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.

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.