The Second Crossing

5 min read

You know me.

Some of you have sat in the field with me, worked through something hard together, been in a room where the real conversation finally happened. Some of you I have known for years in the way women know each other, through something that doesn’t require frequent contact.

I’m writing to you. Directly.

Something has been forming between us for a while. A circle taking shape quietly, the way things do before anyone names them. I kept noticing it: the same questions returning in different conversations, women I love arriving at the same threshold from different directions. At some point I stopped waiting and decided to make it real on purpose.

This is that.

What I share here is what comes through me: the channeling, the knowing that arrives at three in the morning and won’t let me rest until I write it down. I believe what moves in me moves in you too. That’s why I feel safe offering it to you. And why I think you’ll recognize something in it.

You know your own life better than anyone. What I’m bringing is myself: my story, my life experience, my questions, my crossings, and an invitation to listen to what your body already knows, to go a little deeper than the day usually allows, to find or rekindle the creative fire that was always yours.

You are safe here. I feel safe with you. That’s what makes this possible.

Something is becoming clear that you’ve been half-knowing for years. This is the first time I’m saying it out loud. This is for that.

You know how to begin again under duress. You’ve done it. The moment the structure failed, the relationship ended, the body gave out, the career revealed itself as a container that had never actually fit; you know what it is to find out what you are made of by having everything else removed. That crossing has a shape. A before and an after. You can point to it.

This crossing is quieter. Harder in its own way. Because nothing has failed.

Because by most measures, you are doing well. Because the woman standing here has already done the work, has already changed, has already paid what the first crossing asked. She is standing in a life that was built for someone slightly smaller than she has become. I am writing to that woman. I am writing to you.

You know what is happening in your body right now. There is a pressure behind the sternum that is not anxiety, though anxiety is the closest word the language offers when we don’t have another. A knowing that arrives first, and a translation of it that arrives second, and the translation is always slightly smaller than the knowing. A voice that still, after everything, asks in the half-second before you speak, or send, or say what you actually see in a room: But is this acceptable?

We have been translating for a long time.

We translate our knowing into language the room will accept. We translate our seeing into questions instead of statements. We translate our authority into warmth, because authority untempered by warmth has been unwelcome in most of the rooms we’ve needed to occupy, and we learned this early, and we learned it in the body, not in the mind. The translation has kept us at the table. It has also been keeping us from the work we are actually here to do.

What is moving in the field right now is a loosening: the way a knot releases when the tension finally drops. The structures built from necessity, from the shape of what was survivable in the rooms we needed to stay in, are beginning to soften. And underneath them: grief.

This is the part you are not prepared for. This grief is for what you spent. What you translated away. What you kept small so the room would keep you. That cost went unnamed for years because naming it would have made it harder to keep going, and you needed to keep going. That grief is not a wound. It is a reckoning.

And underneath it, if you are willing to stay rather than move quickly into resolution, is something that has been refusing to die. Something sovereign. Something that knows.

We are in the South now.

We are already in the South, inside it. The summer is here. These long, generous days. The quality of light that asks you to slow down and be inside it. If you have felt something opening in your chest these past weeks, a warmth that isn’t quite emotion, a spaciousness where there used to be bracing, that is not coincidence. That is the season doing what seasons do.

The spring did its work. The spark came, as it always does, without asking permission. Something was initiated. The fire broke open what needed breaking. You stood in it long enough to be changed by it.

And now: the South. Warmth. Generosity. The direction the wheel has always known as growth: the full, unhurried ripening of what was always coming. The South asks only that you open in the direction you’re already facing. Something in your body knows exactly what I am talking about.

The fog has lifted. That is not an accident. It is seasonal. It is yours.

This transmission is not going to tell you what to do with that. You are here because something went very, very right. Your knowing is still there. Patient. Whole, despite the years of translation. Undiminished by the rooms that couldn’t hold it. It has been waiting for a season warm enough to open. This is that season. And this is where we begin.

This is the first of these letters. Each one will take us somewhere the last one prepared us for.

We will ask questions that feel too large for most rooms. We will sit with things that don’t resolve quickly. We will go toward the fire: the creative fire that was in us before we learned to make it acceptable. The one that knows what it is here to make.

We will move slowly, on purpose. This container is built for depth.

I only ask one thing of you: that you come as you are, the one who woke up at three in the morning, already carrying the question she hasn’t said out loud yet.

That is the one I wrote this for.

With curiosity to serve. Into the questions. Together. This is that season. And this is where we begin.

Inessa O-Childs

In the southern reaches of Siberia lies the Altai, one of the oldest shamanic cradles on earth, where the roots run so deep they are simply called the ground. That is where I began, on a military base, in a land already shaping me long before I had language for what it was holding. I did not know that then. I know it now.

I make my home now in Napa, on the ancestral land of the Wappo and Patwin peoples, the first people of this valley. Between those two grounds lies most of what I have to offer.

I lived through the collapse of the USSR. I crossed into Silicon Valley and built inside it. Long before this work had a name, I was investing in and advocating for women in technology, placing them on boards of private companies, insisting they belonged at the center of power long before that was a common conversation. I learned what that costs, in the body, in the soul, in everything that never appears on a balance sheet. And I learned something I have carried forward ever since: a woman held properly can change everything in the room.

My husband Timothy and I now work together in food and regenerative agriculture across California and Texas, alongside indigenous communities, underserved farmers, and Māori investors who understand that the land is a relationship, not a resource. Being in their company changed me. It is still changing me.

The healing path did not arrive as a revelation. It arrived through leaving one world and not yet belonging to the next, through a body that eventually stopped asking and started insisting, through the particular loneliness of a woman who is capable of so much and supported in so little of what matters. I did not go looking for this work. It found the place in me that had long known it.

I followed my intuition wherever it led: into ceremony, dreaming, constellation work, the body as medicine, leaning on teachers and traditions across three continents who arrived when I needed them, not on any single lineage. One of them was Tumanako Wereta, a Māori elder, Chair of the Tuaropaki Trust, architect of a billion-dollar indigenous enterprise built on ancestral values. He blessed my marriage to Timothy on Māori land and called us the tip of the spear. I have never taken those words lightly. Through him and the teachers around him, I came to understand something about women I had been living without fully naming: that in Māori tradition, it is women who walk ahead, sent first across the threshold, to hold space before the warriors arrive, to make peace possible through presence alone. Not behind the scenes. At the front. I recognized that role in my own life: what it had taken to stand beside Timothy through the building of something real, to hold a partnership, a family, and a vision at once, to be the one who crossed first and made room. That recognition did not diminish what I had done. It named it.

For most of my life, I had been putting people first, building for others, advocating for others, holding space for others in work, in family, in every room I entered. Last year, I completed the three-year Arbor program in two years, under my teacher and mentor, Grandmother Sarah Maclean Bicknell, thirty years deep in ceremony, dreaming, and family constellation work. There I learned what it means to stand in ceremony and in service, to read what runs beneath a family system, to follow a dream as instruction rather than symbol. It was there, on vision quest, that I saw it plainly: my place is beside women in business who are standing between two worlds, helping each one find her own way through.

I walk beside her with the gifts I have spent a lifetime gathering so we can discover her own path together. I offer this work because I lived it myself first, all the way through.

What I lacked, through those thresholds, was a container: someone to hold space through the reinventions, the losses, the moments when everything built on the outside could no longer answer what was stirring within. I navigated that mostly alone. I found my way, but I know what it cost. And I know how many women quietly give up, not for lack of strength, but for lack of witness. A trusted one. Someone who has been there and will not flinch.

It took me a long time to build that container for myself. Rising from the Roots is what I built next, for women ready to stop navigating alone.

I have walked through fire. I have stood in the not-knowing. I have learned, slowly, in many languages, that what heals is not acquired.

It is remembered.

This circle

An invitation to know yourself more fully — and to bring your own creativity into the world. To birth what is yours to birth, in a container built to hold it.

If something here speaks to you, reach out. Not as a transaction — as a conversation. If there is alignment, we find a way to create together around what you need.

inessa@risingfromtheroots.earth