worth and witness

She thought to herself:

I want willpower.

I want confidence.

I want motivation, certainty, energy, clarity.

A quieter yet stronger voice whispered:

I want dignity.

A decade earlier, she had quit her job and returned to her home country. She knew she had some work to do before her worth no longer rose and fell with the responses of others.

She imagined freedom awaited her.

Instead, she encountered loss.

She learned quickly that before she could become free to be herself, she would first have to become free from everything that wasn't.

Over the next decade, much would be stripped away.

And much would be seen deeply enough to bring her into greater union with her soul.

The one who thought she knew exactly who she was and where she was going realized:

"I'm just a fool like the rest of us."

The enmeshed one realized:

"We're actually not the same person."

The fawning one realized:

"Actually, it's your fault too."

The codependent one realized:

"I can't save you."

The good girl realized:

"Sometimes I'm mean, bad, and difficult."

And many people and beings died.

Enough to rearrange a soul.

Through composting her grief and longing in soils richer than her own, she learned new ways of being.

Pleasure, not just purpose.

Power, not just service.

Desire, not just duty.

She realized the water she had been raised in and swimming in had a name.

Empire.

Gradually, she brought her relationship to worth and witness into better order and balance.

Eventually she began to suspect that dignity had never been absent.

It had merely been obscured beneath everything she had mistaken for it.

dear dad

My favorite way I remember you is delighting over the nooks and crannies of a toasted English muffin with VT butter.

And when I listen to the Wallflowers, U2, XTC, New Radicals, Sheryl Crow, Pearl Jam, RadioHead and Alanis.

When I'm very disciplined.

When I put on my charm.

When I write from the heart.

When I am good at selling.

When I am good at negotiating.

When I am organized.

When I'm driving.

When I'm sarcastic.

When I'm a struggling perfectionist relenting for excellence.

When I care about nice things.

When I'm provocative.

When I have good taste.

When I'm thinking about futurism and science fiction.

When I'm bombastic or indignant.

When I earn a living.

When I'm a totally unapologetic seriously-fortified unwavering badass.

When I care about the details.

When I go to great lengths to share with someone a powerful experience.

When I look at my checking and savings.

When I use my hand to drum to the beat.

When I'm shy and embarrassed to act weird or tenderly.

When I contemplate American (G)irls.

When I care to listen and help others.

When I’m mad at the liberals!

And it’s an inescapable birthright and necessity of my wholeness for my mom and Justin to be part of my success as well.

The high sensitivity. The soft. The mysterious. The feminine. The divergent. The livid. The private. The emergently-abled. The solitary. The special needs. The disabled. The irrational. The freedom. The burden. The marginalized. The ecstatic. The deep well of loving-kindness, compassion and tolerance.

I am my mother's daughter. I am my father's daughter. I am my brother's sister. I am my maternal lineage. I am my paternal lineage. I am my generation. I am a writer. I am a devotee. I am a teacher. I am a student. I am a victim. I am a perpetrator. And much more.

There were more than one Marlena.

Fai Così

I want to write about love. I want to write about eros in the life force. Today, I want to write about you.

Freedom from writing about important things brings me to write about what’s important to me. I imagined listening to your song on the way to Vergennes and writing in one of Vermont’s infamous little elitist yuppie cafes. But it’s kind of a far drive. But then out of 2,008 liked songs, yours came on! A sign! Anyway, I’m writing about you. I’ll go to Vergennes later.

I think the first time, I saved your life. This last time, you saved mine. Good thing I’m not a healer so I can say shit like that. Maybe I’ll just leave this whole concept of entanglement aside and let my life force guide me in and out of entanglement. No rules, regulations, procedures or principles. Just following the life force, surely better and better as I go.

When we were making love in the shower the first time, I said, “I’m sorry about your mother.” You started weeping and asked how did I know? I said, I feel you. My psychic sensibilities ever on the rise!

I hate making love in the shower. It feels like a performative porno. Later, you’d ask me to move my body “like this.” I’d reply, “No, you move yours like this.” Fai così. No, tu fai così. 7 years later, with barely a contact between, we had the same exchange. I said no the second time to the shower scene. But then I relented again because I like to please you. You were giving me a lot, too. “I can’t go again.” “Yes, you can, you need more.”

You said I looked the same, felt the same and smelled the same! That was great to hear, even if it was a lie. You’re pretty mercurial like me. That’s what it takes to go in between. A dozen people had died in between our times together and I had just barely recovered from years of chronic pain.

I asked you to sing to me again like last time. Like last time, you choked on your words and then sang me my favorite one, remembering which one it was. Like last time, I kissed your calloused hands.

Like last time, your kisses were so sloppy. Consumptive, really!

Ah who am I kidding, you saved my life both times. A greater healer than me.

Marguerite-y, laughing me into deeper dignity

I laughed so hard, I peed my pants.

I was way too old for that! I was 5!

And what did you do?

You laughed.

There was no diminishment of me in your laughter, however!

You thought it was great that I laughed that hard.

That you made me laugh that hard!

My little body couldn’t hold all that hilarity!

I wish I remembered what was so funny!

But I remember how sincere you were.

And how seen I felt. Even in my lack of self-containment -

A blessing of overflow! Of excess!

Humiliation transformed into dignity in that very instant. Installed as a meme, as a core memory, in my barely verbal existence. Thank you, Marguerite! Oh wow I’m just remembering that I called you Marguerite-y! It was to rhyme with Peggy Lee singing "We are Siamese if you please…”

-

My grandmothers died before I was born.

You were my step grandmother. But you were connected to them. They were Mary and Martha, you Marguerite. And my middle name, Marie.

After the divorce, you stayed in contact with my mom. Continuity is hard to come by these days!

You wore emerald green boas and ruby red stilettos to vermont country thanksgiving dinners!

I wish I knew what music you listened to. What your favorite book was. I wish we could have one more giggle fit. I want one more time listening to you narrate what Bo, your slinky siamese cat, was saying as he lurked around the corners of your antique-filled double-wide home.

You were always bowling over with laughter, slapping your knee in amazement over what people were saying and doing. You always greeted me with a cheeky grin and eyes wide with big trickster curiosity. You wanted to know what I’d been up to. And made it all so glamorous, whatever I was sharing, just in the way that you listened! Pure candid delight.

I learn only now that you served the state legislature in 1955. Gosh, I want to know all about that. I see you setting example there, how to use power to make room for, and not diminish, others.

There was a drawer at your house.

“Mattie, open that bottom drawer on the dresser there.”

“This one?” I asked you hesitantly.

“Yes, that one. That’s for you!”

I was dumbstruck. Confused. But why?

“What do you mean? Just for me?”

“Yes, I put that all together down there with you in my mind! Now pull something out and let’s start crafting, dear!”

saturn watching himself

He is old now.

The paint keeps breathing for him though.

He contemplates when hunger became habit.

At first, he only wanted to keep the world he’d made.

Keep the word he made.
Then the wanting widened.

He observes himself,
jaw unhinged, fists sunk into what once was hope.

This is how we stay alive, isn’t it?

Borrow from their future.

Taking control instead of giving wise fallow.

The unseen, the transliminal all around knows it’s a feeding.

Addiction to division, comparison and exile.

He speaks with the cadence of a Conquistador.
Work harder. Longer.
Manifest your destiny.

Conquer unflinchingly.

It’s for your own good.

Just a little bite.

Relief when feeling briefly young again.

Maybe it’s the fleetingness that’s missed again.

His knuckles brace.

His arms never knew embrace.

Confusing consumption and continuity.

Victim instead of purveyor of time.

But no matter, what life remembers how to begin again.

Miracles and faith ensue, as they always do.

Along with other cosmic shrugs of grace.

The little ones build softer and quieter from the ash,
altars to life instead of temples of sacrifice.

Despite siphoned awe, they emerge with sharpened saws.

Using their edges to speak even more eloquently.

They learn to cast wider vision in instead of the other out.

Ruin runs down the river into renewed rhythm.

New lexicons! Pluriversalism, even!

Saturn, half-dead and half-aware,
will call after them with a mouth still raw with memory,
asking for stories, for purpose, for more,

not realizing that the feast has ended

and the world is learning how to live without that kind of unaccompanied hunger.

doubt walks in

There are two of them.

The first is quick and curious.

Like a hostess at a chain restaurant, annoyingly affectionate.

But she also checks my tone, my posture, and my why without really listening.

She’s the little kid asking twenty questions during the PG-13 movie.

She keeps me supple, alert, and honest.

She invites irritation that burns away pretense.

She’s the wobble that keeps balance possible,

the tremor that makes sure the ballerina is still alive.

She relieves the certainty of spiritual bypassing for a non-forced faith and living spiritual ecology.

She can sit with the everything everywhere all at once, but she doesn’t go anywhere.

She trains my intellect. Doesn’t do much for my instinct.

Little doubt.

Then there’s big Doubt.

She’s heavy. Ancient. She wears a lead cape.

She doesn’t question a sentence; she questions my right to speak at all.

She’s the frozen weight of the ancestors.

The loyalty that spookily whispers, “It’s not safe, Girlie!”

They never got to move.

She’s the one that knows women were property up until about yesterday,

and perhaps again tomorrow.

Her intent is protection. Her impact is paralysis.

When it’s little doubt, while I used to treat her like an unwanted guest, I make her tea now.

She can sample my perfume. Take a quarter or two from my piggybank.

I let her ask her questions.

I let her edit and tease.

She can poke holes in my performance. Not my substance.

She turns my absolutisms into a gentle maybe or tender perhaps.

She turns my I must do and have this by then and there into

I would like this by then and I leave room for life to offer something more.

I thank her when she’s done, close the notebook, and take one deliberate step forward.

She is passenger, not driver.

When it’s big Doubt, I don’t debate her. Reason has no use.

I stop. I breathe. I sit back and down. I acknowledge. I bow.

I see you. I see what you sacrificed. Thank you.

I take the vigil and leave your vigilance with you.

Sometimes she nods. Sometimes she doesn’t. Regardless, my bow restores order.

My body can move again.

Little doubt wants attention. Big Doubt wants recognition.

One I meet with a cocked head.

The other, I meet with a lowered one.

You both belong.

a field large enough

I am here because of my mother.
And my father.
And my older brother.
And our ancestors

They came first.
Their weight, their contradictions, their unfinished stories. These are the soil of my being.
I stand in that soil now.

Others may come close, but I do not confuse nearness with origin.
Or I loosen my depth.

My belonging is already given.
My energy flows. Through them.
From this orientation, I meet the world and the moment.

This friction, the one born in family, has always drawn me toward the wider systems we inherit and replicate. What begins as a personal tension becomes a philosophical, political, and cultural inquiry.

There is a tension in this course I’m offering. I offer this course as a counter-generative to conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom that prizes cold intelligence over warm intelligence. Mind over soul. Conventional wisdom that says institutional credentials are king. That systemic capitulation is safety and ease. That democracy and racial injustice can coexist.*

We need extra-institutional learning now because the crises we face (ecological, political, relational) cannot be solved by the same systems that created them. The academy can confer credentials, but it does not teach soulful congruence. True learning must happen in living fields, through embodied contact, reciprocity, and practice meeting the moment as it is, again and again.

“To be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society is no indicator of health.” -Krishnamurti

Despite having played the people-pleasing good girl for a while, doing the conventional world things, earning the degrees, following the rules, it’s always been in a bed of desire to clear the rot to my rerooted rebellion.

During my professional coach training in Italy in 2013, an Italo-German coach introduced me to the concept of constellations. I was in awe. I didn’t know it would become so central in my life.

In 2018, after a bad breakup, I learned how to grieve in constellations workshops where I represented many Others. I experienced the avoidant sister as an anxious sister. The predator while being prey. The men of NYC. The unacknowledged and ungrieved dead. So many of those. And I’m getting even more from those representations right now as I recollect them in the here and now.

I saw my maternal grandmother take my brother in her arms. I saw my mother turned half-toward and half-away. I felt everyone’s fear of my father. I wept unashamed. I lost my false innocence. And there were many witnesses.

What began as family became field. The interrupted movements I witnessed in my lineage were the same ones that pulse through communities and nations.

I learned the invisible choreography of systems, how power and fear, distance and desire, belonging and exile all move through the collective body. Letting the body become instrument and witness taught me that transformation doesn’t come from identifying with a role, but from allowing it to move through for ongoing balance and emergent order.

I began my formal training the day after Bert Hellinger, the founder of this work, died in September 2019.Our training ended during the first weekend of lockdown, and then another level of training began, grieving ten people in four years, beginning with the most tragic one.

The personal and the collective kept dissolving into one another. What I was learning about grief, lineage, and loss in my own life was inseparable from what was happening in the world: the reckonings, the ruptures, the unfinished mourning.

My teacher Suzi Tucker said on that first day, “This work provides a large enough landing strip for all of your gifts to be held in.” I remember looking across the room at a cohort peer who mirrored my amazement at that notion.

The language, the movement, the permission to feel systems as living fields felt so natural. I accessed a well of infinite curiosity that I was relieved could not be fully quenched in this lifetime. I sensed a field large enough to hold all of me and my gifts, a field wider than the sociopolitical and psycho-industrial complex we often mistake for all of reality.

The constant quandary and inquiry of what’s mine, what’s yours, and what’s ours has defined my life’s work TO LEARN. The hyper-vigilance that once kept me safe as a child has evolved into a capacity to read a field, to sense imbalance and disorder before words appear or when truth begins to move again.

Through contact with the basic truths of my personal story, my ancestral field, and the greater collective soul, I’ve lost and regained my essential dignity many times. That cyclical restoration, the iterative contribution of returning to wholeness and offering it back to life, is the foundation of my teaching.

And now, I offer this course back home, in Vermont.
The state’s motto, Freedom and Unity, is a wonderful invocation for constellations work - the dance between individuality and belonging, autonomy and interdependence.

Yet Vermont also carries its own hidden field: the performative denial that can accompany small-scale progressivism, the myth of purity that conceals deeper roots of exclusion. We’re so great but everyone I know is so lonely. We’re so not racist but all people of color here I know share experiences of racial harm. To teach here means to stay in contact with both: the aspiration and the amnesia, the beauty and the blind spots.

Vermont’s rhythm and scale make it possible to learn in a way that is still human and local. Vermont insists that nothing is achieved quickly or hubristically, but through slow presence, through belonging that can bear contradiction.

*inspired by Nikole Hannah Jones, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2fpQqXi2rA

MEETING THE MOMENT

Family & Systemic Constellations Facilitator Course
Eight weekends of in-person, soul-centric education in Burlington, Vermont

Meeting the Moment invites participants into a rigorous, embodied exploration of systemic constellations and soul-centric leadership.

Over eight weekends we’ll study and practice the principles that allow us to face reality, hold complexity, and facilitate transformation.

The course is designed for facilitators, educators, therapists, organizers, and anyone drawn to this work as a path of healing—for themselves, their families, and the wider systems they belong to. Together we’ll practice staying present with what is, to move toward greater individuation and belonging.

Five percent of proceeds will be donated to the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, in recognition that systemic healing must include the social, ancestral, and political fields we inhabit together.

letting the enemy rest (part two)

Recently, in ReRooted Rebelles, we used representative figures from our surroundings to acknowledge what is, bringing warmth to unfelt and unseen parts within us.

Loyalty to others’ pain arose in our shared field.
We collectively exhaled when it surfaced,
as if naming it was already an act of setting it down…

and returning more fully to ourselves (as part of our endeavor to repair self-betrayal through self-regenerating constellations!).

When we give back what is not ours to carry,
we return respect and dignity to the true bearer of the burden.

We are dignified when we take responsibility for what is ours.

We are strengthened in our own gifts
when we carry what is ours
and stay in steady, same-plane accompaniment to the burdens of others.

In part one of letting the enemy rest,
we acknowledged the larger field of the victim–perpetrator dynamic,
including bystanders, loyalists, and witnesses as well.

-

part two

Feeling, listening, looking…
staying in contact with what is
until the field can exhale.

Constellations are radical empathy:
walking through every role in the system,
even those we fear or despise,
until none are excluded.

The enemy isn’t only those we oppose. It's also where we refuse to enter, where we dare, not even in imagination, inhabit. Where we fear proximity might ruin us or undo the story of our being innocent and complete.

But a system cannot find peace
until every role rests and grows up and out of eternal innocence.

People once possessed by positions
become aware
and consciously choose place.

The bystander rests when no longer frozen in distance:

I acknowledge the cost of not acting.
I return to my place in life.
I do it differently. Visibly.

The loyalist rests when they no longer fight to prove worth:

I honor the dead without following them. With my systemic awareness and my own gifts, I create.

The perpetrator rests when their humanity is seen beside the harm:

I see what I did here. I take responsibility for forces that move through me. I have impact.

The victim rests when their suffering is witnessed without weapon:

I acknowledge the fullness of my pain and allow myself to be accompanied in it. I let life flow imperfectly through me.

And the witness, too, must rest,
step down from the mountain lookout,
let the wind die down:

I step into the mess of the everyday.

Nothing is left out.
Even the enemy is folded back in,
rest itself
becomes a transformative act

until the next resistance-growth edge.

We bow.

Unbound,

yet prismatically woven in,

in honor of the dead.