“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” – Ranier Maria Rilke
From the first moment I heard this quote from Austrian poet Ranier Maria Rilke over twenty years ago, it rang viscerally true for me and felt like a guiding flame that I have carried with me now for all these years. It is, indeed, the question that holds the catalyst of curiosity. It is the question that directs the compass needle even as it’s own unwinding often seems to spin and move that needle to and fro as the dance of living one’s way into the answer unfolds.
On this subject of questions, almost six months ago now, one of my teachers began asking me the following one:
“In what and from where do your voice and authentic power root?”

As soon as the question was asked, I felt the flame of the catalyst ignite as something stirred deep within me and I knew a significant awakening had just been set in motion.
Waking this morning on the back side of a presidential inauguration that seems all kinds of upside down and inside out, I am still asking myself that question as I have every day since it was first gifted me by my teacher:
In what and from where do my voice and authentic power root?
This morning, this question takes me back to the Earth and her infinite wisdom as I consider a part of her known as bedrock. In case you are unfamiliar with what bedrock actually is, National Geographic describes it as follows:
“Bedrock is the hard, solid rock beneath surface materials such as soil and gravel. Bedrock is consolidated rock, meaning it is solid and tightly bound…and can extend hundreds of meters below the surface of Earth, toward the base of Earth’s crust.” (https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/bedrock/)
There is a process used sometimes here in Central Texas that helps secure the foundations of homes and buildings against the ever-shifting expansion and contraction caused by the interplay of yearly drought and flood. It is a process of digging/drilling down to the bedrock to provide firm anchoring points on which the structure can rest without being tossed about by the seasonal shifting of rock and soil that may otherwise break that foundation in two and render the structure unstable and unsafe.
As I consider this metaphor of descent to find a stable anchoring platform, I also find myself delighting in the word itself, bed-rock. When I play with these two syllables, I find myself reaching for a firm and solid base that allows me to yield and rest even as the more surface rhythms seem ensconced in chaos.
After months of dancing with this question, so far I am finding that, for me, this bedrock rests with my soul song and the archetypes that weave through me to best support its expression. This is my daily generative offering to the collective chorus, health and interconnectedness of all beings.
It rests in the support of well-enough ancestors who have my back, my front, my sides, my above and my below and who whisper their truths and remembrances into my ears, my bones and my dreams. Over and over, they remind me that wheresoever I rest, walk, fly or sail within this earth’s atmosphere, I am never alone.
It rests in the stars from whom Earth found her own emergence, that remind me I am ever part of something so much bigger than myself. They shine and pulse in each night’s sky, beacons of light reminding me that help and support are available from this bigness, as well, if I will only slow myself to observe their rhythms and align with the cycles that are their breath and evolution, as well as my own.

This is a question that I am still unfolding for myself and one that will surely be finding its way into many of the activities and explorations I will be offering this year. I think it is such an important question for each of us to be dancing with in light of the current madness that is attempting to take the reigns of the Collective and steer us down a path of further disconnection from ourselves, Earth and all of her beings.
And so, today, I turn and pay the gift forward as I offer this question to you.
What will you do with it?
Where will it take you?
In what and from where do YOUR voice and authentic power root?