A few weeks before I was asked to contribute to Childlessness Transformed, I had the following dream:

I am in a foreign city. There is a huge bell tower attached to a sacred building. The bells begin to ring and a large group of people congregate to watch the figures moving in the tower. The figures are a statue of a mother and her child. She moves as the bell tolls, taking off her clothes, layer by layer above the waist until she wears only a kimono. Then she begins to nurse her infant who is in a white dress. The child finishes nursing and squirms to be put down. The mother puts the child down. The child is now alive and on the ground in front of me. The bells continue playing. The child crawls toward me. The child is about eleven months old and pulls itself up on my leg. Putting my hands on either side of the child, I check to make sure it is safe. As the child begins to fall I help it to the ground and it crawls even closer to me. I pick the child up and kiss it. The child is beautiful and blond. The man behind me expresses concern that the white dress will get dirty. I say, "What makes a child dirty is printer's ink from people's hands, and I don't have that on my hands."

In this dream, the child becomes flesh and blood by being placed on the Earth. Though the child is not mine, in one sense, it comes to me for support, love, reassurance and safekeeping. I receive the child with the hands of Eros (earthly related love), not of Logos (the word - printer's ink - more removed love from above).

I have been reflecting, in the way one does at midlife, on my own childlessness and what life has called me to pick up, parent and nourish in other forms. I am reviewing all the important choices of my life, refining and clarifying the conscious and unconscious intention which has brought me to this moment. I am actually surprised to find myself childless because I have always had a deep love for children and as a young girl, and as a young woman, imagined myself having several children. However, there have been other experiences and tasks toward which life had compelled me. Writing this piece, I still feel some sadness and loss acknowledging that I am 45 and have no child of my own. And it is with deep gratitude and wonder that I acknowledge how alive the child within me is today. This pure and beautiful child within is one of my great teachers and an essential resource from which I draw in parenting the planet.

Along with mid-life musings, I have been experiencing many changes in my body and energy patterns which have expanded my reflective process. Something fundamental is shifting for me in this pre-menopausal time, something at a cellular level. It is affecting me at every part of my being. I have been quite driven in my intentions during my life, and this year my body "hit the wall" as we say in the heroic language of the athlete. I have been forced to slow down dramatically. At times this change is alarming and frightening. At moments, I have felt dead in the water. Working with healers this year has balanced my energy, eliminated some very troubling symptoms and allowed me to see this transition as another of life's initiations. It has been a descent into a terrifying, sometimes life-threatening, unformed place from which a more vivid and expanded knowing begins to be available to me.

From this vantage point, I have been preoccupied with the notion that we as individuals and as a collective must expand our hearts and our vision. If we are to live out our days, numbered as they clearly are, with joy and equanimity, it seems we must expand and become much simpler all at once. How do we get our psyches to resemble the inside of a Zen monk's room and his consciousness in meditation at the same time? Or to resemble the starkness of the New Mexico desert and the creative vision of O'Keeffe's genius all at once? I reflect upon this for my own life, and for those whom I see in my practice as a Jungian analyst in training. How do I support the development of this new form of consciousness? What are the resources I draw from and what forms and rituals in therapeutic work, teaching and daily life serve to manifest the vision of expansion and simplicity?

I teach as I have been taught, heal as I have been healed, parent as I have been parented. At mid-life I see how I have been birthed and rebirthed and grown up again and again through the great parenting of life and the transformational experiences which life keeps providing me. The way I have come to the question about expansion and simplicity is through always living on the edge of life's transformative moments.

My relationship to parenting is primarily through the feminine, including both the maternal and erotic dimensions innate to woman. Often in our culture women sacrifice the erotic to take on the maternal, or vice-versa. That split has damaged our souls and our daily lives immeasurably. It both parallels and reflects the spirit/matter split of patriarchy.

From a very early age fate intended that I maintain a bond with both dimensions of the feminine. When I was two years old my birth mother was killed in a train accident which my father and I survived. A year later my father remarried and I have been mothered since then by another mother. My early loss created a special tension and sensitivity within me, because I had bonds with both the mother who raised me and the one from whom I was so abruptly separated. When my mother died, a part of me crossed over with her. I can remember clearly how in my childhood I loved sacred music and would hold elaborate ritual funerals for the snakes I found dead in our alley.

Friends and relatives were more aware of my great love of life and the outdoors than of this private part of me. As a strong willed, very animated child growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I could never get enough of mountains, water and camping. It was at this time that my life-long intimate relationship with nature began, for in nature both the above and the below are merged. I was not divided there. But what was engaged by those who survived my mother's death was the earth-bound aspect of me. As a triple earth sign and a natural extrovert, this part of me became dynamic. What was less nurtured and developed, because there was little talk about my birth mother and no acknowledgement of the bond I continued to have with her, was the reflective, introverted, mystical part of me. As a guide and parent for the planet, this intimate knowledge of both the above and the below, which I have taken into my cells through the bond I have with both mothers, is essential. My capacity to hold a bond through all the ins and outs of a client or student giving birth to themselves has its origins here.

Another vital resource in parenting the planet is, as I mentioned at the beginning, a deep investment in my inner child. I remember seeing Peter Pan when I was about six years old. In a fashion characteristic of my enthsuiastic self, I committed all of the songs to memory and acted out the full show, complete with flying by leaping from chair to chair. I particularly liked the song about not growing up and the purity in the nursery lullaby. A couple of years ago, at a meeting among some of my colleagues at the Jungian Institute, I was surprised to hear all of the women say that as adults they never really played, except perhaps when their children were young. By contrast, some of the men felt they still preserved a spirit of play through sports. I was saddened to feel how many women project much of their inner child onto their children, and how few were able to access the spontaneity, wonder and freshness of that inner child. Mine has been well tended. I am still frequently overcome with a feeling of "Oh the Wonder of It All" and awed by the remarkable beauty inherent in so much of life. This child in me knows she is loved.

In direct contrast to these images of light and joy are experiences of betrayal and deep suffering. These have also been important teachers and transformative influences for my expanding vision and work with others. To really live through a fundamental betrayal in relationship or in community is like being leveled by a heavy air raid, or burnt clean by a huge forest fire. I have survived both, and have gained deeper access to compassion, discrimination, wisdom and forgiveness as a result. I find in my work with clients, and in my living relationships, I tend to feel deeply sensitive to the pain of these betrayals in the lives of those I am close to. I have some unresolved ambivalence about whether or not, as many psychologists insist, suffering is really necessary for growth and development. However, betrayals do occur. That is what's so. I have myself been a betrayer. Betrayal is a part of the rhythm of life and relationship through which I am asked to accompany and support others. The balance between supporting the descent demanded by betrayal and holding a hopeful vision for the one who is at the moment despairing is always an original, creative act.

At the age of 33, I made a choice to be coupled with a woman. That choice betrayed all convention. I left a marriage to a minister with two children of his own, all of whom I loved. In ending the marriage I left a certain kind of collective approval forever. I am still honoring my love of women as a lesbian and "living outside the law." Though I have given up predicting anyone's future, particularly my own, I cannot imagine that this choice, spiritually congruent as it feels to me, will change in my lifetime. There was a great deal of suffering for me and those whom I loved in my turning away from the socially agreed upon way of mating. Yet, the experience of coming home in the intimate presence of a woman is my true heart's place.

Two years after my life brought me to this choice, I remember having a 35th birthday party and being given a beautiful card by an old wise Jungian woman. I have this wisdom from Castanada framed to remind me of the truth of my life and my choices.
"For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly."1

Life in intimate partnership with women is a rich experience from which I draw healing waters, fiery wisdom and nurturance for myself and those whose lives I touch. I have come to a more integrated knowing about the child, the mother, the erotic woman and now the crone through the mirroring and deep loving in these relationships.

Jung acknowledged the unique wisdom which women transmit one to another:
"Every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, and every woman extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter. This intermingling gives rise to that particular uncertainty as regards time; a woman lives earlier as mother, later as daughter. The conscious experience of these ties produces the feeling that her life is spread out over generations. The first step towards the immediate experience and conviction of being outside time brings with it a feeling of immortality."2

In order to expand our hearts and our vision, we must all be initiated, at a mute and cellular level, into the wholeness of the feminine. Being in intimate relationship to women - as mother, sister, analyst, teacher, friend, and lover - has provided that initiation for me.

Nature has also been my initiator and teacher. I have learned different lessons in nature at different times in my life. As a small child, nature was that place where I was comforted in my wholeness in a way my life could not contain elsewhere. As a young woman adventurer in the grips of the heroic archetype, I learned from nature a great deal about impermanence, discrimination, the cycles of life and about fear and courage. I remember how upset and humbled I was in the Himilayan Mountains of Nepal when as unexpected monsoon rain flooded our campsite and ruined my camera in a matter of seconds. I was challenged there, at a very physical level, to let go of attachment and expectation and was able to feel the freedom of not really knowing how any day would unfold. In midlife, still with a spirit of adventure, I am also learning from nature how to carefully listen and observe. As Krishnamurti says, to see. The subtle, delicate communi-cations of life and beauty I experience in nature, when I take the time, are deeply nurturing and inspiring. I take refuge in my home in the country and the familiarity and nurturance of daily life with my ancient redwoods. My pets have taught me a lot about kindness and loyalty and the value of constant care. Poetry has also been a great teacher to me, and a favorite poem of mine is "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry;

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
Who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
Waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.3

Finally, my Buddhist practice has been an invaluable teacher. Watching my breath, holding on, letting go, has begun to introduce me to an experience of life and death as one. Sitting practice has allowed me to feel safer alone and in silence. It has provided the container for seeing more clearly what is so about myself and learning not to judge it; being in the moment with whatever is. Inspired by the life and work of the Vietnamese monk and teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, I have been practicing mindfullness with clients. As I go to greet my client at the beginning of the hour, I say to myself:
Greeting my client
I open heart and mind
Fully receiving and accepting
The one who enters here.

And as my client leaves I remind myself again:
Saying goodbye to my client
Holding them in light
Hoping they will keep their heart warm
And not lose themselves along the way.

So, there you have it. My life and my work in parenting the planet are really the same thing. I have always had trouble with the splitting which says, "S/he is a great teacher even though her personal life doesn't reflect what s/he teaches." I am committed to healing that split. I know clients and students can sense that kind of split and it tends to undermine the safety and containment necessary to cultivate the seeds of the Self. My way of parenting, teaching, healing is through the feminine, through the child, the body, through nature, spiritual practice and daily life - all of which are out of favor with patriarchy. Fool that I am, I follow my heart. I have made many mistakes, hurt people and been hurt in the process. But this fool in me is an important teacher and friend. The fool keeps the critic away because she's oblivious to its voice. To be a fool is to be spontan-eous, sincere, imperfect, simple and humble. Our culture tends to despise the fool, responding only to the hero. If we are parenting our children, and in the background we are embracing the archtype of the Fool as opposed to the Hero, then one of the things we will commuicate to them is that nothing ever stays the same. The only constant is change. We must keep teaching them reality, rather than training them to grow up, accomplish all these goals, settle down, get married, have their children - everything linear. The hero archetype has its place in growing up into our Selves, but it is no longer enough. The idea of Don Quixote charging the MX missle is absurd and poignant. We need the creativity, vulner-ability, simplicity, vision and inner strength of the fool. In my teaching and therapy rituals, the fool is often present and always welcome.

Therapy is important to the seeding, birthing and initiating of the Self. The container can restrict and constrict, however, if I am not open and expanding my heart and my vision at all times. The intimacy and stark confrontation with the secrets of a client's past and of their own deepest truth can be frightening, overwhelming and painful to them. There is so much emphasis on being right, being perfect, not being foolish. We grow up thinking the important thing is looking good and being right. That is pretty superficial and far from the heart of the matter. I find that when I can meet my clients as they are, holding my heart open to their fear, anger, dismay and despair, they are able to see, to grieve and to expand into their own deepest truth.

I have often been told that I have the capacity to inspire others whose lives I touch. And I have been criticized sometimes for my optimism. I feel my hope makes me a good alchemist. I can inspire people to do things that they didn't think they could do. One of my friends said to me, "You get people to come right up to the edge. And then you get them to jump off. And they don't realize what has happened to them." I think this is because I am a mirror, one in which others see reflected the expanded possibility they are becoming.

The forms of therapy and teaching continue to be vital and alive for me. And at mid-life I am experiencing a restlessness, waiting for some clarity about creative expression. At my 45th birthday celebration I said to friends that I felt the really important thing I had come to receive and contribute was still unfolding. Perhaps it will be farming on Orcas Island. Or doing more hands-on work in the desert. Or living a more solitary and contemplative life in the mountains. Or coming forth in a more extro-verted way as a writer and artist. Or perhaps things will continue as they are and my perspective will be transformed somehow. Though mid-life reflections are disorienting and sometimes painful and confusing, I feel grateful to have written this piece at just this moment. I am grateful to be remembering the complex experiences which life has used to parent me, and the relationships which I have relied upon for guidance and love. It is good to feel how I have contributed to the parenting of this planet. I now move into the second half of life, heart more open, still a beginner gripped by a vision of expansion and simplicity.

1. Teaching of Don Juan, Carlos Castenada, New York, Simon & Schuster.

2. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Princeton University Press.

3. Collected Poems of Wendell Berry, San Francisco, North Point Press, 1985.

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