Love Song

It is about time,
About time that I hear the song that
I thought was
For and about someone else.
The fire in the bones
The spirit dancing out loud
In a thousand year spiral.
The ode to the long wait,
The effervescent moment
Spinning out for eons in the
Courtship of two mortal souls.
Knowing now I was not mistaken,
But simply not listening deeply enough
To truly hear.

It is about time
I hear the call
The voice that for so long I thought
was for
Someone else.
Belonging only to me
By association,
By remembering.
I know it by rote,
The familiarity of yearning for what was.
And puzzling over what was not to be.
All the time swaying to the sounds that
Pulled at my soul
Like a missing link.

And here, now
Once more, and again
Knowing the love song for what it is.
No longer a question mark.
Perceiving finally the the voice that sings it
Is my own.
Sinking
Deeper now into the still pond,
This song that has always been mine.


On the surface the ripples spread,
Diffuse, refractory.
In the depths they are contained,
And reverberate endlessly into all the layers of what is true.

Redemption

To be seen.

I have been granted a test, a run of experiences that have pointed me again and again to this need, this desire to be seen for who and what I am. To be understood. In all my imperfection and incompletion, but out of reach of any coloured or warped lens. What a gift it would be to finally, or once again, feel visible.

Our external transparency is so fleeting and clouded by perception; the ubiquitous blindness of human beings. Sometimes we are illuminated in moments of flow, when both the seer and the seen are loosened temporarily from the boundaries of our own inhibitions. In the stop-motion capture of a grin, or a playful movement across snow or water or rock, we are most truly ourselves. Sometimes we are found in passages of writing, art, music or dance.

It is perhaps that our parents and guardians could not fully see us, too consumed in their own lives to notice. The bright soul-lights of children are too often stifled and dumbed down. As a kid I knew myself as brazen, fiery and wild-hearted, but learned ways of muting that powerful energy for public consumption. The duties of school, expectations and complexities of family dynamics, and the adult world of convention grind us down. Uniqueness is shaped into uniformity, our impervious light-armour gets dented and dulled by comparison and fear. Shame is methodically applied in response to public expressions of strong emotion. No wonder we grow up buttoned down, dulling ourselves to the pain of these spiritual losses.

As a kid I could perceive the brightness and depth of my own inner source. I knew I was made of magic and the iridescent dust of stars. I spoke to animals and trees, saw sprites and forest fairies, trusted that all would be well. My imagination was a rampant thing, finding belonging and wonder in every corner. And somewhere in there, I'm not sure exactly when, I began to understand that I had no language to express what was within me. The wild optimism and brilliant trust I had in the world. I was made of magic, as we all are. Ultimately I could not find a way to fully reconcile the outer world of the mundane with the richness of my inner landscape.

I have certainly been seen, perhaps fully at times. But I am coming to know that while this is a gift, to be seen by another it can also be fleeting and unreliable. It can become addictive; one can develop a dependency if not careful. So recently I have decided to become visible to myself once again. To dampen the noise and listen in. I am recovering some of what has been muted and misunderstood for a time, not so much by others as by me. Uncovering what has lain buried in the dust of the sorrows and disappointments of life. An arm here, a leg there, the old bridle from the pegasus I used to ride across my dreamscapes.
I can see that it has been my own fight to remain in integrity, with it's pendulum-like swings, that has led me to this point. And so it a good place to start.

I understand that first it is me that needs to do the seeing. My job is to remind myself of myself. Because at some point I will wake up and notice what is already here. Redemption and healing arriving from within.

Ostriches

There are some days I notice themes. Recently I've become more aware of avoidance, in myself and the world around me, and I've wondered about it, why I am noticing it now and to what end.

I've never been one for current affairs. I don't read the paper, watch the TV news and try to avoid the parts of "The Current" on CBC that involve the horrors and atrocities that we humans inflict upon each other and this planet. And let's be honest, there's a lot of very ugly train wrecks happening out in the world these days. I've always told myself that I am not so much burying my head in the sand as much as it feels unnecessary and counter-productive to bask in the well-known awfulness that makes up a generous aspect of human nature. It bums me out and burns me out, darkens my mood, confuses my energy rather than clarifies it. I feel like I do a better job at life knowing about the existence of the many dark truths of the world from a distance, although I get that that is a luxury. The other night however I did listen, a rare tuning in to an evening radio current events show.

I was driving through the beautiful and incessant rain that has been both pummelling and nourishing this coast for the past month or so. On my way to an evening class. I feel so lucky to live here on this island, despite the threat of being carried away by a tsunami or swallowed up in an earthquake, I am privileged to have the freedom, comfort and abundance that I am afforded in my life. My class, race, the many lucky happenstances of my birth (all except my gender culturally speaking) have made my life materially and and in many other ways easy. Although I want for certain things sometimes, my very existence is not threatened on a daily basis. I am not struggling to survive in any way, and in some ways I am thriving.

As I drove through the rain and listened to a few of the stories - tales of violence, destruction and incredible cruelty I allowed it to sink in. Hospitals - maternity wards - built underground in war zones, being systematically targeted and  destroyed. Babies, labouring mothers, all terrorized over the course of days and weeks and incinerated in a moments' bomb blast.   This just one of several stories about war, pipelines and human rights offences. Just me and the radio and the dog in the back, as I drove through the verdant fields in tears, listening to the crackling voice of some soul living in that war zone, sounding so matter of fact, so possessing of dignity and grace and resignation. Just living the experience, of being in direct and visceral contact with the evil in the world and telling his story.
Past some of the self-protective filters I have, I let myself feel the discomfort of it, which includes an awareness of my culpability as a human being.

I reflected that while not all bad, some of my avoidance of these types of programs is about the shame and helplessness I feel at not being able to do anything substantial to make it better. I often feel, underneath it all, ashamed of my life of privilege and abundance and my tendency to sometimes ruminate on the petty heartbreaks of my small life. My colonial heritage troubles me, and the way it plays out in my way of being in the world. I feel shame at my tendency to avoid facing the ever-present difficulties that so many people deal with daily and my fixations on 'living into what is beautiful' which though I see has value, seems to be an insufficient contribution in this world of suffering and injustice.

I don't usually listen to the news not because I am trying to will it out of existence, but because it pollutes my consciousness, makes me feel small and ineffective. Useless. When I pause long enough to consider all the unfathomable losses and horrors brought about by the human predilection for inhumane acts I am overwhelmed by it.

I wonder at that word - inhumane, because I understand that without us humans there would be no inhumanity. And yet we push it away from ourselves, labelling deeds and actions that are in any way destructive using a word that overtly suggests it is the opposite of us. Not human. And yet it is exactly and wholly human to be violent, to kill each other, as well as destroy, plunder, or cripple the the infinite biotic and abiotic beings that are also of this world. Ironically when I looked up synonyms of the word "inhuman" one of them was 'wolfish', the irony and inaccuracy of which is unbearable to me.

I sometimes push things away that threaten my sense of my own essential goodness  - things that I do, think or say feel less compassionate, less loving, less worthy. We all like to believe in this idea - that we are essentially and innately good. But sometimes we don't even see the messes we make, so habituated are we to the carelessness of the day to day acts of modern living. I know I don't, in part because it's hard to extract my own tenuous sense of self from the ways where I have been less good, less fair or grounded. All the dark thoughts and neglectful ways I have of being in the world. All the places where I am out of integrity.

 I am wondering whether that is really the great feat in this life. To take it all - encompass and take responsibility for our own light and darkness and know it to be part of our wholeness. There is darkness wherever there is light. To use shame simply as a landmark to remind us to continually check the compass of integrity and compassion. To feel deeply but not be overcome by it. To see the human casualties, and mountainsides being carved and blasted to rubble for the sake of modernity; to hear the resounding silence of lost species are falling under the hands of our own unforgivable apathy and insatiable material desires. Maybe we need to be touched by things enough to see what needs to change. To work through and overcome our shame as best we can because I am almost certain that sitting in shame and guilt, while useful indicators, only really lead to more wrong-doing and wrong-thinking. And to be able to accept that I am part of the problem and find something, even something small that I can actually do.




* After I wrote this I saw this post: https://www.facebook.com/ngc.tw/videos/10156270456689170/

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.