Calling In

This spring I attended a training about awareness and diversity at work. During a group discussion, someone asked a question about how we might 'call someone out' for a certain kind of behaviour. For a few minutes we talked about the importance of language, and boundaries, and of establishing a culture of respect, kindness and non-judgemental awareness. Near the end of the conversation, one of the younger (wiser) staff spoke up, turning the idea of 'calling someone out' on it's head. 'Another way to use language' he said, 'Would be to call someone in, rather than calling them out'. Absolutely, I thought. Beautiful.
How many times this year have I had thoughts that involved calling out, seeking justice, making something or someone right instead of wrong?
More importantly, and perhaps the foundational question is how can I call myself 'in' rather than out?

This last paragraph was written back in April  and here I am rediscovering it again, today for some reason sifting through one of over a hundred unfinished blog posts. Not to mention the Word documents that are scattered across my desktop. This is a little bit of the way I write; I complete and publish less than half of my beginnings, some of which are a paragraph or two long, others a few words jotted down in a moment of inspiration. Words captured like sparks in the enclosure of cupped palms, held safely for a better time to sit down and complete the thought. Occasionally I rediscover them as little missives from my past to my present self.

I have had the sense that I am not quite at the end, but really someplace in the middle of an emotionally dense period of my history. I have to believe that this will pass, as all things do, but certainly there are times right now when I cannot see the light at the end of this particular tunnel. Although when I stop and pay attention, I do notice dapples of sunlight interspersed within the dark cover of these January days. I revel in the white out weekends in the mountains; despite the lack of visibility this body loves moving on snow. I am faintly aware of the unbearable lightness of   my own being, and all those beings, living and non-living that surround me.

And so I am issuing myself (and anyone else out there who is interested) a challenge, to see how I can apply this idea of calling in. To those whose actions or inactions cause me pain, as well as those who bring me joy and solace. Strangers; the guy on the phone I am disagreeing with about a botched appliance repair; the harried clerk at the grocery store who miraculously replaced the litre of maple syrup that I had accidentally left at the check out two days earlier. I seek to call them in, somehow. Maybe it is enough just to hold the intention of it, to hold myself out in silent invitation and see what comes. The fact is that people may not see it for what it is, and I may not execute it in a way that can be seen or heard by those I am aiming to reach, but it is worth a try. This has been proven to me in spades this year - I am not in control of the receipt of the message, as words are sometimes (perhaps often) lost in the filters of the listener. However clear or redemptive my intentions might be to me, they are being filtered through lenses that I do not influence or truly understand. As well as the intonations my own imperfect voice; I am aware of the fact that my own stories and projections may sometimes cause something beautiful to become warped into something painful. I'm not sure. But I can hope that it is the intention that will endure in the end, that whatever purity or clarity there was at the beginning is what will survive and nourish the spring growth to come.

How can I invite myself back into the sacred territory of my own precious life? To honour and call it  in; sadness, joy, ambivalence and all.

A Story Half Finished

Yesterday I executed one of the more perfect front surfs I have had for a while. Water levels and the looseness and ease of my river-body conspiring together. The drip of damp moss-covered stone alongside moving water, the simultaneously decaying and verdantly alive forest rich in my lungs, the contour of river bed and bottom coming together in just the right way. All these irregular natural forms; seeming imperfection and disorder uniting to create a momentary phenomena just the right size and shape.
This is one perfect and complete moment in the midst of incompletion and discomfort.

This, it seems is what life is made of sometimes. We can find ourselves, as I do now, in the middle of a mysterious plot line - living into some untenable situation or dynamic. Upon reflection today I am aware of my own ability to traverse things that are difficult, my tendency to want to face up to things, to hear the truth, the real truth of my own and another's heart, including what is beyond words and more than human. To step into the fires of misunderstanding and pain to the wholeness that lies on the other side. And also knowing that I can't do this alone and have little control of who chooses to join me.

I have many critics, most of whom live inside of me. They tell me that I should let go more quickly, lighten up, be more loving or less judgmental, less contemplative and more playful or vice versa as the occasion arises. It's possible I have a disorder that centres around seeing too many sides of the same situation. It can be paralyzing, knowing that all perspectives are true, seeing them all co-existng at once. But this is also one of my greatest gifts, this tolerance for ambiguity and multiplicity, and I need to learn to embrace it more fully. To balance it by grounding in my salient truth, by hearing my own voice just one decibel higher than all the others. To make sure the course I am on is my own, attuned carefully to my sensitive inner compass.

The perfect wave can be narrow and fast, with irregularities in flow and texture - there is a need to make constant but minute adjustments, to carve just the right amount left or right. Tilt down the face, or let the paddle drag a moment longer to match the quiet pulse of the earth and the trees and the flow of river water underneath my hull.  Turn the body in some minute and particular way. This is not a stationary art form.

Today I have given myself permission to do whatever I want. To lie still and silent or rage against imbalance or cry or beg myself for forgiveness. I tend towards wholeness, I seek to mend, heal, bring about a return to the table. It is something I beat up on myself about, because it makes me vulnerable; this tendency I have to seek out the things that do not seem to want me. But appearances are deceiving, and today I discover that this is perhaps what is most beautiful about my way of being. This capacity for wholeness, of allowing of all the facets of things complex and dense to take and change form.

To sit in incompletion is no longer a weakness, but a gift, a cure. In it rests an imagination big enough to contain the universe in all it's detail and vastness. It no longer matters whether my invitations are accepted, because there is peace in simply issuing them. Together with a generous measure of fear, the possibility of humiliation and some sadness I am releasing them at the end of fingertips, a grateful and wanton flinging of intention. I will trust that only what is worthy will return to me. What is not can drift into dust, settling into the ground to mark the trail ahead.

I am learning to rest more often in the faith that all is not 'well' or as it 'should' be, but just as it is, and that is enough. To be at home in the middle of the story, when all seems lost or confused, knowing that another plot twist is coming. This life is made of a thousand beginnings, middles and conclusions, overlapped and layered, nested in infinity. And for now there is always another perfect wave waiting to take form, waiting for the right number of raindrops and the precise speed at which the forest wants to release them into our watershed. We are unimaginably influenced by the shallowest tilts of the earth, the slightest breath of wind.