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„You want it darker? We kill the flame.“ Leonard Cohen’s raspy voice has been ringing in my ears these last few weeks. Maybe he and Steven (Lost Borders Co-Founder) are jamming together somewhere on the other side. I wouldn’t be surprised.

The dark of the dark. We are in it, here in the US, and in too many places around the world. And while we all saw it coming, as it is with all heartbreaking news, nothing ever quite prepares us for how it feels when it actually happens.

Have you ever waited for a CT scan when you already know the results are going to crush you, but you hope against all odds that you’re wrong? And then it hits. And it’s bad. It’s actually worse than you thought. The bottom has dropped out. And irrevocably you enter a new reality.

The Bandaids have come off

Here we are. The bandaids have come off. The illness which has long been systematic, has now gone metastatic. And yes, we have entered a new and frightening reality.

These fever dreams of domination, haunted by the trauma of a past that prevents a future, are deeply and tragically bound to the extraction of the present, where they go on to mine dwindling resources ever more ferociously, turning populations into pawns and trading human rights for capital gains.

Until we are ready to turn, drop, and surrender into the ocean of tears uncried, and the infinite reservoir of the heart that beats below, waiting through time and time again for liberation. We will get there. Give me time, life says.

Lethal

If we cut the dying out of our living, we sow death with every step. If we cannot die to our greed, fed by fear, if we don’t grow beyond the childhood dreams of personal power our lives become lethal weapons and our legacies become land mines left for innocent future generations to land upon long after we are gone.

We are here. In the dark of the dark. Right now. Breathe.

I can’t breathe. I’m tired. I hurt. 5,000 years of Patriarchy. Supremacy, misogyny, genocide. Colonialism, fascism, sexism, ableism. My soul is tired. All my previous incarnations are tired. It seems we are here over and over and over again. Never learning anything.

Deep Time

“Remember deep time“ creation whispers. Deep time. Yes. Underneath it all, everything in nature moves toward healing, all the time, and in all ways possible. No exceptions. That doesn’t mean we don’t take heavy losses. It doesn’t mean as a species we don’t regress, despair, dissociate, get stuck, and repeat seemingly endless closed feedback loops. We do. But our story doesn’t end here. It merely repeats a pattern until it has grown the evolutionary muscle to do something new, to break the mold, to move toward a new level of wholeness. That’s what I need to remember on days like this.

It’s been a long few thousand years that we have lived and died by the sword. Hypermasculinity has dominated the planet with T-Rex energy, extracting, colonizing, devouring life to fuel personal power. A (rebel) child of the empire I’ve spent half my life trying to find the root causes, how we got here. Smarter people than me point to agriculture, domestication, population increase, the constructs of supremacy and whiteness.

No single theory meets the mystery of this moment. But what stands out in the layered patterning of our recent patriarchal history is that when this type of energy isn’t tempered by the need to serve and protect greater good it leads to war and blood shed and the kind of totalitarianism that we are seeing in the US and so many governments around the world right now. Whether in ourselves or in the world, when this kind of power is isolated and monocultured it will pillage and burn.

Rites of Passage

This is what rights of passage were all about. To offer a challenge greater than ourselves, a humbling, a seasoning, an initiatory brush up with death that helps crack us open, and positions us to mature into the kind of adults that will lead not purely from strength but also from deep heartfelt compassion.

Rites of Passage are designed to break the shell of our childhood. They help us direct and employ the raw force of life with which we are born. To put this force into service for all those who come after us is the mandate of the adult initiated human. Without initiation, without this tempering, without looking at our own death and realizing the shortfall of our egotistical dreams, and adolescent megalomanic fantasies, whether through ritual or through life events, we are unable to mature and all too easily fall prey to using our adult agency/power merely to advance personal agenda, amass fortunes, and dominate others – much like toddlers exerting their own will and agency. This behavior, as essential as it is for two-year-olds to develop, is lethal in an adult body, both for the village, and for the ecosystem, and it is what drives the hyper masculine extractive capitalist colonial conquest.

In the arc of our human development, this is the reptilian brainstem of our being, which is in charge of our survival. The compassionate heart doesn’t get awakened until later, when we pass through the dark night of the soul and the way-finding that we must all traverse in order to become a full adult member of the human family.

Way Finding

And here is the crux. In recent ‘modern’ history, we’ve cut out this essential time of way-finding, and with it the chance to connect with our soul and our song line. You all know. We are asked to jump from childhood to adulthood, to go from school to college, work and parenthood, to go from consumption to production. And without initiation, without this leveling of our primal power drive, without a chance to mature internally, to lay fallow and wrestle with the pivotal and prickly questions of ‘who am I’, ‘what is my purpose’, ‘where is my place of service in the world’, without traversing the liminal, without facing our own death and impermanence, we land in a place of pre-fab adulthood. We may look like adults, but we have not had a chance to become them.

From the Four Shields perspective, being uninitiated leaves us stuck in what we call the South Shield, at the whim of our instinctual nature, which is neither good or bad, which is as innocent as it is greedy and as unstable as it is pure, which is many beautiful things but what it is not is being fit to be in the drivers seat.

The South Shield

In a regulated South Shield I trust that my needs will be met. I trust that I am loved, that I belong, that there is enough, that I am safe. In a dysregulated (traumatized) south shield I am in fight, flight or freeze. My survival reflexes dominate my thinking and feeling, blotting out all else. No amount of enough will soothe me. I trust no one and I am afraid.

Our instinctual nature, like all other parts of us, is of course not static but in continuous movement. It expands and contracts, it shifts and changes moment by moment, experience by experience. We are resilient by nature, and built to make it through life’s tougher moments. But major trauma can dysregulate and damage our South Shield severely.

Note that I am using the word trauma here in the broadest of contexts, to describe an experience in which our safety, or our basic sense of self is threatened – a rupture greater than we can absorb in the moment it occurs. Under such duress, survival mode kicks in, to do just what the word promises, help keep us alive until the danger has passed and we can integrate and process the experience. Survival mode is an ingenious life-saving short term response/strategy but it is not, and was never meant to be, a way to live.

To heal, we need to process and integrate our ordeal and yes, that, just like the initiatory work of our adolescence, is soul work (West shield business if you are a four shield nerd like me). But if that door is closed, if we don’t even know it exists, if there is no access to internal process, no support for digestion and meaning making, no community or container to hold the experience – perhaps not even an understanding that a violation has occurred – we are locked into the intensity of our feelings with a timeless, desperate rawness that has no way to move or heal. Trapped in the unbearable, we will inevitably cause harm to self and/or other.

Recipe for Disaster – and Dictators

Violence, violation, cancellation. Illness, racism, sexism, child neglect. Famine, war, climate collapse. We live in a traumatized and trauma producing culture. Most of us have deep wounding stacked up in our bodies and bloodlines. The arc of patriarchal exploitation, the erasure of earth-based cultures, colonial rule and indigenous genocide, extractive capitalism, misogyny and white supremacy, all these blueprints of domination that have left deep marks on our human psyche are deeply intertwined with trauma.

Which is NOT by the way an excuse but simply an attempt to understand how we got here. In deep time, the desire to dominate may be an evolutionary contraction on the path to a fuller version of mature humanhood. A knee jerk survival response that traces back to fear, greed, and ego need, to not having enough, to an attitude of more for me and less for you, to a dissociative hamster wheels of perpetuating harm, inflating the personal power drive to rule a world to which one no longer feels any belonging.

Add a few ingredients to the mix, a certain amount of influence or agency, societal positionally, racial and gender entitlement, a tendency to self inflate rather than self blame, and out comes a deadly dictator cocktail.

Domination is a survival response gone rogue. Drill baby drill. Fueled by trauma, perpetuated by violence, and sanctioned by patrilineal systems of oppression it is so deeply embedded in our culture that we seem to be beyond the reach of traditional therapies, theories, and policies. Will these fever dreams of supremacy overwhelm our collective nervous system for good? Have they already?

How To Show Up Now

For those of us who’ve been through the threshold, who have had the privilege of being initiated, the question of what it means to live an initiated life is one we must carry wherever we go, and into whatever circumstances we encounter. And it is one that is calling us to task now.

What it means to live an initiated life in this historic moment will vary widely for each of us. But this we know: It can no longer just be about survival. It needs to be about integrity. It needs to be about wholeness.

Instead of fear, which is the main fuel of survivalism, Integrity is powered by love, by a knowing/connecting to a blessedness that is already here, that is our birthright as well as our responsibility to tend and nurture in return. (Yes, this is the stuff we bring back from the mountain).

Integrity is where our needs meet the needs of the world, where the ‘I‘ meets the ‘We’, where we sit in the interconnectedness and interrelatedness of life. Cooperation, Community and Collaboration live there. Here we mind. Here we mend. Feeling the weave of the whole and our own embededness in it we can’t help but care about the wellness of all our relations. In this place, we worry less about how much we get and care more about how much we are able to give. Kuan Yin, the goddess with the 1000 arms lives here, among the many saints and bodhisattvas of all times – because two arms just aren’t enough to relieve the suffering of the world.

Heart of the North

Yes, this is the place where self and other are one – the heart of the North. Where we dip into the infinite reservoir of the heart that beats below, that connects us all, beating for liberation.

To live in love and wholeness at this time seems ludicrous and impossible. And at the same time it also feels like the only way to meet the present. In this climate, to stay rooted in the heart, to tend the wellness that lives at the source, to give this breath to wholeness and then another is no small thing. It is an active act of resistance.

Wholeness can look a million different ways. If it is yours to stand at the frontlines and protect those more vulnerable, thank you! If it is time to go inside and allow yourself to deeply rest and settle your nervous system, thank you. If you can escape the bright lit screen and the watchful eye of its algorithms to connect with the land and visit your more-than-human kin, thank you!

Connecting through prayer and song, getting out on the land, organizing, making art, hugging our children, supporting our neighbor, calling senators, saving seeds, there are infinite ways of showing up with our whole selves and we need them all.

But showing up we must. To stand strong, and connected, when human rights are stripped away at a breathtaking rate and our survival responses are triggered by intensifying marginalization. To hear what is ours to do and where we are called to serve at this time is essential. For our own sanity, for our immigrant neighbors, for our non-binary children, for basic human and more than human rights, for the living Earth and each of our beautiful, unique, diverse and precious kin.

The Edge of our Living

Not that it will be easy. Living in integrity will likely become increasingly dangerous as the binary closes in on us and new versions of fascist narratives are lowering the bar on moral ethics and establishing a new national culture that is endorsing violence to justify an authoritarian government with a central dictatorship.

We may be heading into a time, where survival may no longer be compatible with decency. What then? Being a human of german descent, this is a poignant and pointed inquiry. It is my deepest prayer that I may never die to the integrity of my heart. And, with a painful nod to the complexities my past ancestors were facing in Nazi Germany, I am also aware that this is so much easier said than done.

How to stand strong and show up for life under increasing pressure and potential threat must be part of our collective inquiry now. For me, remembering that I am held by some greater benevolence, something that I can continue to fall toward and come home to is an essential practice to stay strong in my heart. I have to cultivate this knowing daily, and most likely for the rest of my life. To remember that healing is my first ancestor, not survival. That my personal trauma, and the trauma that informs these times are not primary but secondary to the wholeness we are born from and for.

When the systems raising us were life harming, when our feet – and generations of our ancestors feet – were planted in war torn soil and unsafe homes this is no small task. Wether implicated in the harm or being a target of it, trauma has felt like the bottom line for many of us, many generations into the past. We may have been raised without ever receiving a transmission of the wellness that lives at the source. We may not know what it means to feel safe. We may not know what it means to feel loved. We may never have connected to the goodness from which we were born. When we are orphaned from our own birthright, we are deeply vulnerable to imprint on turmoil and the paradigm of survival.

Wholeness and Healing as our First Ancestors

And yet. Healing and wholeness are primary. As our first ancestors, they live at the very center of our being, and have far longer roots than their younger sibling survival.

Many of us tap into the mother root of this wellness at the source for the first time when we venture into solo time on the land. This is the core of our work: to create a space where the noise of our lives can subside long enough for us to hear the ancient imperative of our belonging singing us back into her bones.

Because no matter how separate we may feel, healing and wholeness have been with us since the beginning of time, moving and shape shifting through every birth and death and every new adaptation. And they will be with us always. We can trust them. Not our idea of them, not any particular outcome, including our own survival, but healing and wholeness themselves. Where and when we do, resilience is born. Where and when we do, freedom rings.

No Ordinary Spring

Having just emerged from the Mid-Winter fast, I am freshly awed by the courage of these humans returning from the threshold to take their rightful places in this life and take on the full weight of what one participant named for herself as „living amidst the oncoming collapse”.

As the first signs of life reappear around us, as late winter is yearning toward spring, may we resist the urge to recoil, fortify, armor our hearts to brace these times. May we instead, along with the rest of creation, risk ourselves again and anew to grow and feed life in all ways we know how.

This is no ordinary spring. Tend your grief and despair when it comes, but don’t stop there. Keep feeding the heart below, the great heart that all beings tie into, the great pulse of creation that keeps your heart beating and mine, this mystery that continues to birth new hearts and minds to live this creation story forward. Feed her. Water her. Sing to her.

Get together. Community IS resistance. Make love. Seed beauty. Spawn courage. Cultivate joy. Connect. Collaborate. Calibrate.

What we make with our lives will be inherited through all cycles of living and dying going forward. As initiates of this time, it matters greatly that our actions are aligned with the truth at the center of our being, tending beauty, peace, liberation, collective awakening, care, whatever it is for you. That our lives leave an imprint of beauty, a breadcrumb trail of seeds for those who come after us, to sprout in the fertile ground of a future, no matter how far in the distance. Because life will keep birthing forward. And how we use this breath and the next will inform all that is yet to be.

Petra Lentz-Snow has been guiding vision fasts and wilderness rites of passage programs for more than 30 years now, she served as Executive Director at LB and is a former Netkeeper for the Wilderness Guides Council network. She lives and works in California and runs the blog „Cancer as a Rite of Passage“.