Risk

About a year and a half ago, I posted a 'crowd-sourcing' question on Facebook. Something to the effect of "wisdom on risk taking - go." I remember it clearly and some of the answers that came, and not because I tend to remember everything I post. I remember it because I was in the process of taking a real risk. One that was emotional, exciting and scary. And although the initial result of that risk was hands down balls out positive, the ramifications of what ensued have embroiled me in a yearlong process of loss, ambiguity and disappointment. And have caused other people pain and strife, I have no doubt.

Now I return to this idea of risk. I have shied away from it a lot this past year, but at times I have expressed my truth, been more brave than at any other time in my life. I have risked seeming like a fool, and in retrospect perhaps that has been the result from a certain perspective.

I am an innately cheeky and sometimes irreverent person. I enjoy whimsical banter, but I am also serious and tend towards deep thinking and profound idealism. And I have spent a lifetime feeling that some of the aspects who I am are, well...'a bit much',  in addition to a fairly healthy dose of 'not enough'. As a result I moderate myself, from being too silly, or too serious and quiet, too sad or too brazenly gleeful, especially in the company of strangers. For the most part, it's the impish part of me that hides away - most often with people I know less well, and more so when there is something at stake - something of the ego to be lost or cracked into. I unfold slowly, though in some cases I transcend that tendency.

I work with people for a living, and while I feel one of my gifts is authenticity, I also know there is a part of me that needs to chink the mortar and limit the doorways people have to who I am. I need to stand up in the watchtower and see who's coming, so I can decide whether or not to let you in. If I find myself being too funny, or too serious - a bit much - I might withdraw. If I inadvertently drew you in too quickly then thought better of it this withdrawal is a way that I avoid a painful conversation later. It gives me some time to regroup and reassess, but it is also a form of pre-emptive cowardice. I am as afraid of disappointing as I am of being disappointed.

So what if I was just myself, whatever that means at any given moment? Would the right people just show up and the wrong ones steer clear? And what about that...I expend energy tamping down the fire of who I am, assuming that I am right about who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'. Perhaps my impressions are incorrect.

What if the real risk is the one that I have been so energetically engaged in? I have risked being a smaller version of who I am in order to exert some imagined control over the outcome of my relationships. Perhaps the real measure of who is right and wrong flows organically from all of us simply being ourselves, moved towards or away from each other by the grace of authenticity.

What the Heart Knows

Take a seat on this blustery March day.
Ink the screen with thoughts alone, black on white, the illusion of words made real by their emotional bones. These scripted shapes have weight and truth when infused with the light of feeling. They are steeped in it.
I have discovered, or am discovering that when the mind has found no explanation or solution to life's mysteries, it is time to give up thinking. All the questions will continue to go unanswered because the answers are not sitting out in plain sight, they are not earthly perhaps. They cannot be grasped, or held at this time.

So it is up to the heart to understand, as it did in the beginning. In every beginning I have ever known. I knew what was up and what was happening long before the mind got hold of it, and will continue in this way. I knew there was a wait in store that could span lifetimes. Knowing that the heart acknowledges no timeline and has a wild tolerance for ambiguity. Trusts the territory where reason and logic have no hold, where intuition and the body's wisdom are paramount. The only truth tellers.
Now to learn to listen.
Hold off on conclusion, 'understanding' and any certainty that seeks to inhabit a physical form.
I knew all this in childhood, before that. I was infused with a connection to what is light and good. That despite everything, and all that was to come, all would be well. I knew too that there would be darkness.
Now I need to listen more carefully at the beginnings, and honour what I know to be true, despite the internal or external pressures otherwise. And always be open to getting it wrong.

The Sound of Otter Feet on Wet Pavement

The darkness of a spring rain night in an oceanside city. For a city it's a modest one, short on skyscrapers, long on driftwood strewn beaches and greenery. And pinkery for that matter. Spring was upon us in February. Blossoms and all. The air is soft, and damp.
There is a final walk of the night for those of us who live with dogs, a short trip around a block or two, finding grassy sidelines, a last bit of sniffery to be had. The humans as well get to breathe some of the outside air before bedtime.
We live beside the water here, from my door less than a minute trip to the salty edge of things. The wood of the trestle bridge and pavement were freshly damp this evening. Emerging from one side of the trail came the humpbacked twosome, in the dim light hard to see. Cats? Coons?
Neither. The strange slapping of compact webbed feet on manmade substrate, a loping and slightly lopsided gait showed them up for who they were. Heads raised, always. Optimistic. River Otters in transit, looking for better fisheries, or a bankside home to hole up in. Perhaps this was their pre-bedtime stroll. They looked to me and the dog for a moment before completing their sidewalk crossing and we looked back, saying nothing.
Before this evening's dark rainy dog walk, I have never known the sound of otter feet hitting wet pavement. And in the smallest ways I am stretched by it, welcomed into some tiny but significant secret that I did not even know existed.

Idealism

Words will evade me if I try to capture this in a linear, sensical rhythm. Instead I give you this, perhaps it makes no sense. But perhaps you will find some truth in it.

Magic is all around you. It is the black dog bounding in the snow. The same bird, reappearing, and appearing again, bobbing on riverbanks and low tide beaches. The swan, trumpeting as it flies overhead, in that particular opening in the trees where are you standing. Insisting upon your pause, awareness. Noticing.

This bit is spiked with anger, or passion, or just some formless emotion. Indignance perhaps.

We are blind if we choose not to see the magic that lies in the wake of all things. The ether-tipped feathers of the spirit that fly through and over and around all of this earthly stuff, living and non... we often ignore it. Choose not to see. Too afraid, or paralyzed by logic to believe in it. Burying our souls in the quicksand of duty, or expectation and rule bound 'reality'. Too cowardly to do what is truly right or be accountable to ourselves and what it is our heart sees and desires. To not even be able to see it. To remember the flow of truth and not be lured back into the safety of illusion.

Wake the sleeper. The job here is not to pay attention to the rules and facts, but to sometimes ignore them, willfully seeing the shimmer of the mystical that pervades this world. Honour love however fleeting it may seem. Trust Impulse but don't lose yourself in it. Let it awaken you to possibility, and choice, but don't fall into it simply because it arises. Impulse came for a reason, but it may not be the one that you think.

It takes courage, to step off the beaten path of what is known. I dare you, and I dare myself to do it. There is magic on all sides. Light a fire on this mountain, even when it seems no one is there to see the light or feel the heat of it.

Tidal Missives

Sometimes I forget things. Like the fact that in this dark rainy and snow-deprived winter we are having, there is still solace to be found in the presence of the ocean. Not just in the urban harbour of semi-polluted saltiness I live beside, but within a quick drive from here. Crashing surf (on the good days), the sounds of shifting pebbles and sand, salt and kelp smells. Sometimes on spring tides a veritable treasure trove of ocean emissaries arrive as well, washed up temporarily for inspection. Oceanic serendipity.

Yesterday I had planned a forest walk with my dog-friend. I have been feeling tired, low, confused, unsettled. The laziness of a five-minute shorter drive tempted me, but instead I continued on, out from under the dark canopy of firs. The road opening out into the grey bluster of the west shore. I stepped out of the car into the soft damp feel of beachy air. Driftwood, seals, Scoters and Goldeneyes bobbing in the surf just out of reach.

Sometimes I am looking for signs, without knowing it. Often I find them and my body knows, even if my mind doesn't, what they mean. The beach at Albert Head is a place of memory for me, but also a place that is clean, cleansing, ever renewing itself through the winter storm cycles. On this day there were some treasures.

The first, on the walk up the beach was this adult Harbour porpoise, a chunk of skin and blubber flayed from it's body. The dog found it first (note paw prints pictured below) but thankfully made a decision not to try to eat it. Tomorrow it may be gone, or it may remain for weeks to be absorbed into the sand, to be picked at by scavengers and sink into it's rotting self. Soon enough what is left of it will get washed away, scattered and dispersed. It will become part of the liquid particulate of the sea, and be borne into the air and earth by whomever makes a meal of it's parts.

Harbour Porpoise with some interesting injuries...Orca or propellor?

Almost back at the car this little treasure appeared. Chitons are a marine mollusc often found in tide pools and stuck to rocks around these parts. They are often hard to spot, unless you know what you are looking for, living in a drab and furry little articulated shell, something like a seagoing armadillo. I had no idea that beneath their dull and prehistoric exterior, hiding on the underside of their shells was this vivid turquoise. Revealed after the departure of their fleshy lifespan is this blast of colour.

Inside of a chitons shell. Who knew? Not me.

Back to Basics

I have this growing sense that despite everything, all the complications and complexities that seem to riddle this human existence, life is, truthfully, simple. I found myself in a moment today feeling deeply sad, only to suddenly realize that it was because I felt left out - not part of something I expected and wanted to be part of. And for me, as an adult, feeling left out sucks as much as it did when I was 6. In that moment I realized that this simple fear or yearning has been part of much of the suffering I have had in my life and relationships with others. I don't know what to do with that yet, but there it is. A piece of a larger puzzle no doubt, but it's pretty basic stuff.

Resoundingly I am coming to realize that the 'answers' to life's unknowns reside in the simplest things. To be loved and love in return without reservation, to trust that things are as they are meant to be, and know that regardless of how much time it seems to take sometimes, all things pass on, and perhaps return to us in a different form. 

I am going to posit that when the shit hits the fan in life, we are not being called to 'figure things out' with another layer of complication. I can retell the same story a thousand times, or come up with a new one about what I or someone else did wrong, or wonder about past lives and chakras and which rock to place on my mantle in order to ensure the optimal Feng-Shui-ness. I have no doubt that all these things are worthwhile and have their gifts. But maybe I just need to learn to pause more often, and find the still points where the rush and grind of life is quieted. To understand that there is nothing unreasonable or overly idealistic about the things I want in life, but that I need to learn a few things I missed along the way. 

I need to learn how to choose (because I often let others or circumstance choose for me).

I need to learn how to (sometimes) walk away and (sometimes) stay put and wait, and to know the difference. 

And to be ok if I got it wrong.

I need to learn to stop trying to imagine all the things that can go wrong and all the things that can go right. Because something else is taking care of that, and it has a much better imagination than I do.

I went skydiving once, and after the chute opened instead of being buffeted by wind and noise I found myself engulfed in a windless silence. Last week I found the perfect surf wave and I experienced something similar, sitting weightless and loose in the moving, careening rush of river water. What I am looking for is that silence, the suspension of control and surrender to the forces that are beyond me. Seeking the answers or explanations or understanding of things past and present and future will not bring me closer to this.

Mystery

There are grand rewards for those who pick the high hard roads, but those rewards are hidden by years. Every choice is made in the uncaring blind, no guarantees from the world around you.

There is an art to this life.
And a tolerance for mystery is part of that artfulness. Acceptance of not knowing. I think we (I) try to understand everything as best I can, get all the details, ask for all the truths.
But the real truth is that there are myriad things happening at once, in the hidden acres below the topsoil. Things that I don't and can't see. They are unavailable to my comprehension, and made of vapour and shards of moving sunlight and dust.  Real truth is not within sight, and out of the grasp of words. I find this untenable, often, and try to force things into shape, and sense. Get clarity.

But clarity and certainty could well be the trap. The things I am sure of will continue to turn cloak.
I would be fooling myself to think that I understand or have any control over what comes next, what is becoming. In seeking that I am probably paying attention to all the wrong details, the wrong signs. The important things are hidden, quietly cloaked in mystery, flitting away at the slightest touch of the thinkers' mind and the graspers' hand.

To remain still in the midst of this mystery is the task, not transmuting the stillness into stories, annoyance, frustration or fear. But I struggle to live life in the uncaring blind.