Piled on the couch with my husband and daughter recently, the irreplaceable David Attenborough taught us about how penguins go through what he called catastrophic molting. Antarctic penguins’ feathers get ragged over time and lack the oils that keep them warm when they glide in the ocean and hunt. Periodically, they need a new set of feathers. They have a special tundra they waddle to, chosen by penguin cultural history. Once on the special tundra, they work as hard as they can to get all their old feathers off. The catastrophic part of this is that they don’t just lose some of the feathers, they all have to go. Then they stand naked in the Antarctic sun waiting for weeks for their new feathers to grow in. While they wait, they just stand there awkwardly. They can’t hunt in the ocean without their feathers because they would freeze to death. I am not sure what else these penguins do with their time. But it sounds like while they are molting catastrophically, they don’t do anything but wait and grow feathers.

            My mind keeps returning to the image of the penguins, submitting themselves to their own exposure, ugly and raw. Imagine having such faith in your body, in the planet, in your feathers. To choose to spend those naked raw days and nights on the tundra. To know in your bones, in your skin, that you will glide through the ocean hunting soon even as the Antarctic wind bites into your exposed flesh. To know your place in this world and how to bring yourself back from the edge of incapacity.

*

           A few years ago, I looked down the road and realized that something big was coming. Empty nesting, menopause and turning 50 would all be happening at the same time. I have always been afraid of how I would cope with my kids leaving. I didn’t have a bond with my mom in my earliest years, so my connection with my kids is precious. When I became a mom, I learned what it meant to be bonded, flesh to flesh, heart to heart. I had been haunted by the fear that it was my own capacity for love and bonding that was wounded, limited, undeveloped. But my kids showed me that I did have a capacity to bond and to deeply love and to receive back that love. They anchored me to myself, to the earth. What would happen to me when they left? Add a big round birthday and some hormones, it’s a triple threat.

           I decided I would give myself an enormous gift; I would take a sabbatical from my clinical practice as a therapist, supervisor and therapy trainer. I would push the pause button on my whole life, which often felt like a runaway cart on a big hill. My husband, Tom and I started saving money and when my dad died, we took a bit of the money he left for me and set it aside. I would take back a year of my life and try to learn to live more in alignment with my deepest self. My arctic tundra was a house on Wy-East (Mt Hood) in Oregon, where the trees vastly outnumber people.

            As I move into my sabbatical, I am standing in my own Antarctic tundra, more and more naked by the day. The whole internal infrastructure that I built my life on for the last 50 years, falling away feather by feather. In some moments, I am cheering it all on as I shed, “yes, let’s get down to it! Tear it all down!” I want freedom and know I am going to have to do some messy disassembly to get it. But at other moments, I feel so lost, so unmoored. I find myself clinging to age-old strategies, as if one ancient feather could cover a whole penguin. In a panicky moment, I grab for self-improvement in the form of decluttering a room or somatic exercises or a food tweak that requires some new recipes, transforming it into a job full of pressure and complete with a critical manager. Ok, play is essential for healing the nervous system, let’s devise a 10 step process for learning to integrate play into your life. Now. So bossy.

                 In the years before sabbatical, I knew a reckoning was coming, but I didn’t know how naked and featherless I would feel. The year before my sabbatical was to start, my professional life blew up dramatically and my step mom died, all within 24 hours. I was fired from the position I had worked towards for 17 years, a consequence of my focus on bringing a racial equity lens to my work as a therapy trainer. Now I was losing my professional home and community, my kids were exploring the world, my parents were gone (except the one who has exiled herself from the family), I lost my ability to create life and bring it in to the world. Feathers falling fast all around me.

*

                Penguins will feed intensely for a couple of weeks to prepare for their catastrophic molt. Once they are in the process, they look rumpled, like a half-unraveled sweater in need of a wash. During the molt, it can be more difficult to discern male from female penguins because they just look so universally awkward and distinguishing characteristics are minimized by their furry brown splotchy feather situation. Some of the penguins are so weak from fasting during the molt that by the time they have their new feathers, they don’t make it back to the sea where their next meal awaits. If they survive the catastrophic molt, it is a fresh start to another year of hunting. I imagine the freshly molted penguin sporting brand new untried feathers, weakly entering the sea, stumbling in the tide until they are carried back into their buoyant hunting grounds.

*

               When I tell people what I am doing, they say, “You are so brave!” But I often wonder if that is code for thinking I am crazy. One person asked me who was letting me take this break from work? A school? A corporation? Just me, I said. I gave myself permission. A friend was telling me of a woman who decided to take a sabbatical but when she started, it was so overwhelming to have let go of all of the usual restrictions, she went back to work after a couple of weeks at a reduced schedule. It isn’t easy to submit ourselves to this kind of raw emptiness, this face to face with oneself with nowhere to hide. To actually sit with not knowing who I am or where I belong is the project of this moment in my life and it is a big project even though it may seem from the outside or from the look of my calendar, like I am not doing much. It might be normal for penguins to put themselves on pause, but in the world of human capitalist culture it is not what most people do.

               Of course, it is also huge privilege to be able to stop working for a year in what I have named, The Great Course Correction. So many people simply have to keep going, being a part of a system that does not value them, but not having a way out. I see the privilege, the multigenerational wealth, the education, the financial support I have had in life to put sabbatical within my reach. It is a precious resource that I do not intend to waste.

*

                At the heart of it, despite our anthropomorphizing and cute-ifying, penguins are hunters. They swim in the ocean and hunt squid and sardines. I try to imagine how it feels to them when they cannot hunt or even swim in the ocean where they normally spend 80% of their waking lives. I keep coming back to the question of how they know. How do they know when to molt and when to hunt? The answer, I suspect, is that they are so intrinsically inside of themselves, in their bodies. The knowing must be so deep.

*

                 When I closed my practice, I had to say goodbye for now to clients and supervisees, hour after hour for weeks. It was exhausting. I peered into my zoom therapy screen (my office since 2020) and saw the faces of clients I love, people I have been helping, people who need more help, and it twisted my insides to tell them I was going to stop seeing them. It felt so wrong. I asked myself, how could I step away from a career that I love where I am actually helping people and making a difference? At times it felt like cutting one tether at a time, losing one connection at a time.

               I might not have been able to talk myself through it if not for the pain. In recent years I have developed an autoimmune disorder that causes pain and mobility issues. By the end of every session, my body reminded me of why I needed to make a change as I hobbled to the bathroom or to get more tea (don’t even get me started on therapists and tea). What is the strain that my body is carrying and how do I lessen it? That would be the main task of sabbatical, to circle back for my body and whatever else of myself I left behind in pursuit of doing, working, accomplishing, and helping.

*

                  I am spending as much time as I can in the woods, in our cabin on Wy-East, an hour from where my nest has been in Portland. I joke with friends that I am experimenting with the hermit lifestyle. Being in the woods with the Sandy River nearby sets my nervous system at ease. I am trying to let Nature fill up my time, my senses, and be my guide. I am tracking the cycles of the moon and the seasons, letting them provide the structure for my life. I have been a therapist for 20 years now, living in 55-minute segments. My life has been completely dictated by the overlapping requirements of my kid’s school schedule and needs and my clinical practice. I still have an internal alarm that goes off at 2:15pm some days because for many years that was the time I had to be sure I was at school to pick up my kids. I organized myself around 55 minutes and 2:15 pm. If there was anything left over, that is what I got.

                   The moon and sun offer different rhythms to follow. I watch the seasons and welcome the changes they bring. I try to show up for sunrise and sunset. New moon means it is time to reflect, listen, and call in what I want, who I want to be. Full moon means celebrate where I am now and the fullness that I already have in life. I try to organize myself around these new (or old) earthly clocks. I hope this will be my new feather body. Feathers that link me to the rhythms of my body and the body of the planet.

*

                 When so much is falling away, what stays? What is enduring? The penguin never forgets her essential penguin-ness, she knows she will hunt again. What gives her courage to face her own death while she stands on the tundra waiting for the new growth? How do I find my way home to the most essential self? Without all the busyness, the roles, the to-do lists, what is left?  With the programming we receive in this culture, we hardly have a chance to know ourselves. We are told we are here to buy, here to dominate, here to win, here to achieve and as a result we are completely out of balance with our ecosystem and ourselves. We are told that our skin color and our gender determine our worth and power from the very beginning. We are trained so deeply and thoroughly that we can’t even see it in the air, in the water. We are told to run from what we feel and control our bodies any way we can. Many of the paths to knowing ourselves deeply are blocked by supremist, colonial culture. Without seeing it, we can’t do much more than be swept up by it.

                From within my family too, I learned early on to avoid being in my body and listening to myself. My parents separated just before I was born, the youngest of 4 kids. In an early 70’s epic divorce story, my mom took me and my three siblings and ran from my dad, moving us frequently. During these years, I was often alone when the older kids went to school and my mom was unaccounted for. When she was there, she was a harsh disciplinarian who I avoided. In one of our moves, I remember riding my tricycle in front of a storage unit for the last time. My tricycle and whatever else was in there was part of the dismantling of our family, one move and storage shed at a time. My mom and us kids were on the run until eventually we were found and the court ordered us back to Kansas City where my parents battled in court for the next few years. In 1976, it was pretty unusual for a dad to be granted full custody of 4 kids, but the court documents describe our living conditions with our mom as neglectful and chaotic. We were left alone, without food sometimes, or proper clothes. The court decided we would live with my dad. We moved in and began a performance of upper middle class white family life.

                   By the time I moved in with Dad and Marilyn, I had already learned I would not be heard and safety was not guaranteed.  I put together my own survival system. Having a body didn’t seem like a good idea. Bodies have needs. Bodies can be hurt. I put a wall up, leaned into my mind and kept moving. Staying safe and alive became the mission of my childhood which I accomplished by focusing on everyone around me and pushing myself beyond my needs and feelings. That became a way of living and I haven’t really known anything else. Now my body is pulling the stop cord and demanding I pay attention.

                  Between the culture and my childhood, the training that turns me away from myself runs deep in my tissues and nerve fibers. Despite my best efforts to heal, I still ended up building a life that didn’t leave much room for me. Deep down I knew that if I was ever to find my true north and truly fully inhabit my life and heal my body, I would have to bring my busy life to a full stop so I could sit in the quiet and wait until I could hear my own heartbeat.

*

                  As I move deeper into sabbatical, the naked and lost feelings resonate in a place so deep, so old inside of me. Now I can feel that this is what I have been running from with busyness and proving myself. It’s how I felt as a baby, as a toddler. I was lost and alone. Lost with these people who had bigger problems than a baby could compete with. Lost in a post-apocalyptic family moment. My kids, the clients, the school committees, the supervisees and trainings, it all kept me moving. There was no room to fall apart or lose all my feathers. The lack of structure and direction echoes inside of me, turning my insides into a vast empty cavern, my lone voice bouncing off distant walls.

*

                 I wish I could tell you I am being brave and leaning into the arctic wind. But I must admit, it’s a daily struggle to allow this kind of liminal rest to move into my life.  I am frequently talking myself out of classes, projects, lists, spreadsheets, goals, resources to apply to problems. I am a resourceful person. That’s how I made it this far. But now I need space to ramble and to not know. It becomes a question of if I will be able to let myself enter “not knowing” and be patient and allow healing that is possible.

*

                   Alone in the sun, with the trees to share my space with, I am trying to ease into this naked and raw existence. I have been a parent, therapist, trainer, supervisor, spouse, activist, writer, friend, but right now, I am not those things. There is a voice that is quiet but persistently asking, Who am I without all of those roles? What happens when the last feather falls?

                 I try to sit like those penguins, dedicated and surrendered in the sun and feel the emptiness that is me without my feathers. There is the wind on my face that makes me smile. There is a game I play with the sun, chasing it for warmth, moving my chair once an hour as I write or read, seeking the perfect combination of sun and wind. I am learning about the plants and birds and other creatures of this land, becoming more grounded in it.

*

               There is a place by the river that I call the Grove, where several ancient western red cedars stand together in a circle. The ground here is soft with their shedding from many years. I learned recently from my daughter that western red cedars are the best at collecting water because of the shape of their fronds. The ground under a western red cedar is often the dampest part of the forest floor. It is here, in this soft damp circle of water collecting trees that I feel held, connected. I like to stand with my back against the cedar with roots reaching into the river and feel the strength of this mighty tree. When I stand in their circle it makes all of the discomfort of my molting time more bearable.

                  It is late summer and each day my dog, Huckleberry Finn (Huck for short) and I walk to the river. I have been seeing feathers in my path as I walked through the woods to the Sandy River from my house and I am reminded of the penguins. I find Stellar’s jay feathers mostly, midnight blue with black on the tip. I started collecting them feeling there was something I was being pulled to and the feathers were a part of it. I put them in a pile by my front door, waiting for inspiration about what to do with them. Turns out, it’s hard to make a pile of feathers, they are made for the wind. But even when some of my feathers are carried away, there are always a couple more on my path. I am collecting the feathers the best I can and waiting for some internal guidance about what to do with them.

*

                 Humans are the only creatures on the planet who don’t seem to know our place in our ecosystem. Penguins don’t wonder how their feathers will grow in or try to grow them in some new more “healed” way or a more acceptable way to the other penguins. They know their place, they know what to do with themselves. When the feathers need to be regrown, they know where to go and what to do. But we, as humans, find all kinds of things to do with ourselves that clearly are not part of our design as creatures of this planet. I imagine how foolish and lost we would seem to a penguin going through a season of catastrophic molting. So many weird preoccupations we chase, only to find ourselves deeper in the systems that do not return us to ourselves.

               It's so quiet on the mountain, I sometimes just sit and listen to the rain fall or the birds stirring at the feeder. Could I let it be as simple as it is for the penguins? Can I trust that there is the truth of me under all of this in the quiet, that I will hear my heart beat and learn to move with its rhythms?

*

              Today on the full moon I am here writing on the deck, reflecting what I want to do with the feathers. I gathered my feathers and walked to the river in the hour of the moon’s fullness. I had looked up the fullest moment of the moon, 11:37am. As I approached the river through a stand of big old cedar and vine maples, I was weighed down with self-doubt. Creating ritual or ceremony is something I feel drawn to, but as I do it, I feel of tinge of embarrassment. The voice of culture and my midwestern upbringing, questioning me. Why can’t I be happy with going to church like everyone else?  What am I doing?

           When I arrived at the beach, as we call it, a rocky shore on the Sandy we visit daily, there was a perfect rock on the edge of the river for me to sit and be. I took my spot, held my feathers and breathed. Each feather became something I could let go of, hustling, being the victim, rejecting myself to be in my family. I let the feathers go one at a time, thanking the river for helping me release my old self. I wish I could have taken a photo of one of my feathers floating away, but they all found the flow of the river and disappeared so quickly. I removed an empty bottle of rum someone dumped in the river and brought it home, a small offering.

             As I strode home, my legs felt confident and strong. I was sweaty, alive, and full of the spirit of the river. Doubt had been washed away. My mind was open and empty and my heart full. Just for a moment, I stand featherless on the tundra and know who I am.