Though I have strived to hold tight to the sense of possibility of that 16 year old, through much of my life I remained pretty clueless about changing my own circumstances let alone fixing the ills of the world.

And then something extraordinary happened. I didn’t get something I wanted.

It wouldn’t have been all that extraordinary because at 42 the experience of not getting what I wanted wasn’t unusual for me. Except that this time, Life said, no! to something I wanted more than I ever remembered wanting anything before. A child.

And the next extraordinary thing that happened was that after searching high and low for someone to help me conceive the inconceivable child. I found that the most reliable guidance arrived from a most unlikely place. The place which poet Mary Oliver once called the “heart’s little intelligence.”

For the last 25 years fertility activism has been a calling that gave birth to a community of caring and sharing aka fertileheart.com.

With FertileHeartedHuman.com I hope to answer a second calling, applying the lessons of my fertility work to birthing a more child-friendly earth.

I am not quite as old as the wise actress I met years ago, but I do know this:  as long as we live and breathe, whether we’re in our 90’s or twenties, every single one of us has what it takes to contribute to the evolution of our—scared and brave, cruel and kind, greedy and supremely generous FertileHeartedHuman clan.