My mother was heroic in confronting her death. It’s an old adage that courage isn’t doing what is easy, it’s doing what terrifies you. It’s in being messy with your fear and vulnerability that is courageous, not having it all together. My mom, like so many, tended to present herself as having it all together. It was hard, therefore, but also beautiful, to witness her journey into that existential twilight of life that is known for pulling all the old, familiar rugs out from beneath us.

But having Midwestern blood and an innate grit that came from god knows where, she was literally as tough as nails. She walked through her ordeal with a tenacity and determination that makes me feel like a rubber hose in the way I often deal with my own obstacles in life. And an ordeal it was. It was 8 years, 2 major Sarcoma tumor surgeries (the first tumor weighing in at 10 lbs) and then 3 ½ years of chemo, radiation and all sorts of experimental and immunotherapy treatments. She endured 12 trips to the ER and 2 emergency intubations, mostly caused by her other disease, COPD, a progressive lung disease which had set in 6 years earlier. It was not, by any standard, an easy journey.

And yet my mother had a profound (at times confounding) determination to keep living. And why not? She had a beautiful life. She had a large, loving circle of friends, a husband, three children, and four grandchildren to be with and watch grow. She had her work fighting nuclear weapon proliferation, economic injustice, and the criminal justice system. Adventures and travels were still calling her, as they had her entire life. She still had her hiking, her cooking, her Japanese flower arranging classes beckoning. She wasn’t ready to go, and because she adhered to the unspoken tradition of western postmodern culture, she resisted talking about it.

In the spring of 2018 her lungs refused to work and she required an emergency intubation. When she made it home after a week in the hospital, I could see that the experience had scared her. It had scared all of us.

When she came home we openly discussed hospice for the first time. I could tell she was deeply shaken. She began working with a wonderful therapist who specialized in somatic trauma work. Together they would work with her body, and its innate organic intelligence. They also talked and explored her fears and anxiety around death. Death for her, I believe, was slowly changing its form. It ceased being some vague and unsettling image that wandered along the murky edges of her mind, colored by projections and fears; instead I believe it grew into a close and intimate companion. Something always present and impossible to ignore. But something she could relate to.

A year and a half later, on the morning after a beautiful thanksgiving dinner, when the whole family had gathered to be together, she went into the hospital, again not being able to breathe. The doctors this time told her there was nothing they could do: the diseases were progressing and they were helpless to stop it.

Slowly, reluctantly, she became willing to let go of the treatments and enter hospice.

Once in hospice she began the heroic journey of preparing for her departure and coming to terms with what this ancient and archetypal part of being human means. All biological life on earth decomposes, degenerates, dissipates. But only humans can grapple consciously and existentially with this fact. And this can yield beautiful opportunities, as I was about to find out.

A part of this journey for her was her tending to something I call unfinished business, something other traditions refer to as making amends. Unfinished business, as I understand it, is anything we still carry in our hearts that has not been shared, spoken, or cleared. It is something we still carry deep inside of us, like shadows cast by the traces of life’s turbulent waters, shaping who we are yet often hidden and buried beneath the rapid currents of our daily lives. By unearthing these griefs and pain, giving them open air and a voice to speak, they can be absolved, healed and released. It’s an intuitive process, when arising naturally, that can be tremendously liberating and healing for everyone involved.

And it was one of the most profound gifts my mother ever gave me.

A few months before she passed, she decided she was ready to tend to her unfinished business. There were psychic and emotional cords tying her to her family, and she was ready to untie them. A part of that process includes unpacking and speaking to the unfinished business that might cause a knot in any of those cords. Knotted cords, it is said, have a tendency to hold us back when it is our time to leave. She wanted to untie these delicate threads with each of us, one by one.

With the help of her therapist, my mom did something I had never heard of before. My sister, who did it first, explained the process to me. First, I was to write her a letter.

What kind of letter? I asked.

The answer came back: one that holds nothing back. One that is not simply a soft loving letter of appreciation. We’d been telling her how much we love her for years during her illness. Instead, this letter was a place for me to air any and all grievances, pain, or regret that had not been dealt with properly between us. I was to write especially the things that I had never said, or to ask the questions I had never had the gall to ask. “Don’t hold back,” the therapist explained to me when I spoke with her, “it’s a sacred opportunity for your mom to clear any past pain in your relationship. The biggest gift you can give her is to be honest.” My mother wanted to take care of our unfinished business, and the sense I got was that by me being honest in this process I would be giving her an opportunity to burn any past karma, so she wouldn’t have to carry it on her journey.

The therapist would read my letter to my mom, and then help my mother write a response letter. Finally the therapist would facilitate a session between us, in which my mom would read her response letter aloud to me.

Wow, I thought. That is intense.

At this point she was rapidly declining physically, as well as mentally — she was someone I wanted to take care of, cook for, read aloud to in the backyard, not necessarily confront with my darkest grudges and 37-year-old trauma. It took me a day to feel into what this invitation really was. What she was asking. I was nervous, hesitant. I had never heard of anything like this before.

But hey, my own therapist said to me, what did I have to lose?

So I wrote her a 3 page letter. I laid it all out. It was loving. But it also laid out the ways — both generally as well as specifically — that I had sometimes felt missed, hurt, and abandoned by her in our relationship. I said things I had alluded to but never said to her before with such clarity and specificity. I shared about some of the complexities and pain of growing up as an identical twin. How at times I had felt missed in that unique constellation of attachment. I shared about how I had struggled at times with not feeling accepted for my passions and interests. Hers was a pragmatic and earthy temperament, and she had an innate skepticism of spirituality, religion, and psychology. These being the very things, of course, that I had studied in undergrad and further in depth with my 2 master’s degrees. Indeed nothing brought me more alive than studying the poetic, imaginal realms of spirit and psyche. I appeared to have an allergy to the very practicality and pragmatism that she so cherished.

In addition, my mother was a passionate and opinionated person — and it turned out so was I. We were both cut from the same cloth. Each of us could be hard-headed and stubborn in our views. So we clashed many times over the years, and had our own karmic dance in a relationship that wasn’t always easy.

So I shared what my own experience had been in the ups and downs of our relationship. We had spoken about these themes before, but it felt good to share it with her in this letter, not in a judging or blaming way, but naming the sadness that was actually at the root of these dynamics. Beneath the hurt, or anger, was a deep longing for connection and intimacy. I believe she shared this too, although we had never really talked about it.

I also asked questions I had never dared to ask. I put it all out there in that letter.

It felt good in a way that a sober, serious ritual can feel good. Such a ritual can ground us with an intentional act that re-orients us to what is essential and most important in life. In this case it felt like we were consciously facing her death, and like all good ancient cultures that weren’t afraid of death and always hiding it beneath an obsession with superficiality, we were tending to the business of dying. Of saying goodbye. And we were tending to it with all the gravitas and honesty it deserved.

I held my breath for several days before we sat down for our scheduled session together.

We sat down in the den with our English Breakfast tea one cold, misty February morning. We sat on the couch next to each other, my mom folding a warm blanket across her lap, her small feet dangling off the couch and resting on the carpet. The therapist invited my mother to read aloud her response letter to me. It was 3 full pages. She read it out loud to me, her hands shaking, her voice crackling and weak. I took it in, bit by bit, and piece by piece. She spoke directly to my heartaches and my grief, and answered all of my questions. She had taken the time to really listen to what I had said to her, to reflect on it, and validate it by giving me in return a thoughtful letter back. Her letter was open, kind, and non-reactive. It was much more than I could ever have asked for.

It washed over me like a powerful wave and broke me open. I wept in her arms, like a little boy. And she held me, stroking my head, and murmuring something I couldn’t understand but whose sweetness was clear. It was as if a huge weight was suddenly lifted, some transparent sheath surrounding and compressing my body dissipated, leaving the sensation of expansion and spaciousness. It was as if some little boy inside of me, who had been holding his breath for decades waiting for something specific to happen, never knowing quite what he was waiting for, had finally heard it, and could breathe freely again. And it released a dam of feelings. After a while I sat back up. I noticed the therapist had tears in her eyes.

Here was my mom, at the end of her journey, with cancer riddling her body, her lungs struggling and her mind fading — willing to listen, and acknowledge the ways she participated in certain painful patterns of relating. She named, with real authenticity, the various ways she had been hard on me. How, due to her own unconscious fears and projections, she had struggled to truly see me, and let me be me — something, I imagine, all parents struggle to do in relationship with their children. Not just parents, let’s be honest, but all people in all relationships struggle with this. I know I do.

I am sure almost everyone has their grievances in regards to their parents — it seems to be an archetypal dimension of the human experience to be “missed,” on some level. To feel dropped, hurt, neglected or abandoned. Who can parent a child perfectly, seamlessly? What partner, lover, or friend, can always be attuned? No one. And yet we all yearn to be heard, listened to, and acknowledged. Even regardless to some objective “truth,” we all do have our hurts and our grief. I think it is a psychological fact that when we feel acknowledged and heard by a loved one, we can open into deeper levels of trust and love. We all long to have that contact and that sense of being seen. That is what heals us humans.

And she did that for me. Out of sheer generosity. Here, at the very end of her seventy-five years, her little feet in those black stockings, looking like a little girl herself with her blanket over her lap and her cup of tea, she did that. And now that she is gone, I am left with her priceless letter. A letter filled with her authentic voice, speaking directly to me. A letter containing magical seed mantras to cut the cord of karma upon which any residual resentment or misunderstanding might cling.

A final letter to set the record straight so that both of us are free to go, unhindered, into our next chapters. Her to fly free, and me to live my life and make my unique imprint on the world.

Thank you Mom, for such a generous and courageous gift.

I love you.

Hi, My name is America and my life has become unmanageable.

I realize that I am helpless over my addiction to material consumption, to economic profit, and ultimately, to power.

I never thought of myself as a bad country, or a culture that was out of control. I just always needed that fix, that rush of control and power that would make me relax and feel more at ease with myself.

I can see now, for the first time, that I have enacted horrendous trauma on all those around me and within me in order to maintain my addiction. I have never been good at having honest conversations about what I have done in my life up to this point, as the denial has been an integral part of my disease.

But my life, after 244 years, has finally become unmanageable.

I now realize I have a problem.

My very origins are rooted in the systematic genocide of tens of millions of thriving indigenous people already living in North America. I ensured the systematic dismantling of their cultures, the destruction of their religious cosmologies (which threatened me deeply, for reasons I still don’t understand), I back-tracked on treaties signed in good faith, and enslaved their remaining people in poverty on various reservations located far away from their native geographical lands.

I abducted and kidnapped millions of African people to build the engine of industry in my early years as a nation. The foundation of my wealth was directly related to the forced slavery, rape, murder, and exploitation of African people. For centuries. Jim Crow and mass incarceration carried this legacy ever forward into the future. Furthermore I have been addicted to lying and remaining in denial about these facts.

I have repressed, abused, and silenced women because of a primordial fear of losing status and therefore losing power. In addition, I continue to batter and repress the feminine mode of being as it arises — in both women and men — because anything related to deep feeling, intimacy, or connection causes some vague indescribable fear which I simply cannot tolerate.

I have become alienated from Spirit, from Source, and from anything non-material. The idea of ancestors, spirits, angels, ghosts, faeries or non-physical beings of any type offend my sensibility. Things like tarot, I-Ching, astrology, shamanism, divination, plant medicine, psychic phenomena, and prayer (sacred technologies from cultures all around the world) arouse in me feelings of disgust, aversion, and antagonism. I never could quite understand it, but things that are not entirely physical scare me.

I always thought I could do everything on my own. That I was in control.

But my disease was progressive.

My body has finally given out after three hundred years of abuse. Toxic chemicals surge through my veins, while my lungs are burning with smoke. My hormonal and endocrine systems are completely disrupted, and my kidneys can no longer detoxify my beautiful, rich, life-giving blood.

I am running a constant fever these days. My body is warming, and I can see now that the arrival of COVID is just the latest, inevitable infection of my dehydrated, inflamed, and neglected body.

I have finally realized that I have destroyed all the important relationships around me — but the relationship that brings me the most regret is that with my Mother, the Planet Earth. I was chasing material profit with such desperation that I couldn’t see clearly. I was high as a kite on the riches I was pulling out of her mountains, extracting out of her soil, finding under her oceans, that I simply didn’t think about what I was doing to her Soul. The thing was, once I started, I had a hard time stopping: anything to stop this numbing emptiness that was incessantly wrapping itself around my insides like a python. Stealthy, steady, always tightening.

I lost all capacity to relate with her, talk to her, love her, look after her. Like an alcoholic abuser completely unhinged from their humanity, I stole from her even as I pretended to protect her and love her. I shamed her, I manipulated her, and I pillaged her for all she was worth, all for my own benefit. I had lost the capacity to see her, feel her, or know her in any true way. And she took it silently, withdrawing her soul somewhere far away. But I was too high on my spoils to notice.

I have tried everything. I have tried religious revivals, complete with loud repenting and cries for atonement. I have tried New Deals, cultivating and proclaiming universal human rights, and even flirted with Democratic Socialism. I have tried the narcotics of imperialism as well as the delusive arrogance of scientific materialism. I tried dosing myself with psychedelics, marching in the streets, experimenting with spiritual traditions of other cultures, and cultivating ever new/age variations of psychotherapy and mindfulness.

But I always ended up relapsing. Consumed with cravings for material wealth, profit, and power again. For the life of me I couldn’t touch my wounds consciously.

But now I am here, in this room, confessing all of this out loud for the first time.

The reason I am here is that the other night, when I couldn’t sleep, I feel a chasm within me open from somewhere deep below, and a wave of grief too big and too vast for words, comes surging up to meet me.

For a moment, when I was inside that wave of vague yet primal grief (or was it longing?), something in my core system cracked. And for a brief moment a window into some inner vista opened. I saw there a culture, a people, sundered in its soul and broken apart. A ragged wandering ghost of a Hurt People, now Hurting Others, pursuing endless narcotics of violence and possession to bite the pain and deny the mortal threat of its own emptiness.

In that moment I could see that this Grief was the source of my endless not-enoughness and never-satisfied quest for power. It is at the center of my rage, my jealousy, my endless yearning for more, and the ever-creeping angst of spiritual hollowness. It is the reason I instinctively and with immediacy exploit any and everything that comes across my path. Its level of sentience doesn’t matter. For I have enslaved not just one race of people, but many, and beyond that the birds of the air, animals of the forests, the oceans, and the precious metals far beneath the earth’s surface.

I am a Hungry Ghost, and a shadow of my true Self.

I am not sure I’m ready to truly make amends. Or do a proper inventory. I am not ready to really dive into the roots of communion with my Higher Power, or dedicate myself to serving others.

But I am ready to take the first step.

My name is America and my life has become unmanageable.

I am here because I need help.

So what is happening here? What is actually going on? Beyond fake news, the electoral college, and Trumps latest tweet.

As far as I can tell, we have a systemic problem on our hands.

Recently a couple wise men in San Quentin told me that they were mighty frustrated with the ‘youngsters’ who were now being allowed to come into the prison. These kids, 18 up to 24, are being transferred to this low level security prison because of its great access to programs and education (as are more men coming out of long term sentences of solitary confinement from different CA prisons), despite the fact that such young men are often hot-headed and caught up in the games from the street. Politics and who’s who in the zoo, as they say. There had been a lot of hopefulness on the side of the older men to help these youngsters, welcome them in, mentor them, who knows, perhaps they would be willing to let go of their fight or flight entrapment in gang mindsets, and do some self help groups. Maybe get curious about what’s under the mask.

This day I sat between these two men, not quite elders, but established in their inner life, curious, open, and deep in the practice of waking up to what lives beneath the surface. One of them is a minister as well. On this day one of these men let out a low groan and mentioned not knowing what to do with these youngsters. I asked him what he meant. He said, with a slight, noticeable, pause, “don’t get me wrong, I know it doesn’t sound good, especially for this class, but man, these kids need to get a whoopin.” I looked at him, startled, almost smiling from surprise, looking to the other man, who was nodding vigorously. They proceeded to explain to me the boys in their late teens and early twenties seemed to have no respect for their elders, no understanding of rules or etiquette in general and certainly not for prison life. They told me when they had come into prison at 18 or 19 years old, they knew the unspoken codes of respect and obeisance. What was allowed and what wasn’t. There were somehow still rules of conduct and respect, and that youngsters could never, in a million years, have strutted around the prison yard, calling the older men whatever they wanted, ignoring their impact on the community as a whole. These young men were, in their eyes, entitled, unruly, disrespectful, arrogant. Mini trumps running around. No relationality.

They said it was because these boys had grown up with no fathers — all their fathers and uncles and grandfathers even, were swept up in the epic moral failure of the experiment in mass incarceration. All the black and brown male bodies were locked in cages, and these boys grew up in broken homes and broken neighborhoods with no male bloodlines to help contain them, challenge them, protect them, model respectful and healthy attachment. Play with them, pray with them or demonstrate how to channel rage into power. Even with the nurturing protection and core inner strength of empowered women to raise them (and of course these women were coping with unimaginable levels oppression and violence, even more so in many ways) there was an unspoken emptiness in their psyche. This indeed was about intergenerational trauma, historical as well as psychological.

In essence, they were a lost generation of boys from the deserts of America’s inner cities, with an understandable and unspeakable rage. Strutting around with puffed up chests, outdoing each other’s bravado, looking for affirmation from each other, yet carrying around invisible wounds of tremendous rejection, alienation, disconnection. They didn’t seem able to be parented (another word for contained, seen, met) at this late age, no interest in self-examination, a frightening numbness, cut off from all others.

But isn’t that what we are seeing all across our culture? Wouldn’t this very alienation and wounding be present in those white bodies and minds that helped enact the policies that so drastically and methodically tear apart communities of color?

I certainly see this in myself, and see it in those around me. The struggle to feel, the struggle to become embodied, the struggle to feel connected. And I can feel it alive and well in our broader culture — all you have to do is watch our movies, listen to our music, look at our advertisements, eat our food, and observe our politics. And I certainly see this in Trump — that mirror of America’s grandiosity that we all love to hate. And to pretend is so different and ‘other’ from ourselves and our own America. But it seems more and more to me that they are flip sides of the same coin.

Isn’t this same numbing disconnection and inability to feel what has driven the passionate machine of white supremacy and heteronormative patriarchy? In the documentary “I am Not Your Negro” James Baldwin speaks directly to this, saying, hey white, rich, America, do you really not realize that if you do not engage and address and heal the rift with Black America, it will seal your fate, that you will flounder and go under? Do you not realize how desperately you are holding onto your delusion that you can oppress and violate others and be whole and happy yourself? The great laws of all ancient religions prove this to be utter delusion, a desperate and profound ignorance.

There is a story that when Mother Theresa, who, after a lifetime of working with the sick and dying in Calcutta, came to New York City and met an old woman who was afraid to leave her apartment to walk along the streets. Mother Theresa said of our great American culture, “I have never seen poverty like this.”

Trumpism can only take root in a culture so water-logged, with institutions so rotted, that blatantly immature and disrespectful adolescents can take the highest offices of the country. We must remember to look to the soil within which the vast weeds of fascism are rising exponentially now. We are officially a culture of adolescents, uninitiated and uncontained. Most of the adults have left the building, it seems. I loved that written piece by the Council of Grandmothers, who called those rising to power ‘moys’ — that is men but mostly boys, those who are not fully developed and are still children. These Grandmothers encourage us to hold a steady presence in “an unsteady world,” in order to contain the destructive energy that is rising in the world. Feels like we are being called to Witness, to hold, and to midwife what is coming.

But it seems at times that as a culture we are lost. We cannot initiate our youth because the sacred art of initiation has been lost. Our adults were never initiated. We are like youngsters with no clear sense of home or of homecoming, disjointed from the earth and the land, cleaved from mythology and cosmology of meaning, uprooted from ritual and initiations that for millennia fed the hungry souls of our ancestors. Instead we feed on the rituals of reality-television, compulsive material consumption, and the addictive humdrum of political commentary — all of us suddenly aghast as we watch the Titanic of our American Dream swan dive into open space.

I will end here by saying I have come to believe that the cornerstone of our poverty is the poverty of the vertical dimension in our human society. All past societies and civilizations had sophisticated technologies to access and be informed by the vertical dimension of life, but somehow we’ve lost it. Somehow it has become taboo (at least in intellectual, or progressive circles) to talk about religion, god, and the myriad layers of mystery that surround us and in which our very human experience is embedded. Somehow conservatives have been given the monopoly of getting to talk about religion therefore the bulk of organized and symbolized spirituality. Religion, we should remember, comes from ‘religio’ — meaning to bind, to reconnect — and is therefore at the root of the trauma that has disconnected and numbed us in the modern world. At the deepest level I believe we suffer from a spiritual wounding. And, it should be remembered, religion has had the privileged role of pulling us up and out of our daily lives through the elasticity of our imagination into the archetypal domains of creativity and poetics.

The vertical dimension, looking downwards and inwards, into our rich depths of ourselves and the collective unconscious, or looking upwards past the stars, to angels and the divine, is still alive and well, but our access to this vertical dimension has atrophied. We have lost elders who know about it from personal experience, and we have lost our rituals, tools, technologies, and maps for navigating its wild and electric mytho-poetic landscape. Gone seem the days when witchdoctors or shamans or priests could cross between worlds to feed us the truths that our souls, as well as bodies, need for vital living. We seem progressively stuck in the flatland of the horizontal world, hence our shallow culture, our racism, our cannibalizing of the planet like a parasite incapable of relational, sustainable partnership, and our collapsing sense of meaning.

Perhaps that is the silver lining and deeper teaching in this moment in time. A chance for repentance and atonement (to use deliberate religious language in an attempt to reclaim sacred metaphor), an opportunity to re-align with our ancestors and finally address our intergenerational trauma. Our intergenerational karma. Like some massive energetic or spiritual constipation, karma has accumulated individually as well as collectively as a species, an as a country, and it needs to be cleaned out, purged and atoned for before the toxicity kills us. Slavery, the refusal to ever honor the treaties with the Native Americans, the systematic oppression of women, the accumulated violence of ‘profit at all costs,’ these are energetic and deeply real breaches of sacred contract. And they must be atoned for. Atonement, according to the dictionary, means to “make amends or reparation… make restitution for, compensate for, recompense for, expiate, redress, make good.”

I believe this is our work now, regardless of our race, age, gender, religious affiliation. But white people, white men, must be at the forefront and take charge, and our culture at large must do this. But I also believe its an inward and spiritual journey to atone for what is in our personal historical lineages of intergenerational trauma as well. Both the inner and the outer must be included in this time. Separation and splitting in all its myriad forms must be healed. Whatever this next chapter for our world or our country looks like — and the metaphors of death-rebirth, of an addict hitting rock bottom, of midwifery of birth, aka ‘not a tomb but a womb’ — it will certainly be calling us into deeper relationship with ourselves, each other, the planet, and in my opinion, the Source or Divine, whatever that might mean beyond the binaries of language.

And may we remember to laugh and love and sow seeds of joy amidst it all.

May it be so.