When I was 23 years old I thought I was dying for the third time in my life. Some people face death once, at the end of a long and healthy life. Some of us get a face to face glimpse of our mortality in an accident and choose to come back. And some of us slow dance with death without realizing what we've swayed with until it removes its mask at song's end.

I breathed death in as a child and then backed away. After graduating college in England, I had death jump into bed with me in Bangkok, Thailand and seize me by the throat in the middle of the night. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move. All I could think was, "I am dying. Right here in a place where no one knows me and I can't yell for help." Not even my friend knew what was happening as she lay in the bed next to me, sleeping peacefully as I struggled to inhale.

Somehow the panic subsided and I felt my chest begin to rise and fall, but the fear was embedded in each heartbeat.

This is what it feels like to die. This is what it feels like to be surprised by the one reality we all face.

And now what.

After flying back to the States as fast as I could buy tickets, I made a bucket list. With cancer as a child I knew deep down, it wasn't my time to drop skin and fly. But the panic attack and subsequent nervous breakdown showed me that life is infinitely creative in how it can shake you.

Time is an illusion. Youth didn't protect me and education didn't shelter me from the wilds of the psyche run amok. All the exercise and positive self-talk and therapy and adventure and acts of compassion didn't prevent terror from overtaking my good sense, so what choices did I have?

As I lay in the shuttered cocoon of my childhood bedroom I came to several places.

To act. To move. To face the truth. To rest. To be kind.

For awhile I pitied people who had never experienced outright fear or confronted their own mortality. It seemed to me that the only way people could become real was to have the illusion of stability and stasis be ripped to shreds. Only then could they begin to ask, "If I am not my body, job, house, spouse, religion, political party, or bank account, what am I?"

I began preparing for death at 8 and have continued to life with one eye on the end ever since.

The greatest challenge has been to not get frozen into numbing out or losing the hard won perspective I struggled so hard to resist.

And now I find death coming as my teacher again, but to a different song and with a different step.

As I look around at all the suffering and fear that has been revealed in the United States over the last year, I see the underpinnings of our country and it shakes me to the core.

If there was one thing I always felt sure of, it was that America was the greatest country on earth in terms of being a safe place and for providing opportunity to reach your fullest potential. While I was disappointed in many aspects of its history, such as the Native American genocide and the enslavement of Africans for the profit of other men, those felt like ancient history. We had learned from our mistakes and become as a whole, more compassionate.

But it isn't true. We have continued to keep the colored communities enslaved through vehicles like mass incarceration and stigmatizing the poor. We continue to renege on our promises to the Native Americans that they are sovereign nations with power over the lands we forced them onto.

And we, as white folks, refuse to look at the fact that we are all propping up a society that demands we consume things we don't need, that we exploit the earth for materials we could do without, and we force the poor to do the labor we think is beneath us. Then call them dirty immigrants and terrorize their families by sending in more poor people to round them up and send them back across the border.

To top it off, I don't feel safe in public places anymore. I don't go to movie theaters or the mall as often as I once did because these are the places that home grown terrorists seem to prefer for their outbursts. I don't enjoy flying like I once did either for similar reasons.

It wasn't hard to walk away from with my past track record. I would be cutting back on consumption and being more creative reading a book or writing a blog post.

But then I started learning about meta data and how our every move online is more or less traceable and used to create profiles for targeted marketing. Top that off with a president who surrounds himself with conspiracy theorists and xenophobic propagandists and suddenly it's getting scary to state your true opinion online.

Anonymity is gone, and with it, the freedom to be absolutely candid without possible recourse.

So again, I find myself faced with having to make a list of what I stand to loose by standing for what I wish to create.

I am a white American. Right now, I have alot. A family. An able body. A good income. A house I own. A car I own. Organic food. An education. The American Dream.

But I could loose it all by choosing to speak truth and align myself with the marginalized and oppressed.

And while those things are all significant draws, the most important one to me is life. I want this life.

And that is one of the things we all loose at some point, but to willingly and consciously choose to potentially cut that short feels a bit like insanity.

And that is mostly because I have been allowed to have far more insulators between my life and death than many Americans who inherited dark skin.

But nothing is permanent. I've learned that lesson before.

Do I want society to crumble? Do I want the Cascadia Subduction Zone to go kaput? No. Do I want to start a revolution? No.

But I do want the truth. Hard as it may be to face. Harder still to utter.

I invest in the luminous. I aim to transcend the chaos and changeability of this physical, temporary world. And the only way I know how to do that, to live that, is to follow the truth as far as it will take me.

So if you see me on the streets protesting, I hope you see light. If you read my writings as I tug the tiger's tail, I thank you for your bravery and time. And if, by chance, you should find yourself in the middle of a storm of personal meaning, I hope you will consider me an ally and a friend.

I intend to restore my vitality in each cell, pore and neuron.

I intend to put my feet and hands into specific dirt and begin sowing my garden of life work.

I intend to grow larger, peaceful, activated and connected.

I intend to become known in the community and a driving force in social/spiritual justice.

I intend to simplify my possessions.

I intend to deepen relationships with people.

So let it be.

So it is.

You can come now

Snow piled in pyramids

Ice, hacksawing the tops

Into jagged trees

Sweep us together

Dirt and white

Melted and fused.

We skip verses we don't know,

Humming the melody as infill.

Anything to avoid hanging 

Like a noose from weeping willows.

That twisting testimony 

You lie,

You camouflage,

I provoke

When backed into this bloodied corner,

Inescapable DNA

Demanding a picket fence,

Pressed dresses

And the ache of stones swallowed to keep quiet.

We carry legacies,

Secrets,

Cementing alliances so long as the tree stands.

I see the willow banded,

Leaves wither

And Time peck through skin.

Perhaps there is no need to hum

Now that the earth is dry,

Roots unhinged for lack of life.

Perhaps this is what it means 

To grow beyond the song

We once sang 

To stay alive. 

Remember that poem you wrote?

The one about San Miguel de Allende?

Roses and bougainvillea everywhere

Gauze and weight and whispers rampaging...

Your fingers were lithe then,

Imagination, supple.

The way our skin stretched

The headboard cracked

Each inch of equinox another nail in the coffin.

We never boarded the plane.

Passports expired,

The amethyst sank into a sock drawer,

13 years hovered and burrowed into bellies.

This Last Glacial Maximum of love.

The seas pulled back and locked in ice.

Land exposed, cracked and fertile.

Waiting for a comet to strike.

If only your mother hadn't died.

If only the fire had smothered itself

In your despair, 

Instead of roaring back to life.

Maybe then,

I would have forgotten the jasmine in your words

The way they made me overlook incarnation

And that we once held meteors between our lips.

The stranger in green

Rests heavy against your breast,

Humming with the violin

Matching tones to chest.

You realize,

The room is still moving

Dancers flying,

Sweat flinging,

Music mincing minutes into motion

That led you to this.

Thud upon thud,

Your heart,

Then his

Repeats again

And again, until

What once was a fist,

Uncurls into a beating rose.

She sits atop her fence,

Dangling words in the breeze

While I wait across the street,

Hanging behind the tree.

Fingers can’t find their way over

Syllables

Just like her smile remains

A flash of sun

But never lightning striking earth.

Not this flesh

Not these bones,

Not the spinning dance

As she pirouettes between land and sky.

My only touch,

The closeness of a whisper

As she leans in to confide

I taste the fire in her lungs

Burning through my skin

An unsigned treaty

Between sovereign nations

Of who we are

And what I long to do.

A storm hammers water

Against earth.

Relentless,

Driving its will

Until liquid becomes solid

And dirt softens.

Sound groans,

Heavy beneath the injustice,

Drenched in force,

Sodden and spent.

And rain courses velvet again.

Skyward,

Only grey

stands against the chaos below.

Paralyzed witness,

A Standing Rock amidst the flood.

But it stretches on,

Racing the heavens,

Carrying the story

Across ocean and tongue,

Until all awaken

And chant its song.

From the madness,

Resolution.

From the tears,

Sanctuary.

Destiny

I was born a skeptical nun

Devotion for blood

Thirst for proof

That could never be absolute

So I left

The habit draped

Over my shoulders

And wandered the desert...

Cause after cause

Cathedral, candidate,

Corpse

Standing before a

Rosary of eternity

My beating heart

And falling before

The lance

Of inherent frailty.

Calling

I can't divorce Fate.

A call to serve,

Digging past ideals

Scraping through skin

Into bone

Until the thrum of

Humanity silences

Party lines, humble pennies

And absolute Rightness

To baptize me

In Holy Choice.

Simply the want

For a better striving.

A deeper canyon

Between summerland

And unending night

May swallow all belief,

But this remains,

Black and white

Billowing around me

In tatters

Lifting an olive branch

Even as the waters rise.

I pushed you across the sand

Splashing water from the hose

Into crack after crack

Until the desert around us

Seemed wet again,

The earth gasping

As we laughed,

quenched.