Defining Cerros

Defining Cerros

 by Michelle Katz

Over the years, many people have asked me why I named Cerros Consulting, “Cerros”.  As a storyteller, I feel this is an important one to tell.

I began this company just shy of a decade ago at a very pivotal rite of passage for myself.  At the time, the name of this business was “Oaks Counsel” named after the Oak tree I would visit frequently in adolescence, when home was Cleveland, Ohio.  Martin Shaw said, “All a tree wants is our fidelity.” And in the naming of the business, my fidelity to this oak seemed important. I remembered how that tree always had my back and I would turn to it for counsel as I watched a swift river flow below, teaching me of life being every changing, tumultuous at times, and still life giving.  The Oak gave me counsel and also consistency and trust.  There were oak trees around where I lived when Oaks Counsel came to be, in a sweet small California town, so the name seemed appropriate and related to the landscape of the practice.  Though a part of me always knew that I would return to Santa Fe at some point and the name would not be so relevant, Oaks Counsel remained the name of the business from its infancy into its adolescent stage. 

I returned to Santa Fe in 2016; but it took years after my return, in the first few months of the global pandemic, for me to seriously begin to contemplate what would bring this organization into full maturity.  I asked myself what was needed to reflect this notable time.  A rebranding/renaming was being called into actuality.  A connection to its new home and the natural landscape that surrounds this work. A step into adulthood and a clarity of purpose and gift to the world. Adulthood is about perspective taking, is includes being prepared and seeing the bigger picture. Santa Fe offers this in the most literal way through its mountain views and its desert lessons. 

Cerros whispered into my ear as I sat on the earth pondering this transformation. Cerros is the Spanish word for hills and peaks. Spanish being a largely spoken language of this city, thus more deeply connected the name to its landscape and people, the landscape, and people I know to be home. There are many places in the region with Cerro embedded in the place name, Cerro streets, Cerro trails and Cerro parks, Cerro often followed by a descriptor word or surname.  But Cerro truly can stand alone, strong and grounded at its foundation and base. Each Cerro is uniquely created of various ecosystems evolving off each other as the ground grows upward to its peak.

In reflection and contemplation of a name for what I wish to bring to the world, Cerros spoke to me of the life I have had and the lessons it has taught me.  Life’s turns and edges brought me to various trials and trails, the uphill battles, and the tumbles downhill, the landscapes of pause sometimes forced upon me and sometime self-created, unexpected experiences and long-awaited harmonious experiences, transformative and all contributing to who I am/am becoming.  Experiences that take us out of the comfort zone and reveal ourselves to ourselves are largely unpredictable and never straightforward in their lessons. Experiences can be ugly, though we must be able to see they are also encircled by beautiful ones.  I have had challenges beyond measure, bringing up questions of self and the world that I have wrestled with along my way. I’d find myself in a meadow of wildflowers with a trickling creek alongside me one moment only to turn a number of zigzags into a scene of rocky grounding, dry, windy and desolate.  I think we all know what the very top of the mountain looks like, and we all decide that the view is worth every bit of the uncertain footing along the way.

We all know the journey to the top is never a clear or carved to be a straight upward path.  It is full of switchbacks, different terrain, ducking down into the ravens, climbing up crevasses, pattering down paths, trudging up cliffs, meandering around boulders or trickling slippery streams, hopping across rock fields to avoid the cracks, screeing shale, and taking long breathers every now and again all before we stretch our arms victoriously to take in the peak.  And you know once we are up there for a while, the cold sets in, the sandwich and snacks get eaten, the storm clouds look to be rolling in or the sun ducks behind the western ridge and we must turn our backs to the glorious view and begin the journey down.  We cannot stay up there for too long.

The fact of the matter is that the peaks don’t exist without all that surround it.  Cerros gets its name from this deeper truth.  Hills don’t exist without their base and valleys between them, without their rounded and gaged and jagged edges, their changes in elevation and the different sceneries that are part of its makeup. It is important that we learn to wander and amble all the terrains to and from the top.

It is often overlooked that Cerro is also translated to mean backbone.  An important part of our physiology. The structure of our being, our standing in the world, our central support that is connected to our entire musculoskeletal system, the part of us that empowers us to move in the world: sit, stand, walk, twist and bend.  Our strength and foundation are in this essential part of our body. It is easy to note that our backbone is also made up of bones with valleys and peaks, curves, and bends in all directions, hard and flexible all at once.  It is also easy to connect the word backbone to the long-used idiom of “have a backbone” meaning to have strength in character.  To commit and live into your knowing and hold strong to your own decisions and feelings.  This knowing of self is the core value of the organization.

Cerros is named such for these two very essential reasons: 1.) It is a reminder that peaks and valleys exist together, and all inform/make up the fullness of a life, the perspective from the top is important in revealing this truth. And 2.) Cerros teaches us about the backbone, the base, the foundation of who we are. Remembering, connecting, and returning to this again and again, no matter where you may be on the journey, is what the organization aims to evoke in every person that steps in and enrolls into the services and offerings of Cerros Consulting. If we strengthen our knowing of ourselves it allows for us to find our home all along the way.  And if you care for a bonus reason, it is the story of my transition into true adulthood, the movement toward seeing a great perspective and knowing even in this great big world, connecting to my base self, day in and day out, is the practice of living into my best self.

Grief to Gift

Grief To Gift

by Michelle Katz

After my first break up with a serious boyfriend, in my grief and heartache, confusion and scrambling to make sense of it, my dad said to me, “when the groom leaves the bride at the altar, no one knowns who is the lucky one.”  I remember it stopping me in my tracks.  This statement, that I gave tribute to as some Ukrainian adage I imagine he heard somewhere along the way in his growing up, created true pause in my experience of loss.  Like a Zen Koan landing in my lap through the wisdom of a man I would never expect such a turn of a phrase be expressed.  Years and years later, I still remember that moment, that saying, and have applied it to the many loses throughout my life: relationship losses, career losses, losses that contributed to major paradigm shifts, the most brutal experience of friendship losses, even the losses and battles with my own ideas. 

This simple and profound saying offers me the greatest contemplation about loss: ”What if it was meant to be?” “What if this terrible unbearable feeling of grief, is actually for the best?”  Holy wow!  As the Dalai Lama wrote “Not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”

We all have had losses in our lives.  Many of which have defined us, taught us a lesson about how to be in the world, taught us about great love and surrendering to what is.  In hindsight, all those losses can be seen as circumstances that were meant to be.  Grief for something that was once so wonderful can later be understood as necessary loss for the becoming who we are meant to be.

Loss happens in nature every day, from predator hunting prey to the extinction of a species due to the climate crisis.  There is even the line of thought that the global pandemic and it’s enormous impact on the loss of life can be contributed to nature running its course for the creation of a world that is more sustainable, conscious, community oriented.  It is a hard heart wrenching thought to bare, but, what if it’s true?  Could we bare it? There is much we grieve these days that is hard to bare. We are meaning-making-machines and it is often more about how we feel about how we feel than the feeling alone. What is the work of seeing the crack as also being the place that the light comes in (as Leonard Cohen wrote)? Are we able to see that a light is in both the broken glass and the diamond (Mark Nepo)?

Byron Katie, a great psychological thinker/author, among many others of her kind, teachers us to look at what is.  To ask the questions of what is really true? How we know it’s true? What is our reaction to our thoughts? Who would we be if we didn’t have that thought?  And what if we flipped that thought around and discovered ways that new thoughts might be true.  What an incredible, interesting, and unbearably challenging practice to take on!

Another great explored or grief, Francis Weller, teaches us the wildness of our sorrow and how the other side of it is gratitude.  Greif can be transformed into fertile ground for use to embrace the realness of life.

Vulnerably, I tell a story of the loss of a career I had been dreaming of for as long as I could remember.  My identity, who I defined myself to be, was wrapped up in this career. The loss of it left me utterly bewildered.  I failed, I wasn’t worthy of anything good, I felt depressed, hopeless, I could not see my life ahead of me.  Who was I?  How was I going to move forward?  Joseph Campbell offers, “We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”  The freedom of this terrifyingly challenging action is inexplicable.  It feels like sometimes this action of letting go could kill us, it is that threatening to our existence.  But I have to tell you, every time I have been able to practice this letting go, it has been liberating. Acceptance of what is the greatest way to lead a peaceful life. 

I watch the trees move through the seasons, loosing their leaves in the autumn without resistance.  I watch the long days become shorter.  The fruit fall from the carefully planned and tended to garden.  I watched the winter come and cover the sands and soils that are marked by footprints that hold memories of walks with a lover or friend, the small plants that took root but may not make it to another spring, the tree trunks that once invited us to sit awhile.  I watch the once pristine glistening heavenly snow turn brown and dirty, patchy and slushy on its way to melt. I watch the buds of tress become leaves and flowers in the spring, the grass growing back the best it can in the face of drought remembering what it once was in the rainy year; the wind blowing the pollen of a juniper to it’s mate like a soul leaving a living being. I watch beautiful full forests become on fire and then turn into flood grounds and then become the landscapes the elk come to know and love as their greatest buffet. I see the bunny picked up by the raptor, the snake eat the mouse, the coyote on the side of the road and it’s mate howling in the loss. I see the fallen and decaying tree, becoming a home for burrowing animals and then on its way to become soil and new plants. The world is full of loss. The loss is an energy that creates something new, something equally or even more beautiful.  If we are able to do the important work we are meant to do with the experience of loss.

My losses created resistance, morphed into grief that spoke to an enormous love, initiated a creative process and revealed some beautiful gifts that would otherwise have been unseen.  So, if the groom leaves the bride at the altar, yes, no one knows who is the lucky one, but my bet is on both of them eventually grow lucky enough to live happily ever after.

A Plea for Presence

A Plea for Presence

by Michelle Katz

Our nation sits with another very familiar tragedy this week.  I have written too many articles on mass and school shootings.  There is a part of me that is resistant and in disbelieve that here I am writing about this yet again.  A pandemic, an unnecessary war in Ukraine, wildfires, and still young people are taking guns into schools. It is all too much.  CNN reports at least 213 mass shooting for this year alone, that is more than the 144 days of 2022!  I think it’s most alarming to know the reality that every young person in our nation no longer feels safe to go to school to get an education and teachers, whose jobs are important beyond measure, risk their lives every day to bring kid the heart and passion of learning.  My heart is breaking.

Einstein, the man who helped the world break through some of the barriers of understanding the physical world and the universe, said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”  So, what are we doing?  Is it about time we break through the barrier of how we are making sense of mass shootings?  I recall the American Dream that brought my parents to this country in 1979 from Ukraine, the dream of a better life, the dream for young, fresh, new and revolutionary ideas, for being the model for what others strive to be.  We are not what we once aimed to be, what the vision of this country feels blurred. Let us hear the voices of the young people, they are screaming out for something better and my heart is breaking.

A few weeks back I posted a video about asking the question, “what breaks your heart?” to help us get to know our purpose in the world.  Does this tragedy and others like it not break everyone’s heart?  What is stopping us from making drastic and real changes?  We need to love our children more than our guns in this country!  My heart is breaking.

As an advocate for social emotional learning and mental health in schools and for young people overall, these tragedies propel me into a trauma response.  If it’s doing that to me, it’s 100 times more traumatic for young people.  My colleagues and I turn to each other in the aftermath of every school shooting, retraumatized and recognizing that one after another we grow more numb.  Because of trauma overload, because of helplessness, because of the need to preserve our psyche. My heart is breaking.

Today, I stepped outside.  I sat at my sit spot on a hill between two living and two dead juniper trees and wept.  I gave myself time to feel.  I looked among the living and dead around me, beyond just where I sat, outward to the hills outstretched in every direction.  Who gets to decided who lives and dies? What can we do to help those still living?  How do we stop this?  How do we speak for those who are most vulnerable?  How can I be of service to heal our world so that this is not a daily headline?  My heart is breaking.

I worry that we have all grown numb to these events. I understand it is a method of coping, I can honor that.  But I plea to everyone to take the time to sit with it, to feel this enormous and persistent loss of young life. To recognize that parents are not meant to bury their children.  Take time to honor who those children are, to let them be remembered and live on through your tears.  May those tears move us, lift our boat from where is sits, stuck in the sand, to a new place that promises that these events won’t happen again.  My heart is breaking.

Every generation born to this world is meant to create change, to bring new ideas that lead to our evolution as human beings, but this cannot happen if we don’t hear their voices, recognize their needs or give them a chance to grown up into healthy purposeful adults. This cannot happen if we look the other way when a young person feels hatred, anger or exhibits mental illness, because we are too uncomfortable to deal with it. This cannot happen if guns are allowed to be purchased so easily on someone’s 18th birthday. I plea that we all feel this heart break.  And that we act on what we can do.  We are not doing enough, and we have far more power to do more than simply send thoughts and prays. My heart is breaking.

I stepped down from my hilltop seat, came home and read about those who have fallen.  First the shooter, curious about warning signs, about what was missed, what would have stopped his trajectory toward such callous reckless violence. Then I read about the teachers and the 9- and 10-year-olds.  How they sung and played and made the people who knew them smile. I plea with you, don’t go numb, be present to all that arises in you at this time. This may be our only hope for change. I cry, I worry, I grow angry and impatient, I bargain and grieve. My heart is broken.