Like many Coloradoans this morning, I am experiencing a tremendous outpouring of anger, grief, and confusion after learning that ten people were murdered in a shooting spree at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder.

I am also noticing that I am not that shocked. This alone is enough to unground me, and to send me into the stratosphere of swirling thoughts around school shootings, gun violence, social injustice, systemic oppression, the lack of adequate mental health education and supports, and the demand for real reform at the root of the illness.

Sadly, the tragedy isn’t really a surprise. As an educator, I’ve been watching the unraveling of people’s capacity to cope with challenge. I have been aware of many people (yes even in my predominantly white, privileged community) at their very edge of reason, living in fight flight, suppressing, isolating, drugging, numbing and disconnecting for more than a decade since I began teaching in the public school system near Boulder.

Welcome the Children home from school. Invite them into the kitchen, to plunge their hands into soapy water and to wash the forks.

Let them break eggshells into the batter and pick out the pieces. Let them poke the muffins with a toothpick. Let them lick the spoon. The bowl. Let them walk around for hours with a chocolate mustache, and teach them how to wet a washcloth and to clean their face in a mirror. Offer them lessons in folding laundry, cleaning the toilet, wiping down the windows. Invite them to participate in your life.

Welcome the Children. Let them wave at your boss in the Zoom meeting. Teach them that they need to be wearing clothes if they are going to appear on a video screen. But let them wear their clothes backwards, inside out. Let them wear princess costumes and makeup and build pillow forts that appear in the background of your calls with investors and clients.

It is the middle of the night and—as it often does here at the mouth of the St. Vrain Canyon—the wind is shifting and whirling through the trees in fat bursts and sudden gusts, keeping me awake. The sounds of wild movement are at once playful and frightening, one moment tossing the neighbor’s wind chimes in metallic song, and the next flinging construction debris and trash can lids against garage doors with clangs and scrapes.

Even tucked into the safety of my bed, and with the window only slightly cracked, I can sense the different currents of air tumbling around the house. The icy and brisk winter current sweeping down from the snowy peaks mixes with the gentler, warmer whisper of spring—a tender prelude to the softening of the earth and the emergence of the first fragile shoots of green piercing through the soil. It has been a long, cold Winter, and I am ready for Spring.

The threat in Denver that closed down schools across the state today, is one that affects us all. It touches into a very real and present danger — the fear itself.

Today, as worried parents across the state scramble to make plans for their kids and to explain the situation in a way that could make any sense, their hearts are pounding and their minds are racing. What am I going to do? Is my kid safe? How can this be happening again?

As human beings, our nervous systems are designed to attune to each other. Our mirror neurons give us a sense in our own bodies of what others around us are feeling. This means that when people around us are stressed, anxious, and afraid, we will pick up on those emotions and also experience them in our systems. The traffic and the roads this morning (if you were unfortunate enough to be on them) were a clear example of this in action.