I am aware that I haven’t written on my blog for a couple of weeks, maybe more. Very odd for me. The times they are a changin’.

What do you say while the hurricane blows? I think you just watch. Bigness is blowing in on personal and collective levels everywhere. I am watching, listening, doing what I can as fast as I can, considering it all.

I’m proud to be human. Everyone appears to be trying so sincerely to rise to the occasions. Even much of the language and posturing among community leaders and news reporters seems to be shifting. There are still, of course, what seem to be intractably stuck, fearful places in our collective psyche; everywhere you see the little Dutch boy archetype in us with holding a finger in the dam. But I begin to feel that at a deeper level we are finally beginning to realize that many of our structures are totally unsustainable. I mean psychological, spiritual, economic, political, environmental and emotional structures, which are really all one thing. In spite of delusions of control and power, and ideas that we can just put a patch here and another there, I think we’re preparing ourselves for the big one — the time when we see through the illusion, like Buddha under the bodhi tree. It’s obviously a chaotic time, frightening, but also very exciting.

In my personal life, the hurricane blowing is the wedding of my first-born daughter, the astoundingly bright light of a human, Josi Ann Ward. On September 17^th she is marrying the love of her life, Eli MacEndarfer, who I feel thrilled to welcome into our family. He is a generous, kind, conscious, capable, smart, love-magnet of a human. Everybody loves Eli.

Weddings are bigger than birth, bigger than death, bigger than anything I am starting to think; maybe simply because I have been standing in the middle of preparations for some months. Watching the images of hurricane news, familiar lives suddenly uprooted, what was quietly inside drawers or closets suddenly blowing all around on the outside scattering change everywhere, I empathize.

My daughter is possibly unique in that she does not want to go through the motions of this wedding following someone else’s trail, allowing for any traditional thing without awareness and personal decision-making about whether or why to include it. Her choices are deliberate. Her great heart and powerful mind are like incisors cutting through illusions and old habits of thought. With ease, beauty and grace she affects this, like a blossoming flower breaking through stone. The emergence is delicate but the courage and strength required seem miraculous. What she and Eli are doing and how they are doing it is ground-breaking. Old internal structures come down, big healings happen, new life emerges. And this is barely the beginning.

I am proud to be human. Proud to be a Mother, and a soon-to-be Mother-in-law, or Mother-in-love, a term my dear friend Ruth Hill prefers. I’m proud to be in the creative tensions of life with every single person I know and don’t know. It’s a worthy endeavor, filled with such raw beauty that I easily weep when I allow myself to feel it too much.