Newsletter March 2026 Volume 192
Hello there,
Hope you are well. 
At the Full Moon circle last Friday I led a guided meditation based on this beautiful poem:
Spring, by Mary Oliver
Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring
down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring
I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue
like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:
how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge
to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else
my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,
it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;
all day I think of her—
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.
I really appreciate the physicality of this poem and I loved the idea of our guided meditation connecting and excavating the power and potency of coming out of the darkness, coming out of a deep sleep. And I wanted the women gathered to feel powerful, large and wild.
These are challenging and ghastly times.
Every day, a new horror before we’ve even had time to process the last.
It is difficult to be present, to be brave and to stay aware.
And the realization that we took so much for granted – decency, kindness, the arc of the universe bending towards justice, that adults and systems of adults protect children and that violations of basic humanity were rare mistakes or anomalies.
But we are now seeing and experiencing the cruelty, greed, idiocy, racism, sexism, environmental destruction and inhumane treatment of children and life on earth are actually what underpins much of what claims power right now in the world.
There is so much pain, disappointment, and despair in seeing this.
Along with rage and loneliness.
And the reckoning that there were plenty of clues to show us the depravity surrounded us but we still didn’t see it.
Coping with it, responding to it, and processing it is challenging to say the least. One of the ways to deal with challenge is to use your imagination, to play in your mind to see and feel yourself and the world differently.
Like how we let our mind and body play at being a bear waking up from hibernation in our guided meditation. To feel a connection to a creature other than ourselves in an experience different than our own.
Imagining the world we want to create is key to creating it. Part of not succumbing to the negativity and tragedy around us and staying strong enough to live our lives and create this new world requires, even though it can feel so corrupt, us to feel joy, whimsy, love, and to play.
One of my teachers recently shared the following poem written by Hafiz. It addresses the fact that what we are seeing now had to come to light for it to be changed, for there to be accountability and for us to eventually heal.
Tired of Speaking Sweetly (excerpt)
from “The Gift: Poems by Hafiz,” translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
We are in such an exhausting time of reckoning because we are seeing all that was hidden and rotting just under the surface, but deep down there is also great beauty and strength in us.
In the guided meditation each of us was a bear waking up in a dark damp cave after spending the winter dreaming in the safety of the womb of the Earth.
We emerged into the morning.
Into the melting snow and the sound of bird song.
We had within us a great deep primal power. An unshakable connection with the Earth and all life, and a desire to engage with our senses.
We drank cool clear water, heard the sounds of a Bluejay call, felt our eyes adjusting to the searing bright light after being in the darkness of our cave. And the smells! The smells of damp earth, melting snow and pine came to meet our exquisitely sensitive snouts.
There is so much to us. The part of us that is a bear, an animal, is a fierce protector of young and a focused part of us that moves towards life and living.
To get through these times and move into the next with the power, awareness and love we need to transform the world. How about we try connecting with our deep animal, bear, our soul, and the living breathing earth.
This uniting may help us shift this planet back, our country back, our city back, our neighborhood back, our body back to an axis that is less cruel and less profoundly stupid than the one we find ourselves in now.
Kitty’s expression while listening to the news!
And uuggghhh we are now in a time of women shrinking their bodies with the over-culture’s obsession with ageless thinness taking on an even more frightening extreme. The Botox-inspired fear of aging and wrinkling is so profound that people are getting Botox to prevent their faces from ever even showing the lives they are leading.
In these same times when we are pushed to look like an emaciated and expressionless mannequin, what a rebellious joy to find ourselves in a bear’s body!
A body with sharp robust claws, a lush and generous pelt and pointy teeth. What a different expression than the hairless, tiny ideal of womanhood that we are now realizing is deeply rooted in a nauseating and sickening pedophilic culture. The ideal became child- like instead of strong powerful vigorous adult women.
It is so horrifying and sobering.
So it feels like a beautiful insurrection to see and feel ourselves as bears, as creatures created by and tethered to the Earth; it’s cycles and it’s breathing.
And to try, as part of surviving and flourishing in such challenging times to love that animal of our body as Mary Oliver says in another epic poem Wild Geese
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
And part of that is making peace and loving our actual bodies that are carrying us through this life. To love your wrinkles, your broken nails, your imperfect teeth, your gray hair, your large pores.
No more distractions.
No punishing or judging yourself for living and being human.
What a waste of our beautiful energy and inspiration to waste it on hating our precious bodies for being natural and imperfect.
It is a miracle that you are here and in a body.
Would you ever judge and criticize the body of that beautiful bear coming down the mountain? Would you ever say her fur wasn’t glossy enough and her snout too pronounced?
No.
I want you to feel that way towards yourself. I want you to remind yourself of your pulsing and living connection to the world around you including the animals and the plants.
That you are included in the living breathing world. You are held and being supported each moment. It makes me think of this Raymond Carver excerpt.
“And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved. To feel myself
beloved on this earth.”
May you take some time, a few breaths or nice walk to feel yourself connected and held by the Earth. Or maybe when you lie down to sleep, imagine yourself as an animal experiencing the world around them. The natural world is our world and it holds great wisdom and healing for us in these treacherous times.
Take solace and let yourself be supported by our loving generous earth.
It is a survival strategy and will help us cultivate the wisdom we need moving forward.
This quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ incandescent book Women Who Run with the Wolves reminds us what is available to us.
“The wild nature has a vast integrity to it.
It means to establish one’s territory, to find one’s pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one’s own behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves
Much love and strength to you all.
xoxo
Katherine
Full Moon Circle for the Full Pink Moon at Sanctuary on Friday April 3rd
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