Apr 12, 2026

“Embracing Possibility – The Cracking Open”

Rev. Kurt Hohmann

Embracing Possibility

The Cracking Open

  • Season
    • Begin outdoors in spirit, even though we’re inside
    • The season is genuinely unstable
      • Frost can still come
      • Blossoms can still arrive
    • What is actually happening in the earth right now
      • The ground has been doing something invisible all winter
      • Something has been preparing that required no witness, no encouragement
      • Bulbs that have sat in frozen dark all winter are now pushing through
      • Seeds sitting in the ground, neither dead nor alive in any way we’d recognize as living, are now cracking open
    • The seed does not know if it will succeed
      • The act of cracking open, without certainty of outcome, is possibility itself
  • Possibility does not arrive from outside
    • It breaks open from within
    • Breaking is not incidental to the process
      • It is the process
  • What germination actually involves
    • The seed coat, or shell, exists for good reason
      • It protected the seed through what would have killed it
      • But at a certain point, in the right conditions, that same protective shell becomes an obstacle to the life it was protecting
      • The shell was never the point
        • The life inside was always the point
        • The shell did its job
        • Something else is being asked now
  • What is possibility?
    • Often treated as optimism
      • A cheerful bet that things will go well
    • A more honest definition:
      • Possibility is a space not yet closed
      • It lives in the unresolved
      • It is still becoming
      • Possibility is ongoing rather than arrived
    • We do not require faith in a fixed outcome
      • But we do pay attention to what is still open
      • The seed’s potential is not diminished by winter underground
        • But potential means change
        • Possibility dwells there
    • Are we also cracking out of shells?

Story: Inanna’s Descent

  • Inanna, Queen of Heaven, descends into the underworld
    • To pay honor to her dead brother-in-law?
    • Or perhaps to expand her own dominion?
    • There is risk
      • Her older sister Ereshkigal hates her
    • Inanna instructs Ninshubur, her servant, to seek help if she does not return after three days and nights
  • The First Gate
    • At the first gate, Inanna is stopped
      • She cannot enter as she is
      • Her crown, representing status and authority, must come off
      • The crown is not taken by force
        • It is surrendered as the condition of going deeper
    • At each of the seven gates, she must surrender something
      • Staff
        • Control
        • The ability to judge outcomes by old standards
      • Necklace
        • Social connection
      • Breastplate
        • Sexual power
      • Gold ring
        • Binding agreements
      • Anklets
        • Ritual movement
      • Robes
        • Persona
    • Gate by gate, everything that defined her in the upper world is left behind
  • What’s your crown right now?
    • What have you been holding as a marker of who you are and how you’re doing?
    • What may need to be set down at the gate?
    • This is not about giving up
      • It is about what you can and cannot carry through a threshold
  • Judgment
    • Inanna arrives stripped of everything
    • She is judged for hubris by the seven judges of the underworld
    • She is killed by Ereshkigal
      • Eyes of death
      • Words of wrath
    • Her corpse is hung from a hook
  • Ereshkigal
    • She is not a simple villain
    • She is herself in pain
      • Physical pains of labor
      • Grief and isolation
        • Unloved
        • Abandoned
        • Consumed by deep loneliness and rage
      • The death of her husband
      • The neglected, dark aspects of life
      • The part of reality that the upper world prefers not to look at
  • Rescue
    • Ninshubur appeals to the gods
      • Several refuse to help
      • Inanna knew the risks
    • Enki, the god of wisdom, intervenes
      • He creates two beings from the dirt under his nails
        • The gala-tura
        • The cur-jar
        • They are genderless and can pass through the gates
      • They carry the food and water of life to revive Inanna
      • They empathize with Ereshkigal’s suffering
        • Because of this, they obtain Inanna’s corpse
      • Inanna is revived
  • Return changes everything
    • Descent is not the end
      • It is the beginning of clarity
    • Inanna sheds her external symbols of ego and power
    • She faces her shadow self in Ereshkigal
    • She becomes a more complete being
    • She accepts vulnerability
      • She becomes meat on a hook
    • She becomes more integrated, mature, and empathetic
    • She changes from arrogant queen to humbled, wiser deity
    • She learns to connect with human pain and suffering
    • She is no longer only the goddess of war and love
      • She becomes a more profound figure who understands life and death
  • The price of wisdom
    • The return changes everything above ground too
      • The world has been barren in her absence, Demeter-like
      • Waiting, grieving, going fallow
      • Her return reshuffles power and relationship
    • She is not restored
      • She is literally remade
      • Nothing about her return is simple or cost-free
      • She must provide a substitute to take her place
      • Not loyal servants, who have wept for her
      • But her husband, Dumuzi, who has not
    • Real power and wisdom come from going under
  • Analogy
    • The cracked-open seed does not return to being a seed
    • What emerges is different from what went in
    • The husk remains in the soil
      • That is not loss
      • It is the mechanism of new life
  • Sustained resistance and activism are like an encounter with Ereshkigal
    • Grief that does not resolve
    • Anger that has no clean outlet
    • Losses that do not get redeemed by outcomes
    • Inanna’s transformation happens partly through genuine encounters with grief, anger, and loss
    • The “underworld” we have been moving through is not a simple obstacle
      • It has its own intelligence
      • Its own truths
      • Things the upper world does not carry
  • Embracing possibility requires releasing our attachment to remaining as we were
    • We are not the same people we were before these months of resistance and difficulty
    • Not because of a wound
      • Because that is the cracking open at work
    • Our creativity is not gone
    • Our brilliance is not broken
    • We are just between gates
    • The cracking open here is total, and the return is not a restoration but a transformation
    • You do not come back from genuine engagement with darkness unchanged, and that is not failure

Tree and the Well

  • Inanna helps tell us where we are.
    • Where are we going?
  • Yggdrasil — the World Tree
    • The tree holds the universe together.
    • The axis mundi — the center connecting all realms.
  • The Norns
    • Verdandi
      • The present moment.
      • Paying attention to what is.
    • Urd
      • The past.
      • That which was.
      • The weight of what has been.
    • Skuld
      • Her name is cognate with “should” and “shall.”
      • An invitation into unfinished possibility.
      • Not “will” and not “won’t,” but “should,” “might,” and “could.”
      • Futures that are genuinely open, not predetermined.
      • Possibility includes the possibility of failure.
      • Skuld does not promise good futures.
      • She represents futures that are still open.
      • More honest and demanding than optimism.
  • Fate or Wyrd?
    • Greek Fates
      • Fix a predetermined pattern.
      • In a weaving model, “should” feels like obligation imposed from outside.
    • The Norns
      • Do not weave.
      • They tend Yggdrasil.
      • They dip into the Well of Wyrd and wash the tree.
      • In the well model, “should” becomes potential energy in the water.
    • Skuld’s domain is not a tapestry with a fixed design.
      • It is water.
      • Water takes the shape of whatever it flows into.
      • It responds to disturbance.
      • It carries ripples from events far away.
      • It cannot be held fixed.
      • The future is genuinely fluid.
  • The impact of our actions
    • The impact of resistance and activism.
      • Is any of this doing anything?
    • Every action or act of witness and presence matters.
      • Every march attended.
      • Every letter written.
      • Every conversation.
      • Every time you showed up.
    • Each action sends ripples through the Well.
      • The ripples reach the roots of Yggdrasil.
      • The tree is affected whether or not you can see how.
    • There is no promise of victory.
      • Only something more honest—and more sustaining.
      • Possible futures are responsive to what flows into them.
    • Skuld is not declaring what will happen.
      • She tends what should, given what the water currently holds.
  • Collective Action
    • Yggdrasil is not just a tree.
      • It is the connective tissue of everything.
      • The medium through which consequence travels.
      • The Well and the Tree are functionally inseparable.
      • What enters the Well travels the roots.
      • What travels the roots reaches every world simultaneously.
    • Problems of scale.
      • One of the most corrosive feelings in sustained resistance is believing our actions are too small to matter.
      • The Yggdrasil framework reframes that without offering false reassurance.
      • Our actions do not affect only this moment or this political situation.
      • They enter a living system whose reach exceeds what any single perspective can track.
      • We cannot see all nine worlds from where we stand.
        • That is a limitation of our perspective—not of our actions.
    • Vertical ripples.
      • Unfinished, fluid futures are not only ahead in time.
      • They are threaded through every level of existence.
      • Possibility is not only about what comes next.
      • It is also about what is resonating right now in ways we cannot always perceive.
      • Our actions ripple in every direction.
      • They affect things we never intended.
      • They make us participants in something much larger than the immediate situation.
  • Three Images
    • The seed cracks open beneath the ground.
      • In the roots—Yggdrasil’s domain.
    • Inanna descends through levels of reality.
      • A vertical journey through worlds.
    • Skuld tends the Well whose water feeds the roots connecting everything.
  • Community as the Condition
    • The Well responds to what is cast into it.
    • The cracking seed responds to its conditions.
    • Inanna’s transformation depends upon helpers who choose to show up.
      • The gala-tura.
      • The cur-jar.
      • Tiny, seemingly powerless beings.
      • They do not fight.
      • They do not argue.
      • They simply remain present.
      • They witness.
      • They empathize.
    • Transformation depends on communal movement.
      • Presence to one another.
      • Showing up.
      • Small, unglamorous acts of witness.
      • Not heroism—but presence.
    • Individual resilience has limits.
    • Communal possibility.
      • Think about how forests actually work.
      • The mycorrhizal network passes nutrients between trees.
      • It sustains those under stress.
      • Community works the same way.
      • We pass strength to those who are cracking open when we have a little more to spare.
      • Possibility does not live only inside individual hearts.
      • It lives between people who remain in community.
    • Honor the small, unglamorous acts of resistance and care that never make headlines.
  • The Cracking Open
    • The seed’s act of breaking is the beginning.
      • Not blooming—but breaking.
    • The crack is the moment of vulnerability.
      • Before the outcome is known.
    • Cracking open is not the end of strength.
      • It is the form strength takes when it stops being defensive.
    • The shell had to remain whole to survive winter.
      • Now that same wholeness becomes the obstacle.
      • The difference between protection and possibility.
    • Cracking open means embracing possibility.
      • Things cannot remain as they were yesterday.
      • We cannot keep the shell intact and also receive what is possible.
      • Something has to give.
      • The process is not comfortable.
    • We have not merely been enduring.
      • We have been cracking open.
      • Losses, frustrations, and the grinding repetition of simply showing up are not obstacles to possibility.
      • They are the mechanism of possibility.
      • The shell has been cracking all along.
    • This is not:
      • “Keep going—it will all be worth it.”
      • No one can promise that.
    • Neither is it false hope.
      • Not “everything will be fine.”
      • But active hope.
      • The kind that does not wait for certainty before acting.
    • The spiritual practice is remaining present to what is breaking open.
      • Possibility is not the destination.
      • It is what you are standing in right now.
  • Examples of the Shell
    • Personally
      • Believing maintaining composure is the same as maintaining strength.
      • Appearing okay while doing difficult work.
      • Waiting for certainty before beginning.
      • Measuring your worth by visible outcomes instead of the quality of your presence and commitment.
    • Collectively
      • Treating democracy as a stable background condition rather than something requiring constant tending.
      • Believing progress is always linear.
      • Assuming what has been won stays won.
      • Separating the human world from the natural world.
      • Privatizing spiritual life.
      • Believing institutions will automatically correct themselves.
  • April Light
    • The light has changed.
    • The ground is doing something.
    • Seeds that have spent winter in cold darkness are cracking open.
      • Without certainty of outcome.
      • Because conditions have finally shifted enough to make it possible.
    • We are not being asked to be unbroken.
    • We are not being asked to return to who we were before all of this.
    • We are being asked to do what Inanna did.
      • What every seed does.
      • Move through the threshold.
      • Surrender what the gate requires.
      • Trust—not that everything will be fine—but that what comes through the cracking open is more alive than what went in.
      • Trust that what we do, however small, ripples outward into the Well of possibilities.

Closing

What you have carried here today has entered the water.

What enters the water reaches the roots.

What reaches the roots should travel all the worlds.