The information is coming in hard and fast here in Santa Fe during the final segment of my Feldenkrais training. I’ve been writing posts as quickly as I can keep up and scheduling them for release. This one jumped the queue, though. It wants to come out NOW.
It was just going to be a mundane afternoon of laundry, but it turned into a meditation on nuclear weapons and the psyche of humanity. Sometimes the synchronicities line up so precisely that there’s no ignoring them.
I was at a classmate’s Airbnb, waiting for the dryer to finish, when her family returned from a trip to Los Alamos. They’d just been to the Manhattan Project museum, and when I asked them what struck them most, they told me about the “downwinders,” the people who lived in the path of fallout from the first nuclear test explosion and carried the toxic effects in their bodies. They described one woman who had washed the laundry of men who worked in the “hot room” at the plant. Decades later, when scientists studied her remains, she had the highest measured level of plutonium recorded. That detail lodged in me like a burr—the ordinariness of washing clothes, turned lethal by supporting men playing with unknown fire.
As they spoke, another story surfaced in my memory: a group of teenage girls camping, swimming in a pond not far from the Trinity test site. They hadn’t been warned, no one in the vicinity was. Not long after the explosion, ash began to drift down around them from the sky. They thought it was snow. They laughed, caught it in their hands, smeared it on their skin. The heat of it puzzled them, but they were only thirteen and no one at that time knew enough to be afraid. Only two lived past the age of 40, mysterious cancers riddling their young bodies. That image—the innocence, the play, set against the unthinkable—has haunted me ever since I first read it.
When my laundry was done, I carried it back to my truck, sorted it into the little bins that make my truck-life workable, and stretched out for a nap while the last load dried. I scrolled idly through Facebook and, not 3 posts down, there it was: a black-and-white photo of the very same girls, posing together in the pond with the mushroom cloud rising behind them. This photo is a fake, but whoever created it captured a picture of not just the atom splitting, but of the world splitting into before and after, human scale and atomic scale, the innocence of play and the catastrophe to come.
That night, at a swing dance, I sat down beside a classmate. She, a human who is constantly delighted by the weird and wonderful quirks of other humans, laughed as she told me that the old man she had just danced with had mentioned—offhandedly—that he’d been an extra in Oppenheimer.
That’s three.
Three synchronicities in the space of a few hours. One might be coincidence, two could still be explained away, but three, in my experience, is always a message.
Later, when I had a moment to dive into it, I asked: what is this about?
I tested the questions in my usual way, asking about what came into my mind: Was it about nuclear energy? No. Was it about nuclear weapons? Yes. And immediately I felt the weight of it. Not just the history, but the residue it has left in our collective psyche—the way the first explosions tore through not only the atmosphere but the human imagination, imprinting fear and dread into the bones of generations who came after.
It is not only about the past. It is about now. About the wars burning across the world, the endless newsfeed of violence, every live-streamed bombing, every fresh report of oppression and slaughter destabilizing us, keeping our nervous systems in permanent readiness for disaster. The hum of anxiety never quite recedes when we know there’s nothing we can do to help, to stem the flow. The fear of annihilation that flickers at the edge of our consciousness, whether we name it or not. Oppression and its shadow twin, terrorism—which is less an inexplicable evil than the desperate defense of those ground down by those who abuse their power and sacred trust of leadership. The human psyche is saturated with trauma, from the desert tests and world wars to today’s attacks and retaliations.
I asked: What can I do?
The answer that came into my mind pointed me toward the Creator. I asked the Creator, as a human on behalf of humanity: please heal this trauma for humanity. And immediately, I felt it begin. My own energy resources were drawn into the current, the way they sometimes are in client sessions when the work needs to run through me rather than alongside me. I could feel the healing come in layers, in waves—somehow both at once. “Lavers,” my mind murmured.
I could feel the shift. It wasn’t total, it couldn’t be—this trauma is too vast, too systemic to be dissolved in a single act of prayer. But the healing was immense. More than half of it moved. The rest cannot be healed globally in this way. That part requires the slow, human work of reconciliation—attacker and attacked, nations and peoples at war, coming to the table to listen, to bear witness to each other’s suffering, to make amends and step into a new path together.
I marveled at how much healing had been done. And then I felt that there was more. More that could be done. More that we could do. Not about the past, but about what we can do for the present.
Because conflict is not confined to the places that dominate the headlines. It is systemic, living in the cells and stories of each of us. You see it when nerves are raw and a single comment sparks an explosion. You see it in the streets, when George Floyd’s breath was stolen and the outcry of grief and rage swept through cities around the world. You see it in mass shootings that have become so common we almost go numb to them. You see it in airplanes grounded by passengers lashing out at strangers, in workplaces where fear and scarcity make colleagues enemies, in households where love breaks under the pressure of constant tension.
This is the atmosphere of our times: decency eclipsed by fear, compassion drowned by suspicion, ordinary lives saturated with the same energies that fuel wars and retaliations on the global stage. The battlefield is not only “out there.” It is here, in us.
OK. Let’s pause and take a breath. It’s a lot to consciously become aware of the anguish of our times, even for a moment. Really pause. Breathe. Feel your feet on the ground, feel the reassuring rhythm of your own heartbeat. Let your gaze shift to the leaves fluttering on a tree outside your window, or a honey bee visiting a flower in your garden, or the rising and falling of the breath of your beloved pet.
Take heart dear one. Here’s what I’m getting as the message of something can do, something we can do for the whole planet.
In your imagination, rise up out of your own context—above your street, your hometown, your watershed, your bioregion, your country, your continent. Rise into that liminal place among the stars. From the perspective of the sun, see our beautiful blue-green planet in its wholeness. And then, in whatever way you are moved, send this message to each human on the planet:
Your suffering is real.
You are not alone.
There is a way out.
Ask for help, and you will be guided.Follow the guidance.
Every time one of us sends this transmission, it matters. We are powerful beyond belief in our human capacities. But as I receive it, if 3,333 of us were to hold it together, its full effect could ripple through the field in a way we cannot yet imagine.
So this is my invitation. If you are moved, sit with me. Hold the planet. Send the message. And if you feel called, pass this post on to someone else who might join us. Not because it is easy. Not because it is a quick fix. Do it because the depth of our human care and attention is a resource too powerful to squander.