“The kind of change we are after is cellular as well as educational, is personal and intimate, is collective as well as cultural. We are making love synonymous with justice.”

Active inquiry, then, is an ecotone: a tension between the known and the unknown, the space between the present and the future that is constantly unfolding.

“All that you touch you change, all that you change changes you.”7 Octavia Butler gave us this.

At its most basic, this is awe-inducing; I find it much easier to pull myself back to awe, even in the midst of a gray winter, when I look around at all these leafless trees and remember they are mirroring the shape of my own dendrites and neurons.

It isn’t enough to keep our focus on the singular human body, on our own breath and our own relaxation. All life is possible through relationships, the ecotone of self and other, cells within the self, an individual within the whole.

The Great Basin bristlecone pine’s unhurried growth saved it from the greed of industry. Such a dense wood that grows in such a harsh landscape in such twisted shapes doesn’t lend itself to commerce.

notice this tree I have seen without seeing so many countless times.

Your bones are in a relationship with gravity, in large part because your bones are filled with blood and lymph, which is to say, your bones are filled with fluid, similar but different to the way trees are filled with sap.

GROW: Ground. Relate. Observe. Widen.