As published on Medium, Oct. 25, 2017

I thought I was writing a book about the relationship between soil health and climate change. It turned into a spiritual memoir. Now I realize that my work is primarily about connecting with the divine feminine.

I had no idea my work would take me all the way here. I started out studying Urban Planning, made my way to climate change, found the soil, and it brought me to the feet of the divine metaphor: the fertile soil is female. Compost is transformation through the life/death/life cycle. The harvest, and the cycles of menstruation, move with the moon. Regeneration is about life, death, transformation, and rebirth.

For the last several years, I’ve been writing about how healing the soil could save humanity by combating climate change. But actually, it goes much, much deeper than that. We’ll only reverse climate change and save humanity by bringing natural cycles back into balance. The science is clear: the carbon cycle and the water cycle are way off balance and it’s killing us. We have sixty harvests left in our world’s soil.

And I believe that our efforts at policy and systems change to correct these problems will only stick if we actually do the inner work necessary to transform and reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the planet.

Yes, we broke the system when we invented industrial agriculture very recently. But we broke another, deeper system, all the way back around 500AD. Goddess worship, the Earth Mother, and agriculture went together for tens of thousands of years, honoring the cycles of fertility, childbirth, menstruation, the harvest, and the birth-life-death cycle.

Ancient cultures all over the world for hundreds of thousands of years have stared at the sky and moved with the cycles of nature to honor the passage of time, grow food, mark life rites of passage, bring children into the world, and honor the passage of death out of this world.

I’m embarking on a personal journey that involves the super woo all the way to the mundane. It all matters. I’m embracing my inner hippie witch, embracing the fact that I fail all the time at living a more sustainable life, embracing my learning process, and summoning the courage to share it. I’m good. I’m alive. I’m ready.

Where do we start? We start where we are.

Here are three primary steps forward in connecting with the divine Her, and a number of places to start within each:

Connect with nature :: Food. The outdoors. Cycles of nature: moon, seasons, day/night. Cycles of the body: breath, menstruation, life/death.
Connect with the self :: Therapy. Spiritual practice: yoga, meditation, rituals. Physical practice/exercise. Creativity and creative practice. Intention setting and letting go.
Connect with others :: Community. Public policy. Activism. Personal spending and behavior choices. Art.

I’ll be writing more about all these things, in an effort to walk the walk and help others to do the same. And to unveil some of the beauty that I’ve encountered along this way.

The answer is in balance.

I’ve found that now that I know her I can’t unsee her. She’s everywhere, all the time, finding her way back from the subconscious to the conscious. She speaks through symbolism, metaphor, dreams, images, colors, music, shapes. She’s always in the pulsations of the body and the drumbeat of the heart. She’s the gentle teacher in our deepest grief. She’s walking with us, drawing us on our paths, inspiring our creative work, and she’s always, ever, guiding us home.