what is an endbeginning?

that sentence stuck between my throat and stomach finally dissolved this morning.

.

i can’t get this sentence out of my body. they are not going to know what hit them. it’s been lodged between my throat and my stomach all day and i don’t know whether to swallow it or throw it up. my nervous system keeps scanning. is this something i need to act on? or is it just fear. i can’t always tell. the not knowing is its own falling.

so i made a place for where i keep landing. i named my substack endbeginnings.

an endbeginning is when the exit and the entrance turn out to be the same door. whatever just died becomes the dirt for whatever’s going to bloom.
you know that thing where you’re walking down the stairs in the dark and you brace for a step that isn’t there? foot hits air. stomach drops. that. except when you land, the ground holds? kinda like that.

i once read a story about a woman who made a ring with her own hands. silver. she sold it and years later the shop it ended up in got swept into the sea. and the strange part is what she did with the bare place on her finger. nothing. she left it bare. she wanted to find out what shows up in a space you don’t hurry to fill.

honestly, that’s the part of an endbeginning nobody warns you about. there are casseroles for endings. beginnings arrive on their own schedule whether you’re ready or not. it’s the inbetween i we don’t know what to do with. the empty space inbetween. it’s the bare finger that’s hard. an empty space starts itching about an hour in and we’ll shove nearly anything into it just to make the feeling stop. but the empty is doing something down there. it’s the dark a seed desires.

there’s a verse that got into me. unless a seed falls to the ground and dies. it dropped (and i felt it like a coin into a vending machine.) and it never left. here’s the thing about a seed though. falling isn’t how it ends. falling is how it begins. it goes down into the dark and it cracks open.

eve fell too. but eve was told her falling was the end of the story. for tasting. for desiring. for being curious. gates shut behind her the rest of her life on the wrong side of a door.

why is eve finding me again now? i feel it in my knower. the little bird under my breastbone going pay attention. so i am.

i shared some of this at a misfit table back in october 2024 so i know how it can land. if you were raised inside that story it is no small thing to look at the wreckage and call it what it is. the original gaslighting of women.

the men who wrote the bible put women in second place from the start. twisting desire and hunger into a curse. using eve's story churches spent generations gaslighting women to take the blame for ruining the world. (we will look at this more)

i know how it lands because i was on the other side of it once. at 21 i went back for my GED. i never finished high school. i got married, had a baby then had another one a year and twelve days later. we lived with my grandma because a shoe store manager’s paycheck didn’t stretch to a place of our own. two babies on my hips and i still wanted college. i thought i wanted to be a nurse.

one of my prerequisite’s was philosophy. the professor taught creation stories from all over the world. and i sat in that room reeling. how dare he. how dare he call ours just a story. one of many. i couldn’t let myself be curious. because if it was only a story then what was my faith? what was God? the whole world had to be wrong so we could be right. i was certain. it was the only truth i had.

wasn’t it?

that seed of curiousity (really it was a breadcrumb but i didn’t trust myself, yet) went in the ground anyway. this was the early nineties, before you could look anything up. it took until my thirties to crack. curiosity got past my defenses and, breadcrumb by breadcrumb with papa, i found a God a lot bigger than the one i’d been handed. i am no longer certain.

rabbi shai held tells about being young and crushed sure there was no place for him inside the tradition he loved. chased out by other people’s certainty. he never forgot it. when he finally built a place of his own he made one rule the whole thing stands or falls on.

no human experience gets chased out of the room. if it ever does, he’s gone.

But it also kind of filled me with a sense of how violent we can be in pursuit of our own certainty and how dangerous religion becomes in precisely those moments.

i can’t stop thinking about that. is certainty what does the chasing. it’s what had me reeling in that classroom. today, witnessing america and the world i am filled with a sense of how violent we can be in pursuit of our own certainty and how dangerous religion becomes in precisely those moments. and the cure was never a louder certainty. if anything the invitation is Mystery. God is mystery. faith is mystery.

then! lat saturday i met skywoman.
papa led me to her sideways like alwaysa:) in antique mall. a magical book nook and a second book humming on a shelf i wasn’t looking at first. its pages warm to the touch. braiding sweetgrass.

i couldn’t believe it girls! skywoman fell too! nobody called it banishment. nobody chased her out. nobody shamed or blamed her! she fell holding seeds!! and her falling became a garden!!

two women fell out of the same sky onto the same dirt. the only difference was the story (and the writers:) and kimmerer says a creation story isn’t just a story. it’s instructions. and these instructions are yours. one of a kind. it tells you who you are and how to stand in the world. your feet orientation. and it keeps telling you long after you’ve forgotten you’re carrying it.

one story says: you’re a gardener. this is your home and your grandchildren’s and great grandchildren’s home. tend it like your + their lives depends on it. because it does.

the other says: you’re in exile. this was never your home. keep your head down. you’re just passing through. you are spiritually unhoused. no home here. no ground to put your feet so youre not floating in the air like a balloon. your real home is in heaven. that’s the one they gave me.

i lived in it for 50 years before i began falling.

one of those is an escape story. the earth still carries the scars of which one won. so do our bodies.

so that’s what an endbeginning is. the drop. the floor goes and the gates clangt. he spin starts under your lungs. or mine did. and somewhere in the falling you choose which story you’re in.

banished from the garden or holding seeds to create one. you stay in the empty dark room. you trust papa is in the falling with you. you don’t grab for the old certainty on the way down. you open up to Mystery.

evie green isn’t afraid of falling. she opens her hand before anybody can pry it loose. this isn’t a grave she says patting the dirt. you were always meant to be planted. you were always meant to be brought home. here. while you are alive.

that sentence stuck between my throat and stomach finally dissolved this morning.

i didn’t scan for the exit. i let the spinning slow. i stood there with my hands open and i swear papa was in the dark with me. the way the ground holds a seed before it knows what it’s going to be.

i don’t know what it’s going to be either. that’s the truth. i have visions. land. a heart hospital. lots of ‘rooms’. something green and half-built in the dark. a greenhouse of people, maybe. but i’m done pretending certainty.

i am all in for Mystery.

for now, all i have is a bag of seeds. an ear tuned for breadcrumbs and this tiny bird saying begin.

so this is me. planting.

i stand in the not-knowing with my hands open

what about you? what comes up for you? what are you curious about? what are you afraid of?

together, we will learn how to create a life we don’t need to escape from.

couraging
t-