A massive hickory at Maraica San Pancho, a divine resort in Nayarit, Mexico.

I am sitting on a balcony in San Pancho, Mexico. I can see the ocean from my chair. Three REALLY WEIRD birds that look something like chickens and something like small peacocks just marched by, our second interaction in the last few minutes. As they walk tiny lizards scurry out from their path. Someone is using a buzz saw, but if I listen carefully I can still hear the waves lapping the shore, like a bass note to the chorus.

I am under the boughs of a massive hickory tree, the oldest I have ever seen. Its boughs reach down around my room and hang below the balcony. It feels something akin to how I feel with Marc, sitting in the shade of his care. It is odd to think that a week ago I did not know this person at all, and this week he figures into all of my decisions. Some change is gradual but some is tectonic, reshaping the landscape in one instant. From this vantage point I wish I had had more anticipation for good things to happen in my life, though maybe that is what I felt last Friday, as I lay in the heated, rooftop pool at the Denver Sheraton, killing time before my panel. There was a sense of a ripeness but I had become impatient and needed to get out of my normal environment to find myself again.

Years ago, when Alexander and I were engaged I had this image of getting married barefoot under a giant tree. It wasn’t possible then, for various reasons. Now I am glad. It almost feels like a sacrilege to include Alexander in the sacred symbols of life. He told me once that I was not in his inner circle anymore. I found the comment childish and kind of silly, especially since I am the mother of his child, but I feel something like that toward him. I would use different words though. It is not about excluding him. He excludes himself by the person he chooses to be. Despite his meticulous praying, he does not honor what is holy, on the earth, or in woman, or in mothers, or in himself. He is fundamentally closed to life.

My people are those who are somehow finding a way to say “yes” to life, whatever their circumstances, opening into it, unfolding, becoming, surrendering. I can often identify them in one instant, one conversation, like a hidden tribe amongst all the people of this precious earth. The cleaning lady assigned to this room is one of them, the lady who works the self-checkout line at the grocery store back home, my college French professor, Greek by birth, quietly studying the Arabic alphabet taped above her desk. Sometimes there is a student in my office and I recognize them as one of my people, or a yoga teacher, or a friend of a friend. I wonder what thread is connecting us to one another, how we know one another when we see each other, a human epistemology.

I don’t think these are static categories. It is not that some people are in the flow, and some are not. We are all in the flow, but some of us are resisting it more than others. I was resisting for a long time, but didn’t realize that’s what I was doing. I was confusing agency and resistance. I could not have imagined how fundamentally out of control it feels to pick up one’s feet and be drawn forward by the current, to accept the pace that it takes, sometimes violent and rushing, other times gentle and barely perceptible. It is so much more socially acceptable to be moving quickly, it is easy to prefer it, to see it as better than the slower times, but it is all part of the flow.

Years ago, I dreamed of a mighty river. I was thrown from the boat and pulled underneath in a current. In the moment where I wanted to fear, I had a knowing: don’t resist, the river will bring you back to the surface when the time is right. I relaxed into the water. For years, I have been below the surface, thrust forward by this unknown force, becoming intimate with it. I don’t know if the God of my childhood exists, but I know the force of creation that beckons the bulbs in spring, the drives me to this damn laptop every day, that erupts in riotous colors in the fecundity of creation. I know something of that force, its insatiable need to birth something new, its quiet search for receptive vessels, the flirtatious way it returns again and again until embraced, its hushed whisper, drawing all things forward. Lifting my feet, I give myself to the current, feel again its mighty power, and prepare to be drawn under. I know, when the time is right, I will surface again.