At a Cabin Retreat in the Hills Above Berkeley Springs, West Virginia

My dog by my side, anxious that this is not her home, ever watchful of a deer named Harris. But when Harris doesn’t react to her insistent barking, she is perplexed – Is this animal friend, or foe?

Cairns all around showing there is depth of presence here. Others have spent time in this place—shaping it with life, taking its spirit back to wherever they call home.

Is this a container for my work? Is this a place where my continual unfolding can be given expression and depth so much so that others can leave changed as well, as so many have experienced here before?

Questions abound yet to be answered. The only way to learn more is to actually breathe my work into this space, to allow it to meld with what comes forth out of me, with the participation of those who are to join who will shape this field along with me.

I am no longer an initiate, although in this space I truly feel like one. I’ve never done this before, so to use space that has been host to many a transformative experience (I just read a bookful of testimonials attesting to such) is a responsibility I take seriously and with depth.

What is to unfold from here? No one knows, least of all me, and that is a precipice of possibility and initiation. We are all on a precipice in some way, but this seems a particularly poignant one. A threshold that speaks to my initiation into a different role, a revised sense of self that I still don’t know what to think of, that is of course still undefined.

I sit here in the morning air, cool breeze blowing on my face, the drizzle of raindrops surrounding the cabin, the sound of the ever-flowing pond a constant companion. The air of possibility, a waft of expectation, but also a wide-openness to the next moment. All are welcome, all that is here, all that is to come—each held on the edge of something both small and vast, in humility and quiet grandeur.

There is room for all of it, I have to make sure of that. For this is me now, awakening to what is, thinking of what can be, alive in this moment between what has passed and what is to come.