a sudden light from nowhere

return of the evening star

“messengers” / hand-dipped beeswax, nasturtium leaf + marigold from the garden, hidden alpine lake.

Dear ones, I’m writing to you, and the hummingbirds are back.

Well, at least one is. As of a few days ago. And I moved at the speed of light to make nectar and get the feeders out, the moment I heard that first wild jeweled trill. “You must be starving” I cried out the kitchen window, “YOU MADE IT!” and I felt that familiar, tearful relief in my bones. The beloved has returned, after such a very long time away. Over the winter, I decided I might not plant a garden this year. But as soon as the hummingbirds arrived, I dug my box of seeds out of the closet. Isn’t it amazing how love does that?

hummingbirds preparing for their journey south / the garden, october 2025

Why did I decide not to plant a garden, when gardening is such a dear part of my world? My dad died in September, and that’s where I’ve been ever since: in between worlds. His death came exactly one month after my 40th birthday, and marked a long-awaited descent into my own chthonic realms.

It has been terrible learning how to be here without him. A beautiful terrible. My dad was full of soul, and simply a “fine human being,” as his Buddhist teacher once called him. He cared deeply about our world, and he passed on that fierce tenderness to me. It is a precious gift I carry in a small velvet pouch, and it glows gently from the folds of my pockets. Even when I forget who I am, it is there.

from “the first free women” by matty weingast

I had always heard that losing a parent is one of those thresholds that changes everything. But I didn’t really get it. I had already gone through some devastating, inconceivable deaths, when I lost my two canid daughters Asha and Gaia (ten years apart). Those deaths each re-routed my path in significant, soulful ways. I quit my job, I left on pilgrimages, I watched my world crumble and change. I thought I somewhat understood the feral creature that is the grief process. I now realize this is a dire mistake in the wilderness of birth and death, to imagine you have any remote understanding of how it’s going to go.

But I had lived through grief’s mangled underworld of despair before, the loss of trust in what I thought I believed, the excruciating re-writing of everything. Mostly, the dark drowning wave that comes when a warm body you love is no longer here. I was prepared for That Wave when my dad died.

But the wave was different. It wasn’t a wave at all, just dark water with an inescapable undercurrent, no up or down or movement at all, like a fog-cloaked night with no stars. Nothing was recognizable, and the most irritating part was that I had to still pretend to be me, when I just wasn’t her anymore. This is the scariest and most mouth-watering part of a great loss: the complete and irreversible deconstruction of one’s former identity. Of course the whole world looks different, when seen through those new eyes. It is the painful but necessary process of birthing new selves, and therefore new worlds.

I have learned from the past decade of nature-based soul work that while we can study and practice these inevitable dark passageways, we cannot force or predict their arrival. This merciful dance with the great mystery is what links us all together, and is why we must treat each other with such tenderness.

If a hole appears, just walk through it, see what it’s like on the other side.
You’ll never be lost because this emptiness is central to life,
figured into the nature of things.

(Joanna Macy, Widening Circles)

A hole appeared, and I did walk through it. There was nowhere else to go. In the months after my dad’s death, a part of me went on her own migration to elsewhere. Just like the hummingbirds, and the humpback whales, the sandhill cranes, the wild irises, the canyon tree frogs… the ones who disappear into the dark and reemerge a thousand times. All these beloveds, these masters of descent, traveled alongside me under many dark moons. I have strange and unbelievable stories about those travels to “elsewhere,” but not for today. Today is simply, tenderly, about coming back.

from my journal

Do you know who else is back, after her own long journey to elsewhere? VENUS, in her most sublime evening star form. For months during the long dark winter I would look at the sky and whisper urgently, “Where is Venus?? Where are you???”

I missed her desperately, but chose to let her whereabouts remain a mystery. I’ve loved her long enough to know that she does this, and I trust her fully to reemerge in her own timing. Then one evening, during the equinox new moon, at the most ordinary of moments, there she was: twinkling through the window, across the dinner table, just above my partner’s shoulder. My eyes bulged out of my head. I stopped talking, dropped my fork and flew outside. I would recognize her from anywhere in this universe. She is just so fiercely herself.

“Everything makes sense again,” I said to Andy later that night. “Because Venus is back.”

sunflower messages

And another mythical, migratory journey recently took place: I mailed out the spring equinox Dark Moon Letters just a few weeks ago, and those folded mystery letters flew on golden wings to special mailboxes all across our dear planet. I took a surprise, mandated sabbatical from doing anything at all during the depths of my grief. I had no idea when I would ever have the heart to send the dark moon letters again.

Then one morning in early March, I was having tea in the before-dawn darkness, like I do every morning, and out of nowhere there was a stirring within me, the fluttering of tiny wings inside my rib cage. The dark moon letters rang like a bell in my chest. It was an unmissable message, and a complete surprise. I can’t tell you how excited I was, to feel myself return to what I love, without forcing it. It helped me trust myself again, to feel the creative heart waking up with its own authentic ripeness. This is the natural cycle when we let ourselves rest, grieve, lose track, lay fallow.

I went right into my studio that morning and watched myself become possessed, enraptured by pressed flowers, poetry, melted beeswax, plant ink, quill pens, glue sticks, all of it. The creation of the dark moon letters is rapturously analog and soulful, and makes me feel like I’m back in the 90’s doing art as an 8 year old. I use the bare minimum of screens/technology when I write those letters, cutting and gluing the whole letter together by hand. It results in an explosive wild mess on my desk that I find so beautiful.

an experiment with unedited joy

Every step of making the letters involves touch, slowness, and curiously allowing the letters to take form with as little thought as possible. I don’t make a plan or know what’s going to happen. For this recent letter, I had no clue that I would end up making a spider web out of fallen ponderosa needles. I just sort of watched it appear, and I was so delighted to see an idea take form that I know came straight from the ponderosa tree.

I am in love with writing and sending the dark moon letters. And I am so thankful to those of you who are paid supporters of my work, and who choose to receive these letters. I can’t tell you the gift, the delight, in folding each one, and imagining your hands then unfolding it. Thank you for your participatory dreaming of this love story.

(If you didn’t receive this recent Equinox letter and would like one, I print several extra copies with each edition’s printing. The next dark moon letter will be sent in June, around summer solstice.)

the dark moon letters

I think this is where I will pause for now, and I will let the next stories brew. Regarding the title of this particular writing: “A sudden light from nowhere” — these are the words that came to me, like a clear crystal chime, in the days after my dad left his body. It was a visceral understanding, and those words continued to echo for months. It doesn’t make sense, and I can’t explain it, but I will tell you that the return of the hummingbirds, that sudden first sight of Venus, and the heart-flutter when I decided to write the next dark moon letter, those moments all carried the exact same feeling that accompanied me after my dad’s death. A sudden light from nowhere.

More on this mystery, I cannot say. But I offer it to you as an invitation to find where that unexplainable incandescence might suddenly flicker in your life. Those glimpses of pure mystery that touch your heart, in palpable ways that others might miss entirely. Those moments are the beads, the clues, the particularities, the threads that weave the strand of your most heartfelt aliveness. They do not go away, even when the whole world appears unrecognizable or terrifying.

No matter the heartache, the worst-feared consequence, something that loves you will always arrive, in the most unexpected moment, to invite you to do the most radical thing you could possibly do in an aching, crumbling world: to continue to say yes to this life.

thank you so much for reading this my friends, and for being here on Earth in these times. your presence here is a precious gift.

with love under Venus our evening star,

Kate