Which is probably why, when I walked through the doors of her home in Concord, MA, hot tears fell down my face. I wasn’t sad. This is a common misconception about grief—that it is only sadness emerging. Honestly, I was so filled with so much awe and reverence for my existence in that moment and place that it completely overwhelmed me with adoration. Gazing at her writing desk at the window that overlooked a frigid New England November, the whispers in my bones could hear her encouragement to keep my sights set firmly on desire; we were not born for contentment.

Why in the hell would we push the godforsaken thing up that cursed hill anymore if ChatGPT can help us escape the discomfort of the hill and the boulder in under six minutes, and for free? We are liberated. But are we?

When we trust the unknowing and surrender the intellect, then somehow, we find what our deepest self has always known or hoped for: we are not alone.

There is something about standing above a process like that, as well as such immense depths, which puts us face to face with our smallness and the vastness of the mysteries of our natural world. I know some people who feel claustrophobic in the open ocean, often meeting annihilation anxieties that pulse through all human beings. I did not find myself anxious, but rather at home in the abyss. The trials of my winter had forced me to face a possibility of annihilation. Rolling over offshore surges on a 20-foot boat, I was at the mercy of the ocean and Her will; it gave me the opportunity to confront my own cycles of life, death, and the equilibrium between it all. It is a process that Melissa Nelson relates to as “climate change” and the way it connects to “our own internal climates that have become out of balance; it’s kind of the mirror of human consciousness being like a climate in chaos. They are so interrelated.”

In the face of this acceptance is the confrontation with ourselves, not what we imagine we should be or even what social media has insisted we need to be. It is essential that we meet ourselves in the space between our highest hopes and our reality, even when it is not what we imagine it should be. While we’d like to do an hour of yoga every day, perhaps 20 minutes, 3 times a week is all we can manage for now.

I am beginning to believe that it is hope that brings us back to the wheel, to life. A colleague of mine recently told me about Mariame Kaba’s quote, “Hope is a discipline.” We hope for change and then we find the action within ourselves to return to a process, which will eventually shift the clay from a rectangle to the wild unknown that lives within it—or us. Sometimes it comes easy, and sometimes it is an act of love to hope with discipline.