One morning several weeks ago, a coyote ate its breakfast beneath the juniper trees in front of our house. Coyotes are common where my husband and I live in New Mexico, but we’ve never seen one eat so close by. We watched through the windows. It felt important. The coyote saw us, kept its eyes on us, but continued eating. I wasn’t sure what kind of animal it was dining on until I saw two long hind feet of a rabbit disappear into its mouth.

Coincidentally, I’d been working a lot with rabbit energy, for comfort and gentleness in part. Qualities I felt I needed as the coronavirus shut society down.

Then coyote ate rabbit right in front of me. Hmm.

Coyote, as many of you know, is the trickster. Nothing with coyote is what it appears. When I went into meditation with these two energies, coyote and rabbit, I quickly understood how the comfort and support of rabbit were now integrated within me.

Coyote’s message was: you’ll need it.

The day my husband came home from his office before starting to work from home, he carried some of his equipment in through the front door. When the door shut, I heard my team say that that door is closed for good. The world we shut to the door to, that reality, was gone forever. It was a surreal feeling, but an exciting one that reverberated through every cell of my body.

My husband and I have barely left our house in months except for dog walking and picking up take-out orders. We’re self-isolating because of our not-so-young age and medical conditions. We’ve held vigil with our fellow New Mexicans and Americans, and our global family as the health crisis unfolded.

And then in our home state of Minnesota, George Floyd was killed. We haven’t lived there in more than 25 years, but it felt strikingly personal. As it has felt intensely personal to so many people across the country and the world.

Within the new chaos that’s unfolded this past week, I’m seeing new energetic doors opening. Everywhere. Doorways to new levels of understanding, new possibilities, new ways of being that are available now to even more people ready and able to make the shift.

Each doorway is a threshold, meaning that much will be left behind–it must be, or we can’t pass through to the new. The process will be different for each of us, and it may happen in strange ways.

For example, about three weeks ago, my husband and I experienced a week of unintentional glass-breaking. We broke two water glasses, and twice, glass food storage containers slid out of the refrigerator like they’d been pushed. Normally, it’s rare we break anything, and in the decades we’ve stored our food in glass, we’ve never had anything shoot out of the refrigerator in such an odd way.

We were releasing. Not just releasing, but shattering what we released. Old energies, old structures and forms. There was no possible way to put those glass shards together again. No way to salvage anything. It all had to go in the trash.

If you look at everything going on the world through this kind of lens, you’ll see all that cannot move forward with us as we, individually and collectively, move across new thresholds. Some won’t be a surprise, others might be.

A few days ago I posted this new poem on Facebook.

Chalk
By Barbara Jacksha

I slap my hands together
Scrub them in water
Hot and cold
Coat them in garden soils
But chalk dust still remains

In school, I learned
Long division, the time-worn way
To tear numbers apart
White chalk scratching the blackboard —
The color of separation

As a girl, I rode my bike on Lake Street
Where my parents forbade me go
During the day, a stream of honking cars
Black-belching buses with
Homeless men in bus shelters
Curled like hibernating mice
At night, I was warned, real trouble began

Now Lake Street burns
Another precious life
Another chalk outline
Etched on deeply pitted streets
Chalk bites my hands as it
Bites into us all

Chalk begs us back to the blackboard
To embrace a new mathematics
Beyond division, multiplication or addition
Where numbers come together
Stream a unified momentum
A new kind of sum that exalts each of its parts

Initially, I thought this poem was about black/white division, about how that separation has hurt us all. But on a deeper level, this poem is also about the larger Separation. Separation from spirit. Separation from our natural state where we see, know, experience, and treasure every part of our collective human body, our oneness, as the exquisite presence it is.

I believe we are being called to move through the thresholds, through the doorways that bring us closer to our natural state, each to our ability and each in our own perfect way. I believe this will help us create the new mathematics of One that we all ache for, whether we’re conscious of it or not.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with coyote and rabbit. What I understood from coyote is that for me, the phase of retreating and comforting myself is done.

It’s time to get on to the business at hand. Time to cross those thresholds and never look back. Time to shatter any form of Separation I can find.

It’s time to be coyote and howl my wild voice into the dark, midnight sky.

When one coyote calls, another invariably answers. It brings me such joy to know that my voice is already being met by so many of yours.

With immense gratitude for you being you,
Barbara