Once there was a storm that came and didn’t leave.

The people knew about storms, but were used to them rolling through and disappearing. Perhaps some shattered windows left in their wake, a waterlogged home, a feeling of fear and fresh grass.

Yet this storm was bigger. Its winds ripped apart the buildings that had seemed impenetrable, exposing rot that had infiltrated their beams and foundations. Explosions of light and sound reverberated through the land, shivering terror and rage into the people who saw the fires bursting in their wake, eviscerating fields and factories.

The people wondered who to blame. “No one warned us of a storm like this!” they cried. They turned toward their prophets. “Why didn’t you warn us?”

The prophets said, “We told you to check your foundations. We told you to build your resilience. We told you to uproot the corruption in your homes.”

The people wondered who to blame. “No one prepared us for a storm like this!” They turned toward their leaders. “Why didn’t you protect us?”

The leaders spoke with many voices. Some blamed the people for planting the corruption and rot. Some blamed the people for praying for the storms to come. Some told the people that there were no storms, there was no decimation, it was all an illusion.

The people fell into confusion, rage, and terror. The storm raged but in moments of quiet the clouds opened a portal for the moon to peer through. In dreams and moonlight the people saw invisible strings pulling each other, pulling their leaders.

New prophets arose and said the chaos of the storm was a lie. All of this was orchestrated. Secret rulers lay behind the thrones of power instilling chaos and terror into the people that they may be controlled. These prophets whispered that the hapless king was a fighter for freedom who had to pretend to be an idiot or else he would be destroyed by the storm-bringers. These prophets whispered that the king himself caused the storm to unsettle the people and turn them against him.

The people, mired in confusion and terror and beginning to starve, did not know where to turn. When they looked to the storm, which continued to wreak destruction, they saw a world of chaos in which nothing secure could be planted. When they looked to the moon, they saw a world of nefarious and occult order in which nothing could be resisted.

And all the while, in the wake of this destruction, the burnt timber and burnt fields became fertile. Lightning infused nitrogen into the soil. The people, whose dreams had been choked by the order of the old world, found a place to plant their food and dreams. The light of the moon showed them the strings within that guided their movements, the unnamed fears and wounds that spurred them to act impulsively.

Beneath the terror of chaos and the terror of order lay the land, and the people remembering the land was the first sovereign. Greater than the prophets, greater than the kings, the land was their sacred home. The great body that gave them nourishment, who would receive their bodies after death.

And in exhaustion and terror, the people turned to all they could do. The storm too big to contain, the moon too distant to tame, the people nurtured the land. The people nurtured their dreams. The people fed each other and learned to love each other, to seek to protect each other, and above all to love the land in which their futures grew.

Anthony Rella PLLC has made a donation toward the Intersectional Healers Covid-19 Fund.

From the fundraising site:

This fund is aimed at helping mental health practitioners, energy workers, and bodyworkers in King County who have been financially impacted by cancellations and forced to close or dramatically shift their businesses due to COVID-19. Priority will be given to healers from communities that have been historically and systemically economically disadvantaged—specifically BIPOC healers, queer, transgender & nonbinary healers, and disabled healers. We hope to be able to help anyone who meets the simple criteria (practices a healing art, lives/works in King County and has completed the application below) as long as we have the funds to do so, though this is dependent on funding levels and number of applications we receive. It is our hope to keep this fundraising going for as long as we can, in order to assist all applicants. 

This has been a difficult time for all of us, and while my practice has also taken hits and I’ve been required to make difficult choices, I have also been supported and protected from some of the worst impacts.

These times make clear that the success of those who have wealth and security in this country come at the expense of the wellness, stability, and vitality of people of color, poor people, Indigenous people, queer people, trans people, disabled people, women, and nonbinary people. While the government appears to be declaring war on marginalized people, if you are in a position where you have some security, some wealth, please join me in supporting this fund.

I was honored to be a guest on the Last Born in the Wilderness podcast where we had a rich discussion about the COVID19 pandemic, shame, privilege, masculinity, and synchronicity. The podcast is available through this link.

In the early days of the COVID19 pandemic, I could not understand why this was such a big deal. The early reports suggested the fatality and impact was not much less significant than the flu, but nevertheless parts of China had gone onto lockdown. Having lived through several media-hyped disease risks that ended up being effectively contained, I could not see why this would be any different.

Except it was clear something was different. The urgency with which it kept being reported, and the early predictions of how China’s shutdown could affect the supply chain, kept communicating an underlying and confusing menace that the information did not help me understand. When Governor Inslee began canceling all events larger than 250 people, I realized, “Even if I don’t understand this, I have to deal with it.”

Reading the reports of Italy’s overwhelmed hospital systems finally helped me understand the risk of its unique infectiousness and the secondary consequences of a system overwhelmed by new cases. Anticipating that soon Washington would entirely be on lockdown, I decided to end my Men* Making Connections group and transition entirely to telehealth. This was a difficult, painful decision, and immediately after making it I knew it was the right one.

Transitioning to telehealth has had its challenges, and you may have seen the many articles of why Zoom meetings are so draining. I’m not entirely convinced we can look at the experience of being drained separate from the collective anxiety and disease of the moment we’re experiencing. Though the early days of telehealth felt draining to me, I took a vacation and recommitted to my spiritual practice, and I began to rediscover my footing as a therapist.

The reason I created my Men* Making Connections group was because I highly value the experience of being in a room together, sharing our feelings and truths. There is something about that connection that is different than what we get through screens. When I was a kid and the Internet was new, I discovered my social awkwardness in daily life didn’t hinder me from making friends on the Internet, many of whom thought I was mature and older than my years.

In part, that was due to Internet communications being entirely text-based at the time. With time to reflect and respond in my own time, I could craft a persona. When it came time to spontaneous conversations with people who could see and hear me, I froze.

So the idea of canceling my in-person social connections group so we could practice social distancing was painful, and at the time I couldn’t even imagining transitioning that to a video experience.

Nevertheless, after two months of full-time telehealth from my home office, I’ve come to feel it has a great deal to offer as a way of doing mental health counseling. The limitations, of course, are that it demands more of clients to do what is needed to adjust their circumstances in ways that were easy with having my own office—creating a space outside their daily lives where they could be fully themselves, having a safe space where they won’t be overheard by others and can express their full truth.

All that being said, the work of listening, understanding, and helping clients to sense into their bodies, listen to themselves, dialogue with their parts is doable.

From the beginning, once I left the office I wondered whether I should keep it. No one can predict the future with accuracy, but historical pandemic cycles suggest a second wave happening in the fall and winter after outbreak. And while other states are reopening, I do not understand why. There does not yet appear to be any effective treatment, vaccination, or prevention of the virus outside of social distancing. (That is disingenuous. I believe I understand why there has been a push for reopening, and I do not agree with it. I support investing in the safety net and support of people who are currently unemployed so they can weather this storm, rather than forcing them to choose between losing unemployment or risking infection by going back to work.)

When I imagine doing therapy with someone while wearing masks, I know that is possible, but it hurts my heart. It creates its own barriers. I would rather do telehealth, where we can see and hear each other, we can connect, and we can mitigate the disease risks of being in the same room for an hour breathing the same air—not to mention all the contacts we would encounter in the process of coming to the office.

My telehealth office remains in north Seattle, and I am considering the opportunities of meeting clients who want in-person connections for socially distanced walks or meetings in the park. At the same time, I am excited by the possibility of working with clients who may be great matches but live in other parts of Seattle, or even Washington state.

My hope is that, first of all, I am overreacting and all this will go away by this summer. That hope seems unlikely. My more pragmatic hope is that by this time next year we’ll be better positioned and I can start looking for office space in north Seattle again. But I cannot predict the future, I can only look at what’s in front of me and make the decisions that seem the best with what I know.

I am so thankful for the clients who have been with me through this process, and I have space and desire for more clients.

All this said, these are the choices I made, and my reasons. My colleagues may be making different choices based on their own assessments of the very real risks of exposure against the very real mental health risks of too much isolation and disconnection. Not every person can do telehealth, and so I honor those who are willing to show up to their offices for those clients.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing down my hurts and disappointments, my losses. Since the pandemic began, all the plans I’d made, all the things I’d finally given myself permission to get excited about, to invest money and energy in, to do what I wanted have been canceled.

In the face of worldwide suffering, the restriction of our movement, death and illness, and the flagrant steps toward authoritarian capitalism, my personal losses are a drop in the bucket. Nothing for you to concern yourself about.

Yet it is my bucket, my drop, and the effort of making my losses small while trying to hold my heart open and brave and caring for others was causing me to be heavy and brittle.

In my life I have frequently asked the question that I am frequently asked as a therapist. There are many versions of this question, but they all boil down to, why should I feel my pain? Why would I want to suffer? Why wouldn’t I do what I could to feel good all the time?

The answers are myriad and there is no answer. I’ve thought about it morally, ethically, spiritually, but when I set aside everything the one thing that seems to be true is: that’s just how we work. What we don’t feel stays locked inside of us, taking up space like malware running in the background of a laptop, invisible except for its effects—slowing down your functioning, causing weird bugs, occasionally throwing up nasty pop-ups that say shit you don’t want to be seeing in your day to day life.

Feelings need to be felt, and being whelmed in our feelings is not the same as feeling them. Being witnessed with loving care is what helps our feelings move, and if we can borrow or pay for the loving witness of others, we can, and we can also learn to bear loving witness ourselves.

Grief and disappointment are not separate from care, joy, and enthusiasm. All of these feelings are emotions of engagement with this life. Letting things matter to us. Taking risks. Opening our hearts. Asking for what we really want and need, and then getting it. Or not getting it. Or getting it in a way we didn’t want or expect. Or getting it in a way that kind of fucks up the whole enjoyment of it.

Should I turn myself away from my sorrow, grief, and disappointment of not getting, then it remains in me. The space and energy I would have for fresh caring and new daring remains occupied. These feelings begin to become stagnant, shifting into cynicism, pessimism, despair, and irritability. Life no longer seems worth the effort of caring.

A friend recently reminded me of the Greek word acedia, which was once considered in Christian theology one of the “eight bad thoughts” that later coalesced into what we call the “seven deadly sins.” Acedia is a state of not-caring that leads us to want to forsake our work, our spiritual practices, our heartfelt engagement in the world. Writer Kathleen Norris describes it as “not being able to care, and being so not able to care that you don’t care that you don’t care.”

When we don’t grieve, we don’t let ourselves be disappointed, don’t witness the feelings and let them move, break down, compost, then we have no room for caring. Indeed we begin to feel resentment toward the world for being so harsh and indifferent to our caring. And we participate in our own defeatedness and acedia.

Last night I put my written slips of disappointment and grief into a little cauldron and burnt it. As the smoke curled and all those losses burnt away, I felt softness entering my heart again. I felt gratitude at a heart capable of caring, growing, and taking risks in a world that is so strange and unpredictable, where passionate connection can sour into cold distance and longing calls us forward into new journeys toward delight and despair.

Our feelings are not facts, not the objective and entire truth, and yet each wishes to be heard and acknowledged as we move on our journey.

Honor your disappointments and griefs. Share them with loving witnesses, if you can. And then lay them in the stone circle and, with love, set them ablaze. Their ash is the ground of hope.

Now that we are going through personal and collective uncertainty, it feels like an important time to take time—if we have it—to reconnect with our selves and the foundations of our being. To shed what is unhelpful and remember what matters to us so we can recommit to our own aliveness and collective liberation. Even in times of crisis, liberation is possible.

Join me in six weeks of working through the material from my book, Circling the Star, in supportive community. Sliding scale and solidarity slots are available.

This will be an online course for psychospiritual healing and integration, and not a therapeutic group, and not billable by insurance.

To see course information and register, click on this link.

In times of crisis, we’re likely to experience some regression. Young parts of us that seek out some authority to blame, some authority to hide behind, someone bigger and more powerful who can be responsible for dealing with this beautiful and at times terrifying world.

Those who step into authority, as parents, religious leaders, politicians, healers, and more may have sensed the strangeness of realizing that projection falls upon you. That you, a human being yourself, as fallible and seeking of safety as anyone else, have been targeted as the one who is supposed to know what’s going on. The right next thing to do to keep people safe. The right way to be in the world to be whole.

And, if you have that authority, you likely do have something to offer. An insight, a process, a plan that will lead everyone through the door from distress to desire. From crisis to normalcy. From illness to haleness.

Yet when we’re on the side receiving that projection, we might feel pressured to behave as though we know more than we do. To be the authority and show no doubt. And sometimes it helps, but often it becomes a barrier to the qualities that made us an authority in the first place, what we needed to practice to accrue that power and insight.

Perhaps the world needs less certainty and more courage. As a therapist, my best offering is my curiosity and a process that helps the client to heal and know themself and discover both the door and what’s on the other side of the door. I may have an idea of what I think is through the door, or I have my biases of what I think should be, but in those moments I am the least curious and the least helpful. What I offer best is the capacity to be in the not-knowing with others, but not to be crushed or overwhelmed by the not-knowing but to let it enliven us. To be excited by the not-knowing, the risk, the opportunity for transformation and the possibility that the other side of the door will be even better, although different and not free of problems.

In times like these, I feel we are all sitting in a great unknowing. There is a giant door through which we are passing, collectively, ready or not. No one knows for sure what’s on the other side. We can practice all of our tools, all of our good skills, stick to our goals, but some of us are feeling a sense of pause even in that. What if this goal I’ve been following is no longer relevant when I move through the door? What if all my work toward being recognized at my job falls to the wayside as the industry collapses? What if my grievances with my friends become buried beneath so much reality? What if all of this fear was for nothing? What if some day I wish I’d had far more fear?

Together we sit in our questions and unknowing, with all its terror and numbness and crankiness and unexpected moments of levity, peace and joy. And even with crisis and pain there is the possibility of richness, of seeing how all our lives we’ve worn a way of seeing that was never fully true. We’ve been ruled by a wounding that’s no longer relevant. We’ve been controlled by fears that simply do not matter. Even in this pain there is the opportunity to set aside all that we’ve been told to like about ourselves, want for ourselves, fear so we can protect ourselves, and discover the truth of who we are.

And if we know that truth, this door could strip away all that no longer serves that truth. We can sacrifice what was burdensome and unnecessary in the flames of aliveness. We can allow the waste and the garbage to be stripped down and pass through, fierce and sharp and ready to make a new world where the old once stood.

To pass through the door is to die. Our bodies may live and our consciousness may persist, but something in the way we’ve lived must die. Something we believed about ourselves and the world must die. Our illusions of separation. Our illusions of control. Our illusions of independence.

And each of us carries our own piece of that death. Instead of worrying about the death of the world, let us tend to our own. Let us keep our bodies alive, and grieve, and care for each other, and let ourselves be changed so that the soul has more room to breathe and adapt to what is beyond the door.