“To become immense means to recall how embedded we are in an animate world—a world that dreams and enchants, a world that excites our imaginations and conjures our affections through its stunning beauty. Everything we need is here. We need only to remember the wider embrace of our belonging to the woodlands and prairies, marshlands, and neighborhoods, to the old stories and tender gestures of a friend.”
—Francis Weller, In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty
Lately, I’ve been finding solace in Francis Weller’s new book In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty, reading it a few pages at a time with my daily ritual of black coffee at 4:30 AM. Weller’s invitation to the soul work of extraordinary, turbulent times feels like a gift.
Two weeks ago, my children finally went back to school after a long, childcare-deficient summer, also a gift. I am still exhaling, marveling at the miracle of having a quiet house to myself for the first time in months and gratefully receiving the cooler temperatures of autumn in Vermont. When we moved here from North Carolina three years ago, it was the New England summers I most looked forward to. To be sure, there were plenty of moments of magic this summer season: my children and I often went to our community pool early in the morning, rescuing dozens of tiny frogs from the chlorinated water. There were monarch butterflies, gloriously pink echinacea flowers, and foraged wild strawberries.
But there were also extreme heat days that our window-unit air conditioners couldn’t quite keep up with, exacerbating underlying family health conditions. My daughter contracted Lyme disease for the second time since our move from one of far too many ticks, and absurdly, parts of Vermont flooded for the third year in a row on July 10. Days-long stretches of wildfire smoke drifting southward from Canada meant anxiously checking the air quality and having to ask my children to wear masks while playing outside when the air was Code Orange or Code Red. There is something surreal about watching nine-year-olds play four-square in KN94 masks on a New England August afternoon. There is a distinct sense that “normal” life has gone missing in action.
Tell Administrator Zeldin: Cutting Climate Pollution Is Essential for Our Families’ Health
Holding onto the moments of magic felt like a survival strategy in a season marked by gnawing unease and the feeling that summers—and American democracy—will never be the same again. Life as you know it is slipping away, the frogs, flowers, butterflies, and berries all seemed to say, but there is still beauty in the unknown. Don’t miss it.
Navigating a tidal wave of intense, unexpected pain in my personal life over the last several weeks has reminded me that there are always times when everything changes. Sometimes change comes with the abrupt shock and jagged edges of a relational, political, or climate disaster; sometimes it is the slow, unsettling erosion of familiar summer days. We cling to the illusion that normalcy is supposed to endure, but really, the cliché is true: change is the only constant.
This brings me back to Weller: “When the ordinary fades, when the familiar rhythms and patterns of shared living erode, something is activated within the soul. Hidden invitations and initiations arise in a time of uncertainty. The soul recognizes the markers of descent—darkness, sorrow, anxiety—as requiring radical change… These are the precise times when the possibility for shifts in the collective field occurs. We are in such a threshold time… Never think that you have nothing to contribute to the shaping of our future. You are needed. You are necessary. It is time to become immense.”
As valiantly as we tried, my children and I could not rescue all the frogs from the pool this summer; some of them had already died by the time we found them. An entire family of monarch caterpillars on the milkweed plant in our front yard was eaten by wasps, never to become butterflies. My daughter buried tiny dead creatures under smoky skies and echinacea petals, and together we prayed for whatever higher power may be out there to take their little souls wherever they are supposed to go next. These were the moments this summer when I felt most immense, most alive, most awake to the potential of threshold times and liminal spaces.
In the absence of the ordinary, there is profound meaning to be found in grieving for what has been lost while praying for what comes next in whatever way we know how: with blessings for the souls of frogs, with earnest actions in the direction of the kind of world we want. We are needed and necessary in these times of transition, Weller reminds me, so I want to remind you: Let us become immense, remembering that everything we need is here to support us.
Tell Administrator Zeldin: Cutting Climate Pollution Is Essential for Our Families’ Health