new traditions: on letting go

Happy Solstice

In cultivating something new from something old, today I set some time aside to look back and to look forward.

I’m most especially grateful to Susannah Conway for her Unraveling the Year which has inspired this practice. I first found her online workshop to find a word for the year one year ago (my word for this year was Focus – I have my word for next year, but that’s for another conversation).

Today was a bit of balance in the midst of the mayhem.

a corner of my home, my retreat from the world.

The end/beginning of a year,

all these holidays associated with all these belief groups,

the altogether headfucking climax of consumerism and consumption,

the magic and
the glitter and
the feasts,
the feelings and
tensions and
releases.

All that stuff.

All of it.

All the tradition.

tradition

[truh–dish–uh n]

noun

the handing down of statements, beliefs legends, customs, information, etc., from generation to generation, especially by word of mouth by practice: a story that has come down to us by popular tradition.

something that is handed down.

a long-established or inherited way of thinking or acting.

a continuing pattern of culture beliefs or practices.

a customary or characteristic method or >manner.

blah etc blah ….

So much is ingrained at a young age end passed on by generations.
For so many people.

Not me, not any more, I’ve made some adjustments to my ways, and that’s what I came here to tell you about today.

I don’t hark back to happy sparkly memories of childhood holiday fun. The people I was with at the time are all gone. This isn’t the place for detail – this isn’t a rabbithole of self pity – it’s just the context for what I’m writing about. And a nod to those who feel the same way. We know we aren’t alone, and we know we aren’t supposed to talk about it – it’s something like the emperor’s new clothes thing – if we begin to question why everyone is getting so tangled up in a frenzy of guilt induced consumption and confusion it all could just fall apart before us.

Here’s what I’m doing: I’m making my own traditions.

They are just for me. I don’t have kids, so these aren’t the foundation for any future other than my own. I started this a year ago, and in repeating them they’re evolving into my new traditions. They have meaning. They are a framework and a structure in an otherwise fairly arbitrary layout of days and free-floating lifestyle.

These short days and long nights at the turn of the year are my retreat. Amongst the usual duties of the days, amid the outside chaos, I’m squeezing in some extra time. Time in my home in candle glow, with my books and my music and my thoughts.

Balancing on today’s apex I look out in both directions: Reflecting & Consolidating; Planning & Wishing. Taking time to just soak in my life, look at what I’ve done and felt and learnt since the last time.

Since this time last year I’ve been blessed to meet and share time with some wonderful people who’ve brought me new understanding and genuine heartfelt joy. I’ve uncovered new music, new ideas, new strategies and new wisdoms.

I’ve begun to take better care of this body and soul. Forgiven her indiscretions and daftnesses. Appreciated her well meaning and abilities. Accepted her doings and goings as the best she could have done given what she had and knew at the time. Acknowledged she needs time, she needs peace and she needs rest, I realised no-one but me can allow this.

I’m trying to show her more kindness.

I’ve released a bunch of judgments.

I’m learning to reframe.

Wherever you are in this season, I wish you and your dearests an abundance of wellness and peace. Go gently, dear friends, be love. X

on story telling

My last post, the lovely comments it received, and the reaction to the project I described has got me thinking much more about a few things.

Y’know, little inconsequential things – The nature of reality, the fabric of time….

I’m not even sure if I’m being facetious here (so ingrained in my character as that is, but also cos these things fall into part of the much bigger uncertainty). I mean to say – I’m content enough to use and benefit from so many things the mechanics of which are so beyond me as to be inconsequential – just the reality/time thing particularly fascinate me.

Cos it’s quite possible – quite popular – to progress through a life and not give such matters a moment’s thought.

Just daily survival can occupy so much energy, and when that isn’t so taxing we’re almost all blessed with more external distractions than we could possibly exhaust in just one lifetime. Failing that, there are usually other folks willing to make demands on our attention.

And then it’s time for sleep again.

All of which could suggest to spend time on such thinkings is a luxury, a silly trifling frippery, even a waste of ‘time’.

It’s a rare and peculiarly privileged spot in history and geography where I’ve appeared in this world, whereby simple survival has (so far, so good) been so simple, granting me enough resources for interest in any of these esoteric and abstruse mind wanderings.

I can mooch around the internet extensively, listen to opinion and mull over whether or not it makes sense to me; Twenty-first century living is an absolute breeze in comparison to just a few generations ago.

I’m living in utter luxury compared to many millions around the world right now, and I thank the universe for such blessings.

I got to think about the truth in the comment “…it takes time to get to that point of being able to write your story – and our story always changes” this got me thinking as our story develops it can be reviewed, re-examined, reinterpreted – even re-written.

Conventional wisdom previously led me to understand that as soon as something is done it becomes fixed; concreted in a newly formed part of ‘the past’. But we all know that recall is swayed by emotion, it’s fogged by time, influenced by perspective, mood, the passing of more ‘time’. Differently skewed versions of history abound, inaccuracy of memory twist and turn.

And when it comes to our own personal stories, we are our only witness – nobody else was living those days, in the company of so-and-so, in all those same places, seen from just that one point of view, encountering such-a-thing provoking that exact reaction, in that exact same way.

We’re each a compilation of uniquely assorted traits, experiences and influences. Connected and divided by the overlaps, in search of the universal, pondering the unquantifiable.

In the words of Bashar:

“…you create the past from the present, and not the other way around; the present is the only experiential time in which you ever exist. Any time you look at yourselves, it is always now; and it always will be now. It may be a different manifestation of now, but it will always be now. Therefore, you are creating from now any idea of the so-called past; you are creating from now any idea of the so-called future. It can be anything you desire it to be.

When you change the you you are now, you will then focus on the particular ideas of the past that will represent the you you are being now. Because the so-called idea of the past has many probable ways of manifesting, just as many as there are of the future. So whatever idea you are being now will determine the way you relate, and what it is you perceive to be real about your past-and about your future.” – Bashar

So as I shared last time, I took the plunge recently and took a long cool look at the years that I’ve clocked up, their contents and the influence of some of the leading characters in ‘my story’.

The reason I hadn’t done this before were multi-fold.

There was a good measure of ‘leave it behind you, it’s gone now’ with a sense that digging over ‘unchangeable truths’ could cause upset, upheaval, insoluble regret. Another voice in my head was busy preaching that such an exercise was just way too self-indulgent. So between the ‘nobody’s interested’ and the ‘hey don’t mess with it’, my story (to date) remained in a complicated tangle of misunderstood, mismanaged memory.

Turned out, the actual process of unraveling through writing was cathartic. The act of sharing was a bravery (although shared within a safe circle, it’s still raw soul offered up on a plate to be dissected by further opinion and judgment), and the results were met with warmth and kindness.

From other side of that metaphorical mountain my view has changed. I’ve dropped some degree of old habitual grouch. My light shines on.

The Egg

Have I told you before about my fascinations with metaphysics? I saw this today, it just bobbed up on my facebook newsfeed ..

Which is funny, because I remember reading this same story some time, like forever or so ago, and it really stuck with me. It made sense. It had a sense of completeness to it that sat comfortably in my mind. But I forgot the name or the writer, or where I’d read it, or the title, and no amount of guess-Googling had brought me back to it. Until this morning. And there it was.

It really made me smile, cos in this last week or so I’ve been reading Mike Dooley’s Manifesting Change, and I’ve also been listening to a bunch of the Abraham Hicks stuff on YouTube. And there are just so many parallels in the way they describe this whole what-are-we-doing-here and what’s-it-all-about-ness and the essence of what I take from this story.

This whole beautiful synchronicity makes me smile inside with such happy. It makes sense to me. I love the whole knitted-togetherness of each of these individually, and then of them altogether collectively. And the metaphor of an egg just seems to fit.

I’ve had some fantastically vivid dreams lately, and two nights ago I had a whole heap of very loud, clear metaphors for new beginnings: planting seeds, young animals (kittens mostly) and eggs. Eggs again! I’m working on some new exciting projects (more of which later) and there’s a really big feeling of new beginningness going on round here!

So that’s how my week is setting out, I hope yours is sprinkled with joy, anticipation and optimism too.

learning in patterns

The process of learning has a lot to do with recognising patterns.

A pattern repeats enough and you can come to trust it.

Then suddenly it changes: Confusion ensues.

I’ve been here before: I’m trotting along, understanding;
each new level of understanding fits comfortably on top of the last and it’s creating a tidy heap of organised information.

I know the routine. I’m cool with this.

Then we turn a corner and I’m lost.
Where did you go?

You were right there in front of me and now you aren’t and I can’t see you and I’m lost.

I don’t get any of it, the words aren’t making sense, the concepts are too big and won’t fit.

Too many options.

Parameters are too wide and I’m looking about for some clues and can only see confusion and fog.

Where am I?

You’ve already clambered up to the next level, so you know it’s possible.You know what I don’t. You see what I can’t.

I just need you to tell me in the right words, explain in a shape I can focus on.

Give me a hand up. I’ll be encouraged to know that where you are is actually a place because you’re there already, but I don’t see how I get from where I am now in my understanding to the dizzying lofty heights you’re occupying.

Hold out your hand and reach out to me.

We both know when I get there I’ll look down and it won’t seem so far.

And from there I can help the next of them climb up too.

oddments & day bits

If I could add up all these bit of days, these odd hours I find wanting for what to do.

Many nights I find a fragment between 2 & 4 am.

Then there’s bits of afternoons as well.
Bits of uncertain waiting.

Placeless snips and snaps.
Trimmed minutes at the end of one thing, before the next begins.

I’d like to make a collage or a patchwork of these moments.

Then I’d build me some new days.

No going back

Sometimes the biggest reason not to go someplace,
the only reason I can conjure up,
is the sure and certain knowledge i won’t want to go back after.

Crazy, huh?

Wanting to go and not going.

Wanting and not wanting.

Wondering where the path will lead.
Denying the scenery to open up in front of the next step.

Letting a little uncertainty take centre stage in your mind in place of the stars and the sparkles that your Imagination can whip together.

on being me.

I love to learn.

I take in as much information as I can every day.

It swims about inside my head,
It gets filtered (a little bit).

Forming together into cohesive chunks
I consider my ‘knowledge’.

TBH, it’s a bit cluttered in there.

Overgrown.

Oftentimes, when I extract some of these really interesting new things to share,
they get all mashed up on the way out.

One idea gets tangled up
with a theory from somewhere else,

In my mind it’s a beautifully crafted gestalt,
digested and distilled,
It’s the architecture of my reality.

But you only see a fin,
or a twig,
a remnant,
truncated from context.

It sounds like nonsense to you.

(I know this to be true)

Doubt and self deception

the question I keep re-asking myself this morning is: how is better not better?

Huh? I mean, if a change is for the better, indisputably, measurably improved, better, then what reason would there to be to doubt it? Sure there’s a compromise, isn’t there always? But the net is gain.

So what’s with the doubt?

Will it all fall apart despite the big life-shift?

Will it turn out that now I’m on the other side of the paradigm the grass is the same muddy colour?

Could it be the part of me that wants to pretend the uncomfortable bits aren’t worth it and revert to the full time discomfort of the old life?

Thoughts for the morning…..

Dropping, honing, fine tuning

some twelve years or more ago I deliberately began to drop.

I forcibly dropped worrying (I’d been trained from the earliest times that this is a vital life skill). But I was coming to understand how much it blocked my path, challenged my happiness, obscured my view.

I’ve chipped away over the years, breaking down the patterns of reaction, exploring other options.

Last year I took a big step into the unknown, I released some old habits that no longer served me. Had they served me in the past? I think so, when I only needed to hide, I hid inside them. I propped them up around me as a fortress. I played pretend.

I wanted to see clearly, be authentic, find out what I’d been missing. Explore unhindered.

Since then I’ve challenged more beliefs than I knew I had. I’ve dropped and picked up the most unlikely ways, I believe all these are for the better, but I’m playing the long game, I’m watching it pan out and observing the path.

I am witness.

ideas about ideas about ideas…

I’ve been processing thoughts on and around the creative process over the weekend. Unravelling thought processes.

In my exploration I can across this article ‘Find your creative currency’. It invites us to explore where our ideas emerge from. Like the author I can happily binge on texture.

concrete. what's not to love. — concrete. Deliciously speckly – what’s not to love.

Tree bark, rocks, skin, textiles, metals (and everything else) – they all have the potential to release a new stream of wanna-make/draw/invent/etc.

But more so I get this from arrangements of color. A little grouping colors – a patch of nature or a window display, the clothes on a passing stranger or a row of parked cars. These are magical gifts to a color hungry mind. I have been known to stop and gaze at a stretch of brickwork or a row of books on a shelf for just this reason.

Really?

Really, no, not known to. Because I don’t generally tell people that’s what’s going on.

(But I do it, and that’s why.)