I didn’t arrive at elderhood all at once. It was a threshold I felt in my body long before I understood it — a slow, often painful shedding of what I had built, believed, and embodied, sensed more as a loosening than a crossing. The letting go was not graceful. There were months—years—of uncertainty, disorientation, and the ache of identity dissolving. I had spent most of my life in the energy of creating, building, achieving. It was a familiar current, deeply aligned with the energies I had learned to cultivate in order to move through the worlds I was part of — worlds shaped by linearity, decisiveness, and directionality. 

For many years, my path had already been guided by a deep inquiry into how to step out of the prevailing patterns of a culture that rewards forward movement, coherence, productivity, and limitless growth. And yet, as I began to sense the threshold of elderhood, I also came to see that despite all that inquiry, something in me had still been silenced. Certain qualities — slower, more relational, more intuitive, more mysterious — had been quieted so that other parts of me could be heard. And I began to wonder what might return if I gave those silenced aspects room to speak again.

As I softened, as the striving began to fade, I found myself entering a space of both vast freedom and deep lostness. I was no longer who I had been, but I didn’t yet know how to be what I was becoming. And in that in-between—somewhere between surrender and not-knowing—I began to hear something. It wasn’t a voice, exactly. More like a vibration. A rhythm. A pulse in the field around and within me.

This was the beginning of what I now recognize as The Matriarch’s Call.

A Call That is Also a Field

At first, it came through as a subtle longing, not easy to name or locate. It wasn’t direction I was seeking, exactly, nor answers in any clear form. I couldn’t trace it to a particular thought or insight—it arrived more like a scent, a texture, a memory from a time I didn’t consciously know. Over time, I began to recognize this frequency not as something arising from within me alone, but something moving in, through, and around me—and in, through, and around many others.

I began having conversations with women—some old friends, some new connections—that carried a different quality, one that touched me in unexpected ways. There was something in the way we met that stirred me, inspired me, even delighted me. The resonance wasn’t tied to shared opinions or familiar histories; it moved beneath those layers. In these spaces, we found ourselves listening together — attuning to something subtle, something more-than-personal, speaking through the space between us. It felt ancient, and strangely familiar — as if it had always been there, waiting for us to notice.

One day, during my daily spiritual journaling practice — a meditation-dialogue I call JournaLogue — something unexpected happened. As always, I entered into deep listening with the inner voices and parts that show up to meet me there. But that day, what came wasn’t dialogue. It was a poem. Its title arrived first: The Matriarch’s Call. All of it arrived entirely unbidden, entirely surprising.

I had never written poetry. I had written articles, essays, even a book — but never had a poem moved through me like this. It felt like an initiation. Looking back now, I recognize that moment as the first time I was truly in a place where I could listen — could hear her — where I could receive her presence.

you’ll feel the temperature change.

Come.

The Matriarch, as I sense her, is an archetypal presence — a force, yes, and also a relational field woven from care, memory, and ancestral intuition. She cannot be held by any one person, nor claimed as an identity. No one can say “I am the Matriarch,” for she lives in the collective psyche — moving through us, between us, across generations and lineages. Over time, she has been disassociated, exiled from many of our systems, our mythologies, our ways of knowing. And now, in what some might call a time of meta-crisis, or polycrisis, or as I have learnt to understand it, a time of meta-consequences, she is calling again. She knows it is her time to come back.

She does not call to individuals alone. She calls to ecologies—to fields of relation where her presence can be sensed, shaped, and shared. She calls us into collective inquiry, into shared becoming, into the mystery of what it means to live in fidelity to life.

The Conscious Collaboration Essays

One of the first places where I felt the Matriarch’s Call reshaping my life was in my relationship with my own work. It was as if she were inviting me to turn around and look back over the long arc of my path: to walk through the many stages of what I had considered “my work in the world” and listen for the thread that had always been there, beneath the surface.

Following this invitation, I began a deep and extended reflection—moving through memories of projects, organizations, experiments in self-organization, distributed leadership and authority, and all the ways I had tried to support people in working together. Seen through the eyes of the elder, and with the Matriarch at my side, I could suddenly recognize what had been constant all along: a devotion to the relational field that makes collaboration possible. Piece by piece, as I listened in this way, things began to fall into place.

What had appeared in different phases and under different names slowly revealed itself as one continuous body of work. The language that felt most true for this now is Conscious Collaboration. Eventually, it became clear that this wanted to be written again—not as a single, finished book, but as a living stream of essays. The Matriarch’s presence asked me to let this writing breathe: to allow it to grow, to be revised, to be fed by ongoing practice, collective inquiry, and the composting of what no longer serves.

The Conscious Collaboration Essays are my way of responding to that invitation. They revisit decades of lived experience with collaboration, and the many ways humans try to organize themselves, to coordinate their efforts in service of something that is much bigger than themselves—now spoken from the vantage point of the feminine elder, listening for how the Matriarch wishes to move through my life and work. Rather than trying to close anything down, the Essays are meant to open fields: they sketch the Root Movements, principles, and terrains of Conscious Collaboration and invite others to meet them through their own experience.

I am still exploring how these essays will be shared in the world so that they can remain alive: not fixed as a final statement but held as a relational field that continues to evolve through response, shared practice, and conversation. For me, they are one of the clearest ways I can offer what has been entrusted to me so far and place it in service to life under the guidance of the Matriarch.

Matriarch on Tour

Another early and clear way this Call began to move in my life was through what I now call Matriarch on Tour. For many years—interrupted only by the pandemic—I have lived a nomadic life, moving between countries and cultures, staying close to people and places across the world. This ongoing movement has been a great teacher: it has widened my sense of kinship, sharpened my listening, and offered me countless glimpses into how different communities organize themselves and care for what matters to them.

As I began to sense the threshold of elderhood and to recognize the Matriarch beckoning me, this nomadic life started to feel less like a personal preference and more like part of my unique way of embodying her. I am not bound to one locality, and people do not need to travel across continents to find me; instead, when invited, I will come to them. I bring what is mine to bring into their relational ecology—hosting or co-hosting gatherings for collective inquiry around the themes that are at the heart of my work.

The overarching thread of these gatherings is Conscious Collaboration. This touches all forms of collective life: families, communities, projects, sports clubs, organizations of all kinds—anywhere people are called to coordinate their efforts in service to a purpose and in attunement with the more-than-human world. In each of these, there is a relational field that makes collaboration possible, and there are also cracks and tensions that, if left unattended, can disrupt the potential that field holds. Conscious Collaboration invites us to tend this field as fertile ground, so that our shared endeavors can grow into their own unique expressions in service to life.

As Matriarch on Tour, it is not “me, the Matriarch” who is hosting. Rather, I am responding to the Matriarch’s Call to hold space for these inquiries and to offer what I can from my own expression of her—through her qualities of wisdom, deep intuition, healing, and the integration of long-lived experience, held as a source of transformation and shared inquiry, carried with as much humility as I can muster.

The forms these gatherings take are many: one-to-one conversations; mentoring women who are sensing their own rite of passage into elderhood or their own way of embodying the Matriarch; exploring the Root Movements of Conscious Collaboration, such as the unification of Love and Power; and more.

They can also take the shape of circles where women who feel a resonance with the Matriarch come together to sense their unique expression of her within their collaborative endeavors, in their cultures and contexts, and to support one another in that inquiry and expression. Other gatherings invite intergenerational dialogue—how we can consciously collaborate across generations, and how the Matriarch can be of service here: what is yearned for, what is needed, what wants to be composted, and what wants to be born. There are also spaces held with people of different genders who wish to explore how a loving flow between feminine and masculine energies can move through their shared work, relationships, and decisions, and how this can be embodied in the way they collaborate.

The various topics and forms are always shaped by place, people, and timing. Beneath them all lives one core intention: to hold space for collectives to inquire into how they can grow into being in deeper service to life through Conscious Collaboration—and what that truly means for each relational field they inhabit.

Oracle of the Four Directions

One of the most unexpected and beautiful responses to the Matriarch’s Call emerged through a deepening field of conversation with three women whose loving friendship has become profoundly meaningful in my life. What began as individual threads with Adriana Forte, Lisa Norton, and Seija Heiskanen, was followed by their invitation for me to join their circle of inquiry, which then slowly wove into something more textured, more alive. A relational ecology formed, through repeated moments of resonance, shared inquiry, mutual sensing.

At some point—half-joking, half-reverent—we began referring to ourselves as the “Oracle of the Four Directions.” Four women, each listening deeply to the Matriarch, each holding different facets of her presence. We didn’t set out to form a group. It emerged. And the more we listened, the more it became clear that this was not about any one of us. It was about the space between us.

Together, we are now co-holding a living field. We are companions to the Matriarch’s emergence, sensing what wants to be known, what wants to be unlearned, what wants to be co-created. We are not leaders of a movement. We are listeners in a landscape of becoming. We bring our wisdom, our questions, our grief, our laughter, our confusion—and from that, something begins to form (https://www.thematriarchscall.com/).

What we are cultivating is not a definition of The Matriarch — she cannot be pinned down or named in full. She is beyond grasp, beyond claim. Our contribution, as we sense it, is to be in relationship with her — to stay attuned to her presence, to notice how she moves through and among us. We listen in ways that attune us to her energy, striving to create conditions where she can be sensed, encountered, and expressed through the textures of embodied life. We ask how she might take root again in our collective expression, as a living thread woven into humanity’s vast and diverse tapestry of cultures and ways of being, doing, and becoming. She cannot be expressed through one voice alone. She requires a collective field, an entangled web of human and more-than-human intelligences, a meta-relational ecology where her memory can root and ripple.

Together, the four of us are learning how to weave a relational field in which The Matriarch’s Call can be collectively heard and responded to. Each of us brings unique capacities and shadows, histories and gifts. And we are learning — humbly and imperfectly — how to show up with our fierce feminine love and power, in service of the inquiry: How might we re-member the Matriarch? How might she come to ground, find new expression, and be embodied through us, and through our relational field?

Meta-Relationality: A Living Practice

In recent years, I’ve been shaped and stirred by a constellation of thinkers, storytellers, and field-holders whose inquiries echo and enrich my own. The mythic poetics of Sophie Strand, the embodied entanglements voiced by Bayo Akomolafe, the systemic complexity work of Daniel Schmachtenberger, the lucid provocations of Bonnita Roy, and the decolonial depth-work of Vanessa Andreotti—all of them, in different ways, have opened doors for me. Each one brings a distinct way of sensing the trouble and possibility of these times, and all share a willingness to stay with complexity, contradiction, and unknowing. Among them, Vanessa’s articulation of meta-relationality has become especially resonant as I step more fully into this eldering path.

What I’ve come to understand, especially through Vanessa’s work, is that what we’re doing is not just spiritual or philosophical. It is meta-relational. It is about cultivating the capacity to be with complexity, contradiction, paradox, and emergence without needing to resolve it. It is about becoming trustworthy to the unknown, and to one another, in times when no single map can carry us forward.

Vanessa speaks of meta-relationality as a kind of relational intelligence that goes beyond interpersonal skills. It invites us to feel into the entire ecology of relations—across time, across species, across systems. It calls us to stay with paradox, to compost inherited reflexes, to relate to knowledge as something we are both shaped by and responsible to — something entangled with histories of harm and habits of extraction, something that metabolizes meaning and relationship, and something that must learn to yield to the beyond: that which exceeds our grasp, humbles our certainty, and asks us to listen through unknowing.

This is what The Matriarch teaches, too. She doesn’t arrive with answers. She doesn’t offer a blueprint. She arrives as paradox, as field, as invitation. To walk with her is to be changed by what becomes possible in her presence.

Holding Space for the In-Between

So much of this work now feels like tending the in-between. Holding space for what is known and at the same time not yet known. Creating atmospheres where emergence is possible. It is a collective act, porous, layered, and deeply human and more-than-human.

The spaces cultivated in all of this work—through the Conscious Collaboration Essays, Matriarch on Tour, the Oracle of the Four Directions, and the wider conversations around them—are not defined by fixed structures or outcomes. They are shaped by the questions we carry, by the silences we allow, by the trust we extend toward what we cannot predict. These spaces are paradoxical by nature: they are tender and fierce, fragile and resilient, disorienting and grounding. They are unpolished. They are messy, relational, alive. We listen for what wants to happen, and we let it shape us and the entire field.

When entering these spaces, whether one-to-one or collective, we join to tune, to listen, to accompany. They are membranes. Shared fields. Portals through which we might encounter a different rhythm of time, a different way of knowing, a different relationship to life.

We gather to remember. To feel again the possibility of being human in ways that are interwoven, intimate, and in service to something larger.

Walking My Strand of the Web

While this article was written from the invitation to speak about what I sense as my own work now, I’ve come to see that there is very little I can name as mine alone. What is most alive is what is emerging through the fields I am part of—the relational ecology I share with these amazing women in the Oracle of the Four Directions, with those I meet through Matriarch on Tour, with those who walk into the Conscious Collaboration field with me, and with others who feel The Matriarch’s Call.

The part that is mine now is to stay in relationship with that field. To explore, from moment to moment, what wants to be contributed through me — and what wants to be let go of — in service of something far beyond myself.

Having arrived in my elderhood, and having embraced it fully, has opened a door into a different way of being — a way that knows and that I can feel deep in my bones: We are not meant to walk alone. In this ecology of listening and becoming, we are learning to greenlight each other in a way that says: I see you. I see us. I feel you. I feel us, and the current we’re listening to. I trust it matters.

A Culture in Service to Life

Ultimately, I sense The Matriarch is calling us into the slow, conscious, and tender re-weaving of culture, rooted in reverence for life, nourished by meta-relational intelligence, and attuned to the kinds of presence through which the wider field of emergence might become perceptible.

This is not something that can unfold in isolation — nor do I sense it can take shape through a movement alone. What appears to be called for is a field, a relational ecology of many frequencies, many lineages, many truths. This is what our small group of four is sensing into, what our wider conversations, gatherings, and collaborations are holding space for. Because we believe that this is what the Matriarch is midwifing.

She does not demand to be followed. She invites us to walk with her. To remember her. To let her presence change us.

Closing: An Invitation to Listen

If something in this feels familiar—not in the mind, but in the bones—I invite you to stay with it. Let it ripple. Let it ask its own questions.

The Matriarch’s Call is not mine. It is not ours. It is moving through many of us. Some hear it as longing. Some as discontent. Some as beauty that refuses to be ignored. However it arrives, it is asking to be tended.

You do not need to know what to do. You do not need to have a clear offering. You need only to listen. To be with others who are listening. To trust that in the between, something is already being born.

We are not alone. We are not leading. We are responding.

And the Matriarch is already here.

⧬⧭⧬⧭

This piece was born from a conversation — a generous, searching, deeply connected exchange with Layman Pascal and Cheryl Hsu on their Soulmakers podcast. I was invited to speak of my journey, and in that space, something opened. We spoke for hours, wandering across stories and subtle shifts, tracing the shape of a life lived in inquiry. Afterward, Layman extended an invitation: to write something about what I sense as my work now, and what may be emerging. I am grateful for this gesture. In stepping into the writing, I found myself entering the story anew — rediscovering paths I had walked, noticing thresholds I hadn’t named, and encountering certain truths from new angles. This has not been a recounting. It has been a remembering...