Born in the Snowy Season

A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to Namibia. With her, she brought a story that has made me consider my relationship with age, aging and linear time. There have been other events and insights in my life recently that have also made me question our cultural attachment to age markers. It's possible I'm just in denial, which might be true, but even so, I think my dubious regard for the importance of chronological age may have merit.

It's my birthday tomorrow, my 49th (I know, right?!), and my proximity to a major decade has been looming in the not so distant future. I have never really known what to make of age, my own or that of others, because in so many ways it seems to wear differently on different people. But I have felt the pressures of 'aging' - not so much in my body, but in the expectations of myself and others. On a recent retreat it was pointed out to me that it is at this stage of life that we are somewhat forced to consider that this one life we get is at least half over. We begin to feel our own mortality in a more poignant way. This year I have come face to face with a raft of existential angsts - the pain and fear of feeling or being alone, a deep sense of shame nested in and made of my own emotional fragility. But of late I have also discovered a strengthening faith in my ability to survive my own humanity. Not so much transcendence as much as living into it, albeit messily at times, and finding a path through it - training myself to trust in something much much bigger than me. It's not that 'all will be well', because that is not how life is, but it's possible there is a way - a path of deepening wisdom and compassion, accessed through a practice of accepting (and even wanting) what is. Not to deny or suppress the things that plague me, but to see them for what they are made of - the insubstantial creations of my own grey matter. And to discover the excitement that lies beyond the fear, the thrill of not knowing what next - because as I once read, the universe has a much better imagination than I do.

It is snowing tonight in Victoria, which it does rarely. I have found this time of year hard at times over the last decade - for whatever reason as luck or design would have it, there have been some challenging events which have centred around the Christmas season. There have also been great joys (and sometimes a combination of the two), but there is something about the mind that tends towards association - the pairing of hard memories with a particular date or time of year.

I was reminded of two things this week. One: the true 'turn' of the year happens before Christmas and 'New Years' Day on the Solstice, the day that our northern hemispheric days begin to lengthen towards summer. That Aleutian Low starts to feel the faint breath of the California High in the few more minutes a day of sun from now on. This marks a cyclical pattern, rather than a finite beginning or ending.

The other thing is that there are indigenous cultures that don't celebrate or conceive of birthdays the way that ours does. When my friend Nicola asked her Namibian bushman friend when he was born, his answer was 'in the rainy season'. No date, no year. Perhaps his is an entire community that lives without the knowledge of their chronological age. It's a bit of a radical idea for us North Americans of European (and other) descent. So I started wondering this week, what if tomorrow is not that big of deal after all. I was born in the snowy season, and maybe that is right now.

Settling

This afternoon I found a question bubbling up in myself - what does it mean to 'settle', and what will happen to me if I do? I have been percolating this question for most of my adult (and maybe some of my younger) life. I have always been somewhat fierce about not settling. I have stayed in a field of work that has allowed me to feel free, empowered, viscerally alive for a long time. At times I have shifted into different and slightly less 'wild' iterations within this, but the work of personal development and wilderness has been the fire in my belly. These days I have made a choice to 'settle in' for a while, I've taken on a job that feels considerably less connected to wildness, although it has other qualities that are close to the heart of who I am. It also allows me time, space (energetic, emotional and mental), and a sense of routine and consistency that has had the effect of loosening up physical and artistic creativity.

These are things that tend to lose steam when my life is more transient and less predictable. I can plan ahead now but I also have the time to do things that make me come alive. Someone recently called it "safety", but it is different than that. The only kind of safety I desire is trust, mainly self trust (which is where it starts and ends) and that is an inside job. The financial security that the job gives me is nice, but the part of that I care most about that aspect of it is the amount of energy it frees. It feels as if my body and spirit has been allowed to drop a whole load of worries and uncertainties off at the door. And I have a generous amount of time in the days, weeks and months of my current life to find the wild places, both near and far.

I have also been on a journey - internal for the most part, with some deeply uncomfortable and painful forays into the external :-) - asking myself this same question about settling in relationships. What is "enough'? (or even what is acceptable)? When is it the right thing to simply commit to something - to find the beautiful simplicity of choosing to accept the imperfections of another human being, and more importantly my own failings and imperfections. I have wondered whether my own brand of non-settling idealism had led me astray.

On the advice of a spiritual teacher I asked my body (and Google) to weigh in on this topic. OK, he didn't suggest Google, but my body has not had time yet to give me a considered answer, so Google was a good enough place to start today. Though I am not in the habit of using the internet as an oracle, I did immediately find this worthy article: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/05/oliver-burkeman-settling

"...virtually all human activity requires some stability, some fixed points, some closed-off options."

I think my body is going to be in agreement, but
I will wait and see. I suspect that, despite everything (age, outward appearances of 'success' or 'failure' or other culturally imposed measures) I need to trust the intuitive wisdom that has led me to this moment, and this current state of affairs in all aspects of my life. I need to remember that the universe is more generous and forgiving than I am.

I will settle when I need a 'fixed point' around which to orbit. And sometimes I will not settle  when the fibres of my being are telling me not to, even when that may be painful. I also don't need to linger any longer in the confusing and gratuitous brand of retro-active sef-doubt that I have been living.

As I approach the Solstice, this is what I will carry into the new year. The sun is beginning to turn us towards the lightness of longer days, and I will be reminded to trust myself. To believe in the convergence of my past and future selves upon this present moment. To touch down upon the seemingly incomplete moments, in all their detail, minutia and beauty. So as not miss the blackening curve of the Cottonwood leaf as it gives itself up to the wintery ground, because I was too busy remembering the way it glowed translucent in the light of the summer sun.

100*

The Dark

I wind my way downwards,
Going deeper into winter.
This storm season whipping up the sediment,
Turning me into myself.

Through the cracks in the windshield
I squeeze perceptive glances.
Wayward, spinning as I have been,
Viewing the world and it's players
through a veil of topsoil,
Buried.
As if there was no other way out of this theatre
But through the lobby
(At intermission no less).
So crowded.

I step into the still dark pool,
It's surface silk-smooth.
This is where 'I' drown,
Free at last.

As always, asking too much of the world,
Searching for magic and retribution
Out there
Where there is none.
Instead I learn
To find stillness in the greenest blade of grass,
Unspoken for in this quietest of seasons,
Left to grow wild into the dim afternoon light.

It is the minutia that kills us,
Imperceptibly.
The ever chattering mind
Throwing knives at itself like there's no tomorrow,
So relentlessly that it can be hard to see
All those sharp edges
Whipping by.
So many
Hitting their mark.

Slow it down.
Pause the tape at each moment,
Notice what has been happening all this time.
Observe the ten thousand things that arise
From the single drop,
Rippling out, wantonly percussive,
Out of control.

Take them in on the breath,
Breathing out kindness, patience
Despite the slow pace of things.
Teaching the mind to interrupt
It's rumination.
Learning to see again,
Eyes closed.


*This marks my 100th blog post. 4.5 years of the Art of Staying Put.

Ambiguity

These twisted lines,

Never straight,

Not unbending.

Winding is the shape of all the paths worth taking in this world.

Even if they don't seem worthy,

The best ways are

Full of blind corners.

Gnarled and braided like the branches of trees and rivers. 

Wisdom can be measured by the
Depth of our faith in this 

Unwavering ambiguity.

The willingness to not have the answers.

A bold refusal to call the mysteries of the world by name.

Our job is to be curious about 

Every thing we are most certain of. 

Allow the floor to drop out beneath you,

Drop down willingly.

Trust in the moments that make you lose your footing,

Follow their lead, for they have a knowing 

Deeper than yours.

Question all the things that appear vaulted, 

Pry open the doorways kept locked.

Reject absolutes whenever possible, 

Go bounding past the fence lines that border the forbidden fields.

Like deer, prancing erratic ahead of the cars on a dark road,

In un-patterned movement.

We are not scientists, not in this realm,

Just explorers.

Shiftless visitors.

Every truth only half seen. 

Fallen

The gray forest people cast off their old clothes

The mists of all twilights dance close at hand

Harvest has lifted the crown from the ground

The song of the seasons brings life to the land

~ Bruce Cockburn - The Fall (excerpts)

Fall is here, we are deep into it, the last of it's brilliant shades drifting to ground. We are tilting into winter. I am learning to live with myself again. I am intermittently happy, anxious, despairing, gleeful, laughing, crying, bored and fully engaged in different moments. I hear that is how we humans are, and the task at hand is to become more of a witness to one's own roller coaster. Watching the cars get loaded up, seeing the people scream and throw their hands up or grip tight to the bar, closing their eyes. I have done both. Neither is right or wrong. Maybe I am learning to trust that the car will come back up the track again - maybe I will get another chance to get it right, make a choice that is grounded. Maybe, as the wisdom of many elders suggests, all the wrong has really been just right after all. 

I am breathing deeply and getting out on the water and hills, waking and being outside before the sun rises and watching the light die beautifully at the end of these shortening days. 

I am admitting that I don't know anything, just like Jon Snow. There was a while there when I thought my job was to know my own heart, and I do, but I also trust that I don't. I have relied on labels too much, bent to the pressure of naming and closing when I could have waited, listened more. Spoken less. There is part of me today that fears that I have lost all my chances, a part that clings to many things past - awaiting the return of something I once promised myself. A wish to erase all the mistakes ever made on my part or anyone else's. I also know that this feeling will change again, as the seasons do. I've never been much of clinger, but now I have had the great fortune (I say this without irony) to have had this human experience. An invaluable one - to become aware of this deep sense of wanting. It will only make me better, and hopefully more fair and more kind. It is the raw material for good prayers.

There is something I started to learn once, before life took over in the way that it does, funnelling me off one course and onto another. It is as if I forgot, at least in part, what it is to be awake. I have not often been one to believe in regret, or shame, but I have come to realize that these are just words that we use to put form to the ephemeral feels that drift in and out of awareness. I recognize these things in my own inner landscape. I can see the ways I have sought to bend myself around what I perceived to be what was wanted of me. All the while forgetting myself, and the perfection and beauty that lies in the uncertainty of the journey. 

Swans

"There are two swans in the harbour this morning." Says the man. He walks up alongside me and the dogs, keeps pace for a while. He is thin, unshaven, rough-hewn in his clothing and demeanour, has unmistakably kind features and has a looseness around the edges that I can't quite place. I think that maybe he lives on one of the boats, illegally moored forever in the saltwater gorge near my house. He has a plastic coffee cup in his hand - I imagine him rowing himself to shore just now and walking up this path to fill it at the bakery. A watery neighbour. We chat for a few moments, about swans, the morning, and other passing wonders before he moves on. A few feet away, he turns back and tells me about the raccoons in the shrubs up ahead - as if he knows the younger of the two dogs would find that tempting.
There was something easy in the way he pulled up, kept pace, spoke of swans, an unthreatening merging into my space. A gentleness. The older dog turned her head to greet him, the younger too consumed with the crystalline smells of an early fall morning to notice - he is less concerned with making friends out of strangers anyway.
There has been a hitch in my step these past days, and both a sadness and a shock of pain after some recent news from a friend. So many layers, I am both haunted by my own unshakeable mistakes and broken-hearted at the ways people hurt and misread one another. Aching for the sadness and confusion in those around me, and at the same time unravelling from my own dark linens. This is today and last night but I remind myself of the need to hold myself and others close, but not still. We live in a quickly and constantly shifting universe.

Run

I am strangely infused with an energy these days, a life force, a push and pull of full moonlight and bodily gravity. I ran around the lake this evening, the dog at my heels and out and around as he tracked scents through the bush in his frenetic and purposeful way. In the rainfall of this burgeoning storm season I find such grace. The cool glory of the turn; the descent of summer into the blustery edges of fall. The days becoming shorter but more textured. The wind and rain whipping through the trees, across the water, pulling forth the sweetness of the poplars that rim the water's edge.

I ended my work today, enlivened by the ways in which the dots keep connecting. Purposeful and inspired. In my office-y days I stumble across poetry, Rumi even. In this world of speed and disconnect, of desk-sitting and computer-staring I find strains of life seeping into the edges of every mundane thing. Re-animation in a de-magicked universe.

Most of my mornings start with ocean walks, evenings are rich with people and movement, and slow solitude. I revel in the salt and forest-imbued air of my chosen home. I find myself returned yet again to a state of loving what is, a full recovery of a piece of me that was lost and shattered. Adrift for a while, but now arriving lightly to ground. Over these years on this island I have come to know that I am a temperate girl at heart; in moments at the mercy of the turbulence of high altitude wind, spindrift racing across a moving sky. At others rooted like the ancient trees that still remain. I have found a homeplace in the darkness and the light, at peace but not untouched by the constantly shifting tides.

Tonight the rain washes the streets clean of a long seasons' detritus, falling with the pure sounds of revelation and absolution. The dog insists that 10km is not enough, the feathers of his tail and the whites of his impish eyes challenging my insistence to sit still. More play is needed. Sometimes he is right.