I nudge the bent tree branches with a snow shovel. Snow falls wet and heavy off their sunken limbs. Though none of them return to their former erectness, many unfurl, seem to remember which way is up. I cut and compost myriad fallen cottonwood branches, grab the dog, and head out into the world.

CC: Edward Hicks Peaceable Kingdom

Captain, the honey-colored Pit bull, walks beside me in the snow, sniffing the underbrush with a pleased gleam in his eye. Last evening, before the storm, he lay on his back and stayed still as Christopher and I towered over him wanting him to resume the walk. He flashed one dark pupil in white eye: “You want to lay down beside me? This is where it’s at.”

Now, we walk around a huge green tuft of fallen tree that dollops the path. At the next turn, a thick imperial fallen trunk turns us back towards home.

I feel like spring inside, like I could easily live this long again now that I’ve figured out how. A new peace fills my chest. Hannah and a few friends filled our house last night, and it all worked out, like there was finally room for Christopher, she and I (four with Captain) to fully live here and move around one another with tenderness and peace. Also, as Christopher and I sat on the floor of his studio, a lit candle between our meditating shapes, I dialogued with my perfection, the one that split off from my being myself when I was a kid and began to watch me from the outside to make sure I measured up. Since then, the perfection police whispered always that I would be safe if I could only hit the perfect me, so close but so far, who would make it impossible for anyone to hurt me. I thought that, were I able to embody the Platonic form of myself, I’d become untouchable.

Photo by Sara Wright

Surprise! I’ve never measured up. And, sadly then, by the transitive property of dysfunctional neuropathy, neither has my daughter. But I let this perfection vigilante inside myself go last night, in this season of ego deaths. Lately, I’ve shed them like serpent skins, two or three a day. And they go colliding into the either with all the other discarded suits we have all worn. Humanity sighs in relief as these falsies dissolve and dissipate back into the collective unconscious, where they are vaporized in light. I share my journey because it’s all I have, except for kind words, big hugs, or some carrot cake muffins to lighten things up.

The last couple of days, I feel into each minute with more trust and less anxiety. Lord, bless this new holy ground. I have longed my whole life to stop being afraid all the time. Finally, some calm that feels like butter, like a lake, like hope. It’s as though OZ pulled back the veil to remind me that we already dwell in heaven and Earth. All we have to do is awaken into the true moment beyond our own disillusion. I can trust this now. It’s always been trustworthy, even while I’ve stared wild eyed in fear, ready for anything. Vigilance packs fear and weapons and bullshit into everything and then we say to our poor sap selves: Live in that crap.

Heaven waits on the other side, in Captain’s big smiling eye, limbs wide.