What would happen if we rebelled? 
What would happen if we stepped outside of the machine like expectations that are thrust upon us? 
What  then? 
What if we took a moment to truly feel the weight we are carrying as a species incarnate in this moment? 
Imagine if just for a time we stopped solving everything, stopped running and fixing and performing. 
I wonder what would happen? 
I wonder what it would be like? 
When I close my eyes for a moment and begin to feel into this I get a sense of something inside me unravelling
At first that is so deeply soothing 
A relief
But then there is an impending chaos that comes
Like the  unraveling has become knotted and messy
I wonder if that is what stops the stopping
That chaos
That unknown
That messy place that almost promises to be full of emotions or  tears or anger or grief or something untidy like that. 
The threat that the unraveling might stay like a knotted mess forever. 
I invite myself to ponder what if I just sat for a time with that mess of threads on my lap
That mess of hopes, fears, unmet desires, expectations, disappointments, heartaching beauty, the state of the world, my worst parenting moments, my best parenting moment, courage, fierceness, sex, grief, failure, death, confusion, futility, proudness, deep knowing, connection, great spirit and all of the beautiful and perfect threads that are all tangled together to create me. 
To create us. 
I reflect upon that a lot 
You see I wonder if that is where the power truly lies
I have a sneaking suspicion that some of the big answers are awaiting for us in the shadows of stepping out of the rat race. 
In the resistance of rush and systems. 
Because in my little existence that seems to be the case
When I watched my children in their natural biological state of entanglement with their world around them this was most certainly  true. 
Often answers and inspiration was birthed through the canal of being held in their frustration, boredom and directionlessness. 
Often they would give up on a learning journey and go outside to play, sometimes for weeks or even years only to return with a fresh burst of ideas and enthusiasm that totally eluded them before. 
I understand there are times to push though but my goodness I’ve witnessed there are definitely times to just stop. 
When I am with the animals I have been in relationship with, both wild and domesticated they always without exception have time in their daily existence to be. 
To be with what is unseen. 
To replenish 
To still
To come into coherence 
To ponder 
I have to tell you I have had some of the most profoundly spiritual experiences laying against my goats while they sat in the sun chewing their cud
Those old mothers were tuning into something far greater and older than I could have ever imagined. 
And every time I was privy to this I cried rivers of  silent tears. 
There is something inexplicably profound and healing about being connected to our more than human family. 
And when Ive experienced it, it Changes me
I think differently 
I take a different approach to my life
I soften 
I feel 
And then I have access to more than my logical brain. 
More than intellect
It’s an intelligence that is shared by all of life
A network of knowing and understanding the world from many different perspectives 
A widening of perception 
An understanding that goes beyond the written word. 
It ventures into the realms of feeling, knowing intuition and sense. 
And as I write that I smile at the messiness in that. These attribute cannot and will not be systemised. 
And again I wonder is that why we keep ourselves so busy. 
Because we are not alive in a civilisation that educates us in how to navigate such terrain here in the west? 
We are educated out of those ways at alarmingly younger and younger ages that the very thought of delving into these spaces terrifies us. 
To such a degree that somehow somewhere these realms have been deemed frivolous and untrue and is met with sniggers and eye rolling. 
Why? 
Why have we removed ourselves from the ecosystem of all of the life forms that exist here on earth and else where? 
We yearn so deeply and heartachingly for belonging yet we educate ourselves out of it. 
All greatness is first imagined. 
I spend a lot of time imagining how we could re-member our learning
Remembering that we are learning every minute of everyday
I give a breath of life to the understanding that we are here to learn from all of life. The human and the more than human and them from us. For they are searching and yearning also. 
From the people who came before us. 
Our ancestors 
For they are not gone only transformed. 
We are the seeds of hope that lay between our ancestors and our descendants. 
We are so much more than we are educated to believe we are. 
We are embedded in so many life forms. 
And so often I’m asked or reminded by helpful people in my life “but what about  the real world Erica ?”
And finally at 48 I know with every fibre of my being that the “real” world they are describing  is birthed from world we speak of here. They are inseparable. Matter is a manifestation of the imagination realm. 
There’s even science to explain the truth in this now so that our overactive logicalilty can rest assured that it is infact fact. 
So I feel one of the most revolutionary acts we can take part in is to stop……
To nourish ourselves with rest.
To dissolve into unseen from time to time.
To descend rather than acceded .
To decend into our bodies and to feel. 
To love our beautiful useful and intellectual brains.
To have so much gratitude for all that brings us. 
AND to understand that our hearts ,our  gut and our Psoas  are IN our bodies, not out there
But inside our bodies and are powerful organs of perception
A perception that is vast and wise and ancient. 
That what we learn in school is such a minuscule and tiny part of what it is to be truly human and to have the courage to explore so much more. 
To be a vessel of the rememberance and re-emergence of what it means to be fully human in all our capacities and capabilities. 
May we draw courage from the earth and our hearts to travel the terrain of what the stopping and the unravelling brings. 
May we feel our way through the chaos and the unknown over and over to revive the ways of deep knowing and connection. 
I wonder what these mechanistic structures and systems would dissolve into if we were to reclaim parts these of ourselves ? 
I wonder what would happen if our children’s hands were harvesting food or fungi  and feeling wild fur more than typing on a computer? 
If their feet were bare running on the earth, muddy and free more than sitting at a desk in a room in shoes. 
What then? 
I wonder 
I wonder
I wonder