The Great Paradox of Being: The Seasons & Cycles That Bring Us HOME
What a relief to remember, and what magnificence to witness, that we too as human beings have seasons, just as this grand Nature we oh so belong to.
There are times when our fires must roar to warm, to illuminate, to create, and sometimes to burn away what can no longer come with us. There are seasons when we flower wildly into our creativity, blossoming into remembrance of the mysterious collaboration between the Creation and the Creator.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, Autumn has begun whispering her cool and nurturing spirit, carrying an ancient wisdom of harvest, descent, of what is ripening and what must now be laid back into the earth. Slowly, as the colors change, the leaves loosen their grip, and perhaps we do too in our being, learnings, actions, reactions, our ways of relating. The identities we have inhabited, the things we have loved, the things we have lost, outgrown, even the ways we have learned to protect ourselves must be laid back into the earth. The paradox, the irony, the complement, the cycles of harmony. The wild one, the unsettled one, the wise one, the fool. And perhaps every season, in its own mysterious way, is taking us back HOME.
Over these last months, I certainly have been traversing the seasons of my own human life. These last 3 months carried me through my ancestral homelands of Türkiye, into my father's home, where I accompanied him through the final passage of his life, and eventually commune with my practices in Mother Nature & to allow myself to break and build, where land, sea, solitude, and the truest ceremony that is Nature held another part of my journey.
Moving through death and beauty, grief and wonder, conflict and prayer, wilderness and calm, I know that these months will continue to shape me through this lifetime. Underneath it all has been THE practice : the practice I choose to walk, the practice I have devoted my service to, the practice on behalf of which I even opened a little Temple :) Integration. And perhaps these months have brought me more intimately than ever into the question at the heart of it all: What does integration literally mean? Even its dictionary definition, as shared below, speaks so beautifully to the heart of this practice…
Integration :
/ˌɪntɪˈɡreɪʃn/ : combining separate parts, systems, elements together so they function as one unit, a single, unified, working whole.
There was a great paradox I had been living since Baba's passing. Hayri Baba required no ritual. No ceremony performed simply because tradition expected it, no prayers offered for appearance, no gathering empty of sincerity. And for me, as someone whose deepest language of love, grief, prayer and relationship with the unseen naturally moves through ritual this was not an easy request. Everything in me wanted to tend, to touch, to pray, to create beauty around his crossing, yet loving him also meant honoring the way he had chosen to leave. And so, in many ways, I restrained the very language through which I most naturally know how to say goodbye. There were also complex family dynamics around his passing that shaped what was and was not possible, and at times I could not clearly discern where Baba's own wishes ended and another family member's interpretation of those wishes began. I chose, as best I could, to respect both the boundaries around me and the mystery of what I could not fully know.
Ps : For those who desire to know more about this passage, you can read my previous newsletters about this journey here
my Substack and/or the Temple blog)
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There is something ancient and sacred about the 40-day passage that appears, in different forms, across so many cultures, faiths and lineages. From forty days of mourning and prayer to ancestral traditions that tend the soul through the weeks following death, and the Tibetan understanding of the bardo, with its own distinct forty-nine-day passage, there is a shared recognition that death is not always treated as a single moment, but as a threshold. The living continue to pray, remember, tend and accompany, while the one who has departed is honored through a mysterious passage we cannot fully know. Different languages, different cosmologies, different rituals, yet a common reverence for allowing time for the soul, the family and the living threads of love to find their new place.
During the 40 days of Baba's passing, I became incredibly sick, burning with a fever unlike anything I had experienced in many years. In that state, somewhere between exhaustion & grief, Baba began coming to me in my dreams now asking for a memorial, a ritual to be remembered and for a final sent off. The paradox was impossible to miss. The man who had so clearly required no ritual was now, in my experience, asking me for one final ceremony on his 40th day. What I felt most strongly was not a request for grandeur performance, but for his three daughters and the women of the family to come together & to gather in his honor, to offer prayer and remembrance, to bring peace and love to what remained unfinished, and to say our final goodbye together. And so I chose to trust what I had received and listen to something deeper and bigger than life.
Death does not magically resolve the unfinished places in a family dynamics; sometimes it illuminates them. The three sisters are very different, carrying different relationships to spirituality, grief, family, ritual and remembrance, and some of our old dynamics followed us even into this sacred crossing. The very ways I naturally wished to honor our Baba through prayer, ritual, ceremony and trust in the unseen were not always understood or welcomed. Strangely and painfully, this too became part of the initiation. It taught me something about ceremony I don't think I could have learned from any teacher: when the altar is taken away, when the candle cannot be lit, when your prayer cannot take the form you imagined, where does ceremony live then?
Beneath the candles, altars, flowers, songs and sacred objects, I was reminded that ceremony is first and foremost an inner job. I love the altar , the beauty of creating a physical place where the worlds may touch. But when those outer forms are not possible, where does truest temple and the prayer live? Perhaps Baba's final teaching about ritual was not to abandon it, but to strip it of performance and return it to its essence of the heart. It asks us to find the altar within and that no one can take us away from.
This experience has also been teaching me something uncomfortable and deeply important about ancestral work. It is easy in our modern spiritual world to fall in love with the romance of the ancestors , ask the elevated ones for guidance, and imagine wise grandmothers and grandfathers standing behind us. And yes, may we know them. May we listen to them. May we be guided by those who have become well. Also perhaps ancestral practice is not only about reaching backward toward some imagined purity. Perhaps it is also about tending what is actually in front of us: our real lineage, our real families, our real wounds & real gifts & our real inheritance. Even when we consciously end patterns of abuse or dysfunction, even when we no longer speak our ancestors' language—literally or metaphorically—even when their religion, behaviors or worldview no longer align with ours, I still feel something sacred in closing the thread with respect. Sometimes perhaps we offer the prayer in the language they would have understood. Not because we must become them, and certainly not because harm should be excused, but because healing may sometimes ask us to meet the lineage where it actually is to be genuinely transformed.
Inside this tending of lineage lives an even more intimate question: what is the truest form of HOME, and where do we find it when the places and people we came from cannot fully be it for us? Sooner or later, life may ask us to stop waiting at the doors that cannot open and begin building the home within, the mothering within, the fathering within, the understanding, tenderness and protection the ancestry within. The place where the little ones inside of us are finally allowed to rest. There is grief in realizing that what we have longed to receive may never arrive in the form, or from the people that we loved or imagined. And there is tremendous liberation there too. Great relief, great tenderness, great responsibility, because now we become participants in creating the home and the ancestry we have been seeking all along.
This question of belonging has followed me for much of my life. I have carried a kind of homelessness within me so many years, the feeling of standing between worlds. Never Turkish enough, never Californian enough, never cosmic enough or never human enough. Maybe some of you know this feeling too , that strange sense that somewhere there must be another place where all the pieces of you finally make sense together. But what if the discomfort itself has been part of the pilgrimage? What if all these places I have never completely belonged were the teachers of belonging? What if they were quietly pushing me toward the only belonging no one can give or take away from me ? The HOME within myself.
And now, I return home. Home to the myself as well as the land and community where I feel deeply that I belong. Where I am not merely tolerated but truly celebrated. What a gift to be surrounded by people willing to ask deeper questions, making sincere efforts to walk their talk, willing to lovingly call one another forward when misalignment happens, and willing to hold one another accountable to integration. What a gift to be in community. As our responsibility is simply our ability to respond. There is so much power there.
As Integration has asked every cell of me to become the student, the devotee, the example. It has asked me to listen to the Feminine wisdom of slowing down, to commune with Nature, to let the tears of prayer fall when they need to fall, to let the heart make song from what it cannot explain, and to allow grief to ripple through rather than asking it to hurry away, even when hurrying it away felt so tempting. Because I know the Integration is the real ceremony. Especially for those of us who hold space for others, who guide, facilitate, teach and serve, we cannot speak of integration only as something we offer. Life will eventually ask us to become students of our own medicine to live what we teach, to meet the places in ourselves we so readily invite others to meet, and to allow our own lives to become the ground upon which the teachings are tested, embodied and made real. Life has certainly asked this of me. And perhaps this is why I return again and again to a phrase that has become one of the deepest threads of my work:
“Integration is our Integrity.”
And So, We Gather…The Temple of Integration was created to bring us home more intimately into relationship with our humanness & to have a refuge we can arrive with our prayers and our questions, our songs and our grief, our devotion and our messiness, our wisdom and our not-knowing.
A place to practice being human together.
So this Autumn, we gather again. Around the sacred flame. Around song. Around prayer. Around teachers and teachings, movement, ceremony, laughter, nourishment and the simple ancient medicine of being together. Gathering as part of integration.
We go out into life. We are changed by it. And then we return to the circle carrying something we did not have before.
Welcome home.
With an open and grateful heart
Tutku & Temple of Integration
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