oh, no! I am caught between the worlds of love and fear (again)

when i get lost in the news of the world things can happen

Relighting the Pilot Light: A Return to the Temple

It happens when I take in too much of the world’s grief, when the news spirals through me like a storm, when I feel called to help but don’t yet know how. It happens when would-be dictators rise, when no one moves to stop them. I feel the scary monster under the bed. The demons scratching at the door. This is a trembling edge that I know (too) well—the place where I hover between the world of love and the world of fear.

Old patterns I thought were long gone re-emerge, and start whispering.

I get scared, overwhelmed, and freeze, feeling powerless. I withdraw, isolating—hiding. Going silent.

I might even run—physically leave, drive away. Or dissociate, skipping away from real life into a binge watch, into an audiobook. There are so many ways to escape these days.

I might do all of these things—one after the other, seeking equilibrium. If things get really bad, I start to spin—turning events around me into a windstorm that looks, to others, like being too emotional or overreacting again.

I overwhelm them, and they leave me alone. Which, inside the spinning winds, I think I want—but really, what I want and need is silence. A space where I can root, restore, and rise.

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Inside of this silence, I can see you. I can sense you there, bringing me tea and reminding me to put on my slippers. The floor is cold. The wind is sweeping the snow across the ice. It’s nice when you hold me. But I am in here alone.

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Today, the trembling at the edge is strong. The world feels unsafe. A news story about the Musk/Trump regime chilled me to the core—the unraveling of alliances, the trampling of carefully built structures by those who do not see or care about what they are breaking. The callousness, the hate, the utter lack of care—chilling. The complicity—chilling. And so I am chilled.

And then I laugh, because of course—the hot water heater has blown out.

But beneath the laughter, there is something else I must acknowledge: ungrounded energy. I am deeper now. I have more power. Not in the sense of a larger audience. Not in the sense of authority over others. I mean the power we all carry—the vital, pulsing force that moves through the body, lighting us up from the inside. A power that, when tended, moves into the world and has real effects.

I am not the source of this power—I am its caretaker. It is not a product of my specialness but a perfectly ordinary, everyday conversation between a human being and the river of life force that flows through all things.

Now, as I step more fully into my work, this power is becoming more concentrated. This happens to any artist who draws closer to the essence of their vocation. We can see it moving through them—this current of energy, this charisma, this liquid genius. I think of Jon Batiste, how we have witnessed the evolution of his music and his message on our screens. The way his power—let’s call it what it is—has become focalized. Tempered by experience, by practice, by the realization that his work is being received.

I am having that experience, in my own way, too. As I craft the Becoming Real workshops each week, as I work on my memoir projects, I feel myself zeroing in—not on my own genius, exactly, but on my own conversation with genius itself. Because just as vital energy is sourced from the river, so is genius sourced from the genius out of which I come. The genius of the creator. The genius of my parents and their parents. A genius passed like a sacred garment up the layers of generations—even as it is illuminated with the glitter of something more than human.

Touching this light—well, it’s life-changing. And last summer, that light touched me in a personal and physical way. I had a stroke. You could say: I blew a fuse. A pilot light flickered and went out.

Thank Heaven it was relit—by human and divine hands.

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So, I was talking about grounding—

When I am ungrounded, this power can have real-life consequences.

I can blow out the pilot light.
I can short-circuit the laptop of my husband's assistant by touching the screen. I can point to the TV and, enraged by what the Fox News anchor is saying, I can turn it off with my finger! There things really happened — back in my baby wizard stage, before I understood my power was real. The laptop went off. The TV went dark.

Years ago, these moments felt like provings. Did I do that? OMG! I did that! Little demonstrations, reminding me: This energy crosses over. From the imaginal into the real.

These days, I know this - profoundly. I know that the most important thing I can do when summoning big energy is grounding. I know that the more power I am flowing, the more I need to tend the container of my body and make sure that the people and things I interact with and also safe.

When you move up the ladder of… what is this ladder? Awareness? Awakening to power? These things are not merely correspondences. They are real.

I am responsible for this power.
And you are responsible for yours.

Because power is always moving, always flowing. And when our power moves together, it can have real effects.

I can blow out the pilot light in my own home. But our collective power—yours and mine, flowing together—can blow out the seat of government, if we aren’t tending it.

The people in the offices of government are leaders - sure - but more than that, they are funnels of our collective intention. They are focal points of power. Just as a teacher is a focal point in a classroom, just as a conductor gathers the energy of an orchestra into a single wave of sound, every citizen of a country is flowing energy—mostly in the form of attention and dollars—toward the seat of power in Washington.

We may not see it, but we are always feeding something. And so the question is not whether we are powerful. The question is: What are we powering?

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This morning, as I was moving through this experience, I sat by the window watching . . . well, nothing. The world outside my home is frozen solid - layers of ice over packed snow. But that doesn’t mean things aren’t moving - aren’t alive. Life flows, even in solid ice. Even when I am sitting by a window, bothering no one - my energy matters.

Just now, my husband came in from the kitchen carrying a piece of cedar, its fragrant smoke curling through the air. Without a word, he swirled it around me, a soft ritual of care, and I stopped everything to inhale deeply—to let it have me. The scent of peace, of self-care, of something older than words. And with that breath, I returned.

I was led back to a post I wrote two years ago. It spoke directly to the challenge I was experiencing. A moment of recognition, a return to my own words, offering me guidance from my past self.

It was titled The Temple of the Rose.

Reading it again, I could see how thought loops through time, how the stories we live are not linear but cyclical—spirals of experience, weaving in and out of our awareness, waiting for us to notice them anew.

The Temple of the Rose is a channeled text—a message from the Guides, spoken through me. I am the vessel. They speak, and I listen. They flow images into my mind. I interpret them, best I can.

In that post, they said:

When you have lived for so long in the Temple of Brokenness, devoted to fixing yourself, it can be hard to imagine you could ever change. You can. And we invite you to your new home now.

It's time to find a new place of devotion for your precious attention. When you live in the Temple of Brokenness, spending all of your time trying to fix its walls, you cannot see that you could simply walk into another space. We invite you now to the dwelling place of blessing.

Imagine a beautiful rose. A color of your choosing. Step into its center and let it enfold you. You are held in the Temple of the Rose.

I had forgotten this invitation. I had forgotten that I had once been given a map, a way back to the Temple of the Rose, a place beyond the compulsive need to fix or repair myself—a place where I could simply be.

But also, I had not forgotten - something led me to it today.

I came up to my bedroom and lay down on the bed, pulling the covers over me as I waited for the pilot light to warm the bath water.

I opened the blog post inside the Substack app, where I can listen to it as it’s read to me in the soft voice of an AI bot named Clare, I think. (Footnote: I selected her from a menu of options—the British guy, the plainspoken Midwestern gal, and Clare, who was described as a soft woman's voice. She's my app voice. You can listen to her too—if you want to—she can read all of my posts to you.)

I lay in bed and let Clare read the post to me, which is especially lovely when it’s a message from The Guides. I get to hear it as you hear it—a gift from an intelligence that loves me, that supports me, and holds me in esteem. And I needed that today. I needed this message today.

I went out to get a coffee. I came home. My husband and I watched a small plank of cedar burn to ash on top of the stove.

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Photo by Obed Hernández on Unsplash

The warmth is not lost. The work is not gone. It simply needs to be relit.

Today, the work is simple: Relight the pilot light. Stay in the temple. Trust the flow. And ground.

It is all still here. It has always been here. Just waiting for me to stay, listen, and let it move. I am home. And so are you.