Letting the Quiet Collect

On the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's, I am choosing to let the quiet collect. I have taken a staycation during this time, going to see family for the holiday, and am now home with husband and dog, feeling the quiet of the holiday and of Winter.

Just as the stillness of the season deepens, I feel resistance to the quiet, craving distraction, entertainment, task. None of it works, none of it fulfills, and I am left with only a surrendering to the reflective spaces within myself, where - if I'm paying attention - a new energy emerges.

As I sit in this new place I can feel in my body discomfort and a sense of fragility, almost pain. I am called in to feel, and what I feel, in the quiet, are the small sensations of the past alive in my skin and cells and even the air I breathe. I find myself curious: what happens if I rest here?

What I find is that by allowing myself a safe dive into my melancholy, I emerge with a verve for life, like one who taken a long swim in a cold river. When I allow myself to be sad, supported by the beauty of art and words, an alchemy is performed.

It seems quite natural to me, and not false at all, to be contemplating life at this time of year. Whether that is brought by the coming back of the light, or the shift in the number of the year, there is a natural settling of the old, a reflection on what happened and what did not, a remembering, maybe, of what I was expecting or hoping for during this time last year.

For me, I am feeling like someone who has been in the process of a large garden project for quite some time, and is just now seeing fresh beds ready for seeds, hoping that the coming season will bring growth and light weeding, but less moving of Earth.

As I look at the blank earth of my soul garden beds ready for planting, I am waiting for the inspiration to plant, and trying not to rush. Unlike an earth garden, our soul gardens can be unpredictable: seeds we thought were for one thing grow something else entirely, or the seeds we thought were so necessary turn out to not be so at all.  What a soul garden shares completely with those made of physical earth is the necessity of tending. Whether gentle, mindful tending or radical, passionate tending, life thrives on attention.

It has been found that human connection is so basic, so necessary, so essential to our existence that the simple lack of it registers in the human nervous system as violence.  I wonder what this means for our connection with ourselves? What does it do it to us when we disregard and disconnect from our own inner longings, feelings and desires?  And what does it do when we pay attention to them? When we tend them, love them, honor them?

We are so encouraged by our culture to disconnect from the quiet longings, the disquiet, the places that may reveal these essential places of disconnection, the opportunities for healing. And it can be terrifying to go there. I'm hoping that 2019 is the year that many of us find our bravery, that we are able to be afraid of being with ourselves, with our pain, with the pain of others, but that we find the strength to go ahead and do it anyway.

For the Wildewomen

It has been a beautiful, wintry week here in Portland. The sun is shining and the air is cold -- the wind blows right through. But I haven't minded. After a beautiful weekend inside, cozily connecting with an incredible group of women, I feel quite warm.

Monday morning, I took my pup and myself to an island outside of the city, to walk on the beach, connect to the Earth, and be.

The morning had been foggy, even as we were driving out, but then it was clear.  So we played...

And saw the mountain and watched boats go by on the river, and birds fly and perch.

As we walked down the sand as far as we could go, the river and the land grew closer, revealing the intertwined roots of the trees that live there at the edge together: growing, falling, and becoming.

I walked through the roots and branches and found a spot where the land is becoming sand and beach, and the river laps at its edge.

All of it reminding me of the luscious, wild beauty of life's continual becoming.


The word 'Wildewomen' is a riff on the name of one of my favorite songs, "Wildewoman", by Lucius.

Coasting

Sometimes life surprises you, and when you think it's going to rain, you end up seeing the moon and stars over the sea...

Or when you least expect it, you make some new friends and are invited to have a fun and satisfying weekend out at the Coast.

Foggy, rainy, no matter. What's shines through is the shared experience of being close, and being glad to be in a big house with a bunch of other folks who also want to be there.

We need each other in this life.  Not just to listen and care, but to challenge, share, and be. The older I get, the more I appreciate the diversity of our shared experience of being human.

No one can argue with certain types of beauty, we all know what Spring feels like...

But we are also all different, and going along in life in our own way, making it easy to forget that we are part of the same tribe.

It's nice to be reminded.

Happy Spring!

Finding Your Inner Rose

A few weeks ago now, I went for a walk in the Portland Rose Garden with a friend. I had had one of those weeks, and walking among the flowers felt like a balm for my heart.

Roses give rise to all kind of metaphor, don't they? They are such a literary tease.

Their beautiful smell, the thorns, the perfect shapes and petals. They are truly a gift to us human earthlings, reminding us of what's important in life, and that thorns are a part of it all.

A rose shows us so much about how to relate to ourselves; about what gives rise to gorgeous blossoms.

The alchemy of care and thorns and weather produces a display that takes your breath away. But to achieve this, we must be able to recognize rose from weed, and this goes for us and our own hearts, too.

As we seek happiness and the expression of our true self, we must patiently look for the rose within, the blossom waiting to unfold. Often it is invisible to us, wintering away, hidden by other plants that can look much easier to tend; or that we have long ago mistaken for a rose.

But with patience, we can find that gorgeous blossom, and once we've found it, we no longer mistake anything else for our own precious rose, unique and perfect and ours alone.

For both the rose and ourselves, summer is a time of full expression, the culmination of a year spent working patiently, hoping for sun.

May you experience the joy of your own inner rose, the part of you that no one else can touch, but that, with care, will always be there for you.

Knocking from the Inside

Love is a verb.

This is a pretty popular saying these days, or idea.  Love is action, love is what is, not what you think.  Love is of the world, as are we, and the world around us is loving us, all the time.  Do you see it?

I feel this the most at the coast. As I've written about before, I am so lucky to live near the beautiful Oregon Coast.  And on a perfect Friday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, K. and I set out for an impromptu trip to Cannon Beach, a small town just West of Portland.

That's Haystack Rock you see in the background, twice.  And this is me... with K.'s photographic whimsy thrown in.

But enough about that.  Let's talk about love.  What is love?  Is there a more important question?

I see and feel love everywhere.  It is life itself.  Often in session I will guide my clients to feel how life is loving them, just by being.  How the energy of life is love, breathing in and out of them, their cells, their very being.  And when you go to the coast, and feel the energy of the waves crashing and the wind and maybe, just maybe, the sun or sunset...

or feel the trail under your feet, even it's a bit muddy...

That's all love is to me.  No need to look for it, no need to seek it.  You find it by surrendering to the moment, by living the life that is yours, by being a creature of the universe.

As the Sufi poet Rumi said many years ago:

I have almost driven myself mad,

wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door.

It opens.

I have been knocking from the inside.

Get outside!

The Green & Gracious Mirror

Mmmm... the first almost Spring days brought me not just one but two walks outside this past weekend...

I love to walk in the cold of late winter.  The fresh green air has a way of surfacing important and overarching themes, while dispersing the mundane and petty.  As I walk, worries shed and creativity and motivation take their place. It is a very strong medicine for me.

Stillness, aliveness, newness, deadness.  It is all there in the Earth just before she awakens to Spring.  And all that is inside each one of us too. Nature invites us to learn from her, and to find our connection back to ourselves through seeing her as a reflection of our own inner world.

The past two winters have gone by quickly for me. I cannot believe that it is almost March, and that summer plans are already being discussed and put on the calendar. K & I tend to hibernate in Winter, we're not snow folks, so I am already dreaming of wildflowers on the hillsides of the Columbia River Gorge, and that cleansing wind.

I saw this quote today:

“He who is outside his door already has the hardest part of his journey behind him.” — Dutch proverb 

There have been very important days in my life, when important events occurred, that began with my simply saying to myself, "Just put on your shoes and go outside."  Which meant I walked...

And looked up....

And saw new things and beautiful things.

May your day bring something fresh and new and true, and may that bring you closer to your self.

Practice for Bringing on the New

If you can go outside...

Put on some walking shoes and your coat and hat and scarf (if appropriate),
Drink a big glass of water
Open your door
Go outside.

Stop.
Look at the sky,
Breathe...

Walk
Look at a tree branch, notice its beauty
Breathe....

Walk
Listen for birdsong, hear the kindred spirit there,
Breathe...

And Walk and Remember
Remember that you are a child of the Earth and that you don't have to earn the right to live this life. Every being alive has the right to just be.  And that includes you.

So walk...
and breathe...

If you can't go outside...

Find a window to look out of,
Look at the sky,
Or a tree branch,
And just be, just watch and breathe.

Fill up with beauty,
Allow yourself to feel light and loved.

Change of Scenery

A few weeks ago, K. and I escaped to the beach...

We went to Rockaway Beach, a funny little place on the Northern Oregon Coast.  I have gone there for years at different times.  My family used to rent a condo there in the Winter when I was home from college for Christmas break.  We would ring in the New Year watching storms and burning presto logs.

The Oregon Coast is one of my favorite places to be and to go.  K. and I were headed there this particular weekend to brainstorm.  We are developing a new direction in our work together, or an extension of the direction we have.  

This new movement has begun with a simple talk we gave last week about the work we do together, that's part of what we were planning. And especially about what K. has to offer in terms of ideas, perspective, and solutions in dealing with emotional and mental struggles from a Chinese Medicine perspective.  

We gave the talk to a small group of therapists that I know, and it went really well.  I wasn't surprised that everyone there was very very interested in what K. had to say, because it is beautiful stuff.  And because he is an amazing doctor and human being.

K. and I spend a lot of time together.  A lot.  And we talk quite a bit about many things.  But to create this new thing we needed to get away.  Away from familiar scenes, away from dishes; we needed a new view.  And we found it at a sweet old family cabin in Rockaway.

We spent the weekend talking and making food, walking on the beach and watching the rain come down sideways.  And we headed for home on Sunday feeling refreshed and excited about this new direction, this new sharing.  It feels like it is time.