The Art of Giving Up

The cool kids call it 'surrender' I think. That's the thing that you do where you throw up your hands and step wantonly into the void, head and shoulders back, mouth slightly ajar, eyes mostly closed. It's very graceful, beautiful, light and potentially ethereal in quality. It's a move that smells heavily of patchouli and whispers 'take me, I'm yours' to the universe and it's whims.

But I'm talking about something a little different, a little messier. A little more human. The art of giving up is perhaps a version of 'losing it'. Maybe this giving up is what follows, or what fills the cracks of time when your waiting and staying put is not so artful. When you pretty much suck at being equanimous, or calm, or zen. This is point where you say "well universe, FUCK YOU!!" and abandon all hope of being enlightened and compassionate in favour of being grindingly, painfully and messily human. It is sometimes all about saying…or maybe just feeling and thinking…all the wrong things. The things that aren't fair, empathetic, measured, objective or accurate. The things that take you down a peg or two in the estimation of those (including yourself) who might have once perceived you as a balanced and enlightened individual.

There must be a place for this in the journey. I hope there is. Otherwise there might be no hope for me. Because while I strive to occupy that artful place of balance and patience, I can fail, more often than I'd like to admit (though not as often or blindly as I once did).

The 'art' of giving up really is a bit of a mix of Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock and one of the "Saw" movies (haven't seen them but I'm imagining they involve a lot of dirt, blood and gristle). It's a fucking mess -  distorted, splattery, haphazard. In contrast to the cool kids version, which may or may not involve a flowing robe and silky hair blowing in the wind as we blithely release ourselves to gravity at the cliff edge, 'giving up' can be gritty, rageful, sloppy and seemingly artless. If you have an ego (which most of us do) it can feel embarrassing, even humiliating. It may inspire other people into (mistakenly) giving you advice. They can be forgiven for that ultimately, but in the moment it may just serve to feed the ragefulness…it's not like we don't KNOW we are a mess after all.

The real trick to it though, is that amidst all that blood and paint and gristle can you still love yourself? Even just for a moment. Can you practice 'radical acceptance' in the face of your own imperfect messiness? That's what I am aspiring to. Somewhere in the midst of the angst to practice a pause…just before I give in to the impulse, I will try to stop just for a moment, return to myself…then abandon all hope and barrel forward like the goat that I am.

We blunder blindly, tripping over rocks and roots as we stumble towards the cliff edge and hurl ourselves over it…jaw clenched, eyes shut tight, arms flailing. But we can forgive ourselves for it in the end because it's part of what makes us beautiful.

Home Place(s) Part 1

Despite that fact that I have moved more times in my adult lifetime than the majority of people, I am profoundly connected to place(s). There are several significant ones that remain iconic, emotional and rooted in my bone memory. Upon reflection, I find myself realizing lately that all of them have now passed from my life. These special, magical and formative places are no longer 'mine' to visit, touch, be in. All of them are either irrevocably changed or gone altogether. The sadness of that is not lost on me, as all of them have been significant in making me who I am; sheltering me in times when I needed respite, housing the rich communities that formed my early working life in the outdoor field, and providing access to wild nature that few people get at 'home'.

The "Farm"
My dad built these shutters. He built, chinked, installed, lathed and sawed pieces of this place into shape for over 30 years. He was not someone who sat still easily and his 'leisure' time up at the farm was most often about being busy, as well as feeding his connection to wild places (as much of his life's work centred around the greening and 'wilding' of urban places).
In my childhood this was the place where I learned how to get lost in the woods (200 acres worth) and eventually find myself again, wandering for hours away from the cramped one room log cabin that contained the rest of my family. I learned to chop wood here, shovelled the path to the outhouse in -20 weather, fetched water in an aluminum bucket from an open well down a hill, read by lamplight, played darts with my brothers, tapped maple tress, learned to cook popcorn and pancakes to perfection over a wood stove, snowshoed from the car up the kilometre of unploughed road and driveway dragging a week's worth of supplies, saw Monarch butterflies emerge from chrysalises, witnessed my first animal death by human hand (my parents went nuts one day with a crowbar in a crazed vendetta against the groundhog that was plaguing their hopeless vegetable garden), portaged and paddled a canoe, swam between islands, learned how to work with wood, kerosene and creosote. Every kid should be so lucky.
It was not what most people would call a 'cottage'. It was a kilometre from the lake, devoid of mod cons and nestled in a wildly overgrown century-abondoned homestead. I was young enough and tomboy enough to revel in the place and all it had to offer, more so than my brothers I think as at that time they were in the throes of adolescence, less interested in manual labour and more in sleeping in and social life.
As an adult I learned to love this place as a retreat in times where I needed silence, independence, and many times, a home place within a transient existence. I had gatherings there, more than I probably have had at any apartment or house I have ever lived in. It was that kind of place. Warm, inviting, wood stoked and smelling of mice, lamp oil and cedar-lined linen chests.

A couple of years ago we sold it. Both me and my brother had moved west, and my dad had been in the grips Alzheimer's and hospitalized for a number of years, and my mum was juggling the financial responsibilities of a house in the city, a house in England inherited from her father that was refusing to sell and the farm. I was the one who 'did the deed' for the most part. Contacted the real estate agent, got the papers signed, handed this key to the padlock on the door over. The agent called me to tell me the counter offer had been accepted as I was driving across the prairies. I still remember where I was, overlooking a badlands canyon from a roadside lookout, pale sage and red soil.

This past winter when my dad passed away I drove across the country again. On the way back to BC from his memorial I drove the road to see the farm again, perhaps somehow seeking him out and bringing him there with me one last time. It still confounds me to describe how it had changed, or how devastating it was to return and find it no longer the gentle, wild place of solace it had been. There were the physical things, like the crisscrosses of skidoo tracks like scars across the snowy field (my dad abhorred all motorized 'off-road' vehicles), the massively widened driveway, the yellow drive shed full of trucks and front end loaders, the less overt but still significant changes to the cabin's old body. Beyond the physical elements, seeing the place again tore a piece of me, left some part of my spirit rattling in the wind. More than any other place in my life, this had been home, and now it's tangible doors at least denied my entry.

When we sold it, I went to pick up a few last things and leave the key. I knew the buyers would skidoo, build things, clear and change the farm in many ways. Before I drove away I wrote out and pinned this quote on the door, with it pinning some hope for the preservation of all that was wild in this home place.

"I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.” 

~ Henry David Thoreau

The Art of "Wait"

A couple of months ago someone posted a quote that went something like this: "Life is what happens while we are waiting for something to happen." At the time, life had just offered up a great challenge to me to wait for something wonderful. At the time,  I said ‘yes, I’ll wait’ wholeheartedly. It is possible however that on some level I was gripped by a belief that all obstacles would magically dissolve and the much-touted waiting would not have to happen.

But the reality was and is that I could not fully have the wonderfulness, for various reasons that are complicated, human and frustratingly, startlingly out of my control or influence. 

In this process I have come to realize that I have rarely (possibly never) truly 'waited'. And when I say wait, I mean wait without dwelling, without obsessing, without tapping my fingers impatiently on the forehead of the cosmos. I am a 'have it now' kind of girl…always have been. Ask my mum about the time that I wanted a dog (it may or may not have involved a hunger strike). Some form of departure, escape; the act leaving has often been my primary tool for dealing with the ‘wait’ challenge in the past. I have been known to go to great lengths to get what I want; take very long spontaneous road trips, quit jobs, break up relationships, do thoughtless things with no regard for other people's feelings (I am ashamed to say but it's true). I tend to reject the barriers that arise, in whatever form they manifest, and I get behind the wheel and drive, hard, towards what I want. 

Many people, including myself, might perceive this idea of 'waiting' as weak, passive, disempowering. But that's just the 'make it happen' monkey mind getting into gear. It's drumming up stories so that it can distract us from the acceptance of how things are. It dislodges us from being with ourselves, returning to ourselves again and again. From staying put.

But I have come to see that to 'wait' in this pure and beautiful form, really means to silence the voices that tell me to move, prod and make happen. It means not to service the restless, impetuous story telling imp that lives inside of me. There is no steering wheel in this way of waiting. Instead there is a challenge to let go of the controls, to practice true patience and to live life as it is now.

Today, last week, this weekend I find myself here, staying put, not just in the physical or geographical sense, but aspiring to do so within my restless, moving being. It is a challenge from minute to minute, and some minutes are better than others.

I aspire to make no move towards this thing that I want. I try and let things be, let the universe, or whatever, time, space…do it's thing, beyond my input. The job right now is to let go, to unhitch the knots of wanting that have wound themselves around me. It is to return, again and again, to myself.

In the beginning

In a conversation with my friend Janie a few weeks ago we were talking about our mutual inner conflict between being 'settled' - having a consistent home place, watching seasons pass from the same vantage point, building a community and the security of a consistent life-pace - and being transient adventurers. We both experience some similar inner conflicts around these two choices and are probably both guilty of wanting both at the same time. Well, I know I am. I crave the wandering life, to spend extended time on expedition, travel to new places, master some new self-propelled mode of travel, instruct in a new course area. At the exact same time I dread the departure; I seek the stability of place that most of my counterparts have long since settled into (while I have left them behind and vice versa).

In recent months, after a rather absurdly eventful year in my personal, professional and family life I have made a commitment to myself to work on the 'staying put' aspect of my life path. To pay attention to and revel in slowness and sameness, to resist the urge to flit off madly in all directions like a dog in a squirrel colony.
This is the starting point for this blog. An exploration of the art of staying still. Stay tuned.