanity.

Our rhythms will merge with the heartbeat of the earth.

What breaks the mourning open for me?

It shines through my connections, my friends, my kin.

Some that are human, and some that are not.

I soar in the sea, glide stealthily among sea turtles,

swoop over snowpack, eagle shushing.

I laze lizard-like on warm boulders amid frigid rivers,

slurping oysters gathered fresh from warm, moist sand.

I am lifted by the courageous uprising of women, and girls,

and of the emerging voice of the feminine within us all.

Together, leading from our feeling side first,

we may yet restore balance before this precarious disc

of our civilization

tumbles over the precipice.

And I am strengthened by my kinship with the land,

with the high desert hills of Northern New Mexico.

Her mountains first called to me twenty-five years ago,

and we’ve barely stopped talking since.

She reminds me of a time when her desert landscape

was submerged underneath a shallow sea.

I visit her alluvial fan, a place where her rocky ridges

meet a flattened plain.

A riverbed splays there, opening her legs to a widened basin.

A great open hand of sand is mounded there,

to mark the fertile zone where two ecosystems meet.

Tickled by the magic of landing on this fulcrum,

this place where the differing worlds meet,

I pray for the help of the invisible hands

of those who came before.

At dusk, I wander down the arroyo by our home.

I am flanked by criss-crossing dogs chasing scents,

and a crow swoops low over my left shoulder, cawing.

At the bottom I stop, standing still on a sandy spit

savoring the dry, clean scent of ponderosa forest.

Near my feet, a perfect white shell catches my eye.

It spirals pristinely, speaking to me in soft and sacred whispers.

Listening closely, I hear stories of its life before,

and of its mother, the shallow sea.

I know the sea as my mother, too.

She holds me softly when I feel empty,

and tickles me gently until I find laughter again.

My gratitude for the beauty of this world fills the spaciousness

within me, and I begin to understand the crow’s complexity,

and to see its embodiment of Kali, goddess of death and rebirth.

Within me, I feel the dualistic dichotomy

of connection and disintegration melting away.

I remember how daybreak follows mourning.

They are waves in an ever-changing sea

that together define the tide.

Nina Simons is a social entrepreneur and co-founder of Bioneers, a nonprofit that features breakthrough solutions for people and planet. She translates her life experiences into tools for serving the emerging leadership of others. Simons currently focuses largely on writing and teaching about women’s leadership and restoring the feminine within us all—and on leveraging Bioneers’ inspiring solutions and stories to transform how we live on Earth and with each other. See www.bioneers.org.

Waking Up from Despair

OPEYEMI PARHAM

Being a retired family doctor, I use medical language in the story of “How I Am Living, Now.”

The culture into which I was born is dying, as we reap the consequences of our own greed, selfishness, and unsound ecological choices. As I became aware of this, I reacted with the same psychological responses that one has to one’s own or a loved one’s death: