Language, Art, and Possibility

When I was 15, I decided I was going to learn Spanish. I studied hard in school and lived in Peru for four months to make that happen, and learning (and more or less retaining) Spanish remains one of the life accomplishments I’m most proud of and thankful for.

Language is a dazzlingly gorgeous thing.

Held within any language is an entire universe. I quickly found that learning Spanish was not a simple acquisition of skill. It was a newfound connection to millions of people and many more throughout time. Entire lives and civilizations lived and died inside this container of words.

Language holds so much. Power. History. Culture. Connection.

As I learned, I was incrementally granted access to whole new schemas of meaning and frameworks of reality. My brain sprouted new pathways. There were also Spanish-induced changes to my embodied self. The muscle memory of my mouth, cheeks, and tongue shifted so much while I was in Peru that when I return to the states, I stuttered and stammered for awhile in the aftermath of the abrupt transition from Romantic to Germanic, as English came less easily out of my face.

We need languages, all sorts of them, including those beyond words to express, create, connect, and decipher. They are the “ways in” to what we know, feel, experience, and desire.

I’m learning that art is one of those essential languages. It conveys what is wordless but real, formless but present. It opens dimensions and perspectives words cannot.

I suddenly became fascinated with art a few months ago when I was introduced to the idea of art as talisman (h/t Fabeku Fatunmise) - an object that holds and transmits power, meaning, and possibility. Inspired, I commissioned a piece and purchased another, and then I wondered: wait, could I do this?

The answer is yes. We can all do this.

So I did, and I am, and it is changing me and my world as much as Spanish did.

Just as there is power in our words, there is power in our art. There is power in expression and creation of all kinds.

So what wants to become fluent within you? Which languages want to be spoken through you? And what bridges between self and world will you construct next?

Self-Love and Life-Force

I’ve come to understand that one of my primary life tasks is to figure out this self-love thing – to come into right relationship with my real self, find peace and okayness in that realness, and revel in the experience of having this life and being this self.

I believe we all come in with and are in possession of a dazzlingly gorgeous life-force, an animating energy that is the magic that lives within each of us, transcending any measurement or definition.

To me, self-love means enjoying this life-force, this core aliveness, connecting to it with intention and not making our experience of it conditional on anything else.

My sense is that so many of our troubles with self-love are a result of being asked by the dominant culture to spend our life-force (in currencies of energy, attention, creativity, time, money, etc.) in ways that deplete rather than nourish us and separate us from our life energy rather than deepen our connection to it, often in service to arbitrary, culturally-defined standards of goodness and enoughness.

I’ve found that self-love is not found in convincing myself that I’m “good enough.” More often I’ve found it in stepping into spaces and connecting with energies that render the idea I could be anything other than good, enough, and okay nonsensical and absurd.

So when I’m struggling to love or care for myself in the ways I want (because that happens in a culture like this one), I don’t try to convince myself of my worthiness. Instead I ask: how can I step back into the current of my life-force? Where is aliveness in this moment? (remembering that because I’m an organic, cyclical creature, aliveness might mean rest). What is there to enjoy right now in my life and self? What would it take to remember that my life and self belong to me and are for my joy?

But mostly, I just try to stand in who I am – who we all are – incarnations of consciousness, energy, imagination, miracle, and mystery. And really, what other than love could meet us here?

Freedom and Adulthood

As a young, not-yet-adult person, I often heard some version of this refrain from the grown-ups in my life: “you better enjoy these years of freedom now before the bills, responsibilities, and stresses take over your life – because being an adult is *super* hard.”

And they weren’t wrong about this.

As it stands, I have to go to work to make money to purchase the basics and essentials of my survival (as most of us do in capitalism). I have to fix things, do tasks, file taxes, make calls, and solve problems (not the fun kind). There are also the difficult feelings, scary circumstances, and collective sufferings to deal with at the same time.

But adult life is not the grim reality I imagined.

Because what I didn’t understand then is that I would be in possession of a vast and glorious freedom – along with the raw materials (time, energy, possibility) to shape this life how I wanted, even with some less-than-ideal pieces in the mix.

Circumstantially, life is probably harder now than it was then. But here is the key difference: as a teen and young adult, there was a cacophony of voices crowding my spirit that did not belong to me. I believed what they told me and did not yet have the wisdom and perspective to see they were not helpful and not my own.

Growing up (still in process) has meant doing the work of finding my own voice and real self and making that my center.

This is why life has gotten better the deeper I traverse into adulthood: Because understanding this point has made me infinitely more free.

I have the freedom and self-possession to choose – to exercise my agency around how I think, what I believe, where I point the compass of my life, what I say yes or no to, and how I spend my discretionary time, energy, attention, and money. And this is so, so good.

I understand life now as a journey of deepening into the truth that my life and self belong entirely to me. And to me, that is freedom.

Containers for Rightness

In matters of discerning and deciding, I’ve often been obsessed with getting to the “right” answer or choosing the “right” thing.

But I’ve found this approach to decision-making often devolves into chaotic flurries of mania, pressure, and obsession that, even if it all ends well enough, leaves me in a state of exhaustion and disarray.

So now rather than asking: is this right? - I ask myself this instead: is this a useful container for rightness?

Because I’m learning that most of the time rightness isn’t really found in external circumstances. Instead, rightness lives within me, within all of us - it is a frequency that inhabits the core of our realest selves and truest desires. Our task then is to find those spaces, containers, and portals that will hold that rightness, hum along with it, and reflect it back to us in ways that expand and enliven us.

Seeing it this way has lifted so much of the pressure I used to feel around “getting it right” - because actually, what I need to do first is connect with what already lives within me (and always will) and then explore and play to find those resonant matches and dynamic complements that will expand and deepen that rightness.

There are so many roads to destiny, connection, freedom, and truth - so many ways to love well, wander bravely, and live truly.

So rather than obsessing over which decision is the right one, I remember to live a big life, explore my edges, dive deep, seek out the sacred, set myself free, and create beauty - to focus there first and then ask myself which avenues will best support these projects and aspirations second.

In other words I ask: which directions, containers, and pathways will open up space for what I truly want to do and be in this lifetime? And more often than not, next steps seem to materialize and new roads tend to open from there.

Empty Spaces and Organic Progress

One of the things I continue to work through in my own life is my relationship with productivity and action.

I have all sorts of embedded stories around the levels of productive action I “should” be taking to be a successful and okay human - remnants from all those years as a student with perfectionist tendencies and neurotic habits, which took hold easily enough in a constant stream of looming deadlines and amorphous tasks, like research, reading, and studying, that could be extended into perpetuity because they had no clear beginning, middle, or end. Empty time was wasted time because there was never enough of it.

Life is different now, but even though I’m more or less in recovery around my hyperproductive leanings, I sometimes still catch myself believing that the only way to get what I want is by doing stuff, pretty much always, or that the only way to feel okay is to be in energies of movement and activation all the time, even when I know it would be better to let go and relax.

One of the things that has since helped me change and heal is reconnecting with my embodied self and remembering that I am an organic creature, not the disembodied machine that capitalism tries to make of me.

I remember the natural world. I think of a garden. There’s action that needs to happen: planting, tending, harvesting. And in between: a whole lot of empty space for mysterious processes of growth, alchemy, and creation that make happen what is far beyond my power.

A relentless stream of action and force will kill any life form. And it is not the way I want to live.

Nature needs empty spaces of unfoldment, and so do we - often more than feels comfortable and okay, given our cultural inheritance.

Just like the plants and the seasons, we need time and space for the magic to do its work on and in us - to let go and surrender to what we have no say in managing or controlling.

So I try to remember that it is not all up to me. I have my part to play, and my action matters, but so does my rest and my participation in emptiness and stillness. And beyond and within me, there is a whole web of being and existence that carries me along too.

The Comforts of Uncertainty

In recent years, uncertainty has become one of my greatest comforts. I find so much relief in reminding myself of all I do not know.

Mystery has become a pathway to peace.

My mind (like yours perhaps) loves projecting, predicting, and catastrophizing. It loves looking at a frustating situation, hard moment, or painful truth and spinning and extending it into distrous visions of cataclysmic ruin.

Left to its own devices, my mind usually opts away from the reasonable, low-drama approach. We’ve had to work hard together to get to any measure of calm composure and grounded equanimity.

And while its talents for creating patterns, making judgments, and crafting predictions have been immeasurably helpful in all sorts of ways, my mind often needs to be reminded that it is not the omnipotent power it presumes to be.

So this is what I do to help it along: I remind myself that every thought I think and every idea I believe is less than the absolute truth (because my mind does not have access to absolute truth). I remind myself that there are gaps – often significant ones – in my stories, beliefs, and predictions. I remember that interpretations of reality and actual reality are two very different things. I remind myself that I can never know for sure what will be real in 5 years, 5 weeks, or 5 minutes.

An important note: uncertainty is not denial. In other words, uncertainty does not refute what’s real or bypass what’s hard. It doesn’t say: I can never know anything, so I’m just going to opt out and ignore reality. It simply says: I do not and cannot know the whole story. I cannot know the future of what is now. And I cannot grasp the whole of reality in all its complexity, possibility, and dimensionality.

Which brings my energy and attention back to what is here for me now: in this moment of time and location in space.

Since I cannot know how the story ends, I am left with presence, mystery, and an open space where the only real and necessary thing is how I choose to live these questions: what will I do, and who will I be in this moment before me now?

Our Inherent Unwastability

One of the fears I’ve had to work through in my life is the anxiety-producing story that I am always in danger of “wasting” something finite and precious, like time, money, or most worrisome of all: life itself.

This is an anxiety born of a particular worldview - that the whole of reality is bound by laws of linear time and finite space and that meaning is only ever created by how much we can get done within those parameters. Put together with capitalism - a system that places us in constant and ruthless competition, mandates productivity as way of being, and asks us to get from here to there in straight, efficient lines - it’s no surprise that scarcity fears run so rampant through the collective.

In one sense, there is truth to all of this. I do have a limited amount of time and resources that are mine to manage carefully and steward wisely.

But as I’ve come to see it, this is not the whole truth, and when scarcity becomes the entire story, we are allowed no margin for error and no space to breathe.

When I get caught up in these fears, I often stay small out of terror that any mistake will propel me out of my prescribed orbit and into uncharted mystery where I might - god forbid - have to spend extra time and energy navigating the unknown and excavating the unexpected.

So what I’ve been working through for myself and with clients is finding and connecting with what is unquantifiable. What I’ve found is that there is a truth, power, and life-force within each of us that is ultimately uncontainable, and therefore, unwastable.

We are whole and vast. And from this vantage point, all the detours, question marks, and empty spaces we dismissed as losses and wasted opportunities might actually be the keys to our becoming, deepening, soul’s alchemy.

Claiming Power

In a time when we are seeing power at its most abusive, malformed, and tyrannical, I am reminding myself that at its core, power is sacred energy.

Power is our life force uncorked. It is our capacity to love, create, discover, connect, and grow. It is the aliveness and possibility that lives within each one of us.

When we filter our power through love and then allow it to transcend the borders of our being to touch the world around us, something happens. Things shift, alchemize, and revolve - often in surprising ways. I’ve seen this again and again - in my own life, in my DV work, with my coaching clients, in the collective.

It’s easy and tempting to shrink from power when we see and feel the ways oppressive power - force fueled by fear - is inflicting pain, trauma, and havoc in the world around us. It makes sense that we might want to run from our own power, fearing it may be twisted in the same way.

But I believe we must do the opposite. We need our power, and so does the world.

So let’s remember to re/claim power as a holy and necessary energy that lives within us and between us, always, and then set it loose in the world.

To the Edge

For several years now I’ve wanted to take a dance class. This summer, I’m finally doing it.

I took ballet and tap around age 5, but after that, my extracurricular endeavors took a different turn - toward those that pretty much exclusively required athletic power and brute strength over artful grace and coordination. And 24 years later, that definitely shows.

I can’t quite decide how good or bad I am at dance now, but the instructor did pull me aside several times this week for extra instruction if that’s any indication.

There’s a lot of floundering and flailing that happens as I learn the steps, try to get the technique right, and attempt to coordinate all that with what my arms are supposed to be doing. (Although I will say I have some powerful jumps - definitely not the most graceful to be clear, but I do get some height and distance, so there’s that.)

Here’s what I’ve concluded four weeks in: feeling like an inept fool is an important human experience we should all be having more often.

In a small way, dance is taking me to an edge of myself, and there’s something essential about that.

It’s making my brain and body work together in different ways. It’s taking me into fun and humor through detours of frustration, failure, and embarrassment. It’s expanding my sense of what’s possible inside of and through my body.

Also: there’s something magical about those series of hard-won baby triumphs that come (slowly and painfully) when we learn a new skill we’re uncomfortably bad at when we start.

So let’s not forget to keep learning and following what fascinates us - pushing our edges, finding delight in our capacity for growth, embarrassing ourselves, and having fun doing it.

All of this awesomeness is part of what we got when we came into this world as human creatures, so even (and especially) when there’s hard stuff swirling around us, brutal and relentless, let’s make good use of this goodness and allow it to fuel our journeys ahead.

Resistance and Stepping Between

I stepped between two people about to fight this week. Not to convince them to stop or to force them to do anything (because I couldn’t) - just to get in the way and interrupt the momentum of the conflict.

I didn’t do it to fix the problem, resolve the conflict, or determine the outcome. I did it because it was the thing to do in that moment.

This shifted some things around how I understand our political resistance. Instead of asking, how can I fix it? I wonder if often a more helpful question is: Given what’s real, what must I do in this moment?

Because I don’t know the answer the first question. I don’t know how to fix this.

I cannot single-handedly abolish ICE, end migrant detention, open our borders, or stomp out xenophobia and racism. And while I believe we can do these things collectively, we will drive ourselves to a breaking point if we make our agency contingent upon our ability to fix this mess immediately.

But we can make things harder. We can interrupt spirals of panic and hatred. We can bring clear energies to turbulent spaces. We can surprise, scare, and disrupt authoritarianism. We can make things more difficult, complicated, and uncomfortable by inserting our bodies, voices, and energies into what is already in motion.

The two people I stepped between may have still been able to get at each other, but it certainly would have been more cumbersome and complicated with (6 ft, 180 lbs) me in the middle. Suddenly they both had new questions to consider: can I get around this person? Do I want to try? Am I willing to harm a third-party? Even if the answers were all yes, having to consider them at all slowed it down, if only by fractions.

What spaces of pause, dilemma, and interruption can we create?

Resistance invites us to get creative with our power and agency. It asks us to use our power to derail, connect, refuse, dissent, create, dream, transgress, step in, stand up, and speak out. It asks us to find new and inventive ways to become radiant beacons of our truth and power.

So even when it’s hard and feels impossible, I’m remembering: All of it counts. All of it matters. And all of it’s essential.

The Power in Transformation

To me, one of the most beautiful things about being human is our ability to change - that we have the power to expand into otherness, shift our ways of thinking, and step into previously unconsidered possibility. It takes effort and willingness on our part, and sometimes hard and scary stuff gets in the way, but our capacity for transformation is one of our human superpowers.

Earlier this week, at the end of our conversation, one of my coaching clients said: “I’m always amazed how I can feel one way coming into these calls and feel completely different an hour later.” I was amazed too (I always am) but not surprised. Because this was simply a reflection of her ability to change her mind, move energy, and open herself to new possibilities - which are powers we all have.

I also think of a DV client I ran into one day at the airport, long after we finished our work together. After a decade in a toxic, abusive relationship, she was now safe, happy, and working for the airline I was flying. She had help and support, but ultimately, she was the one who did the work of taking the risk, changing her mind, and transforming her life.

In moments that feel impossible, I need to remember stories like these. I need to remember the times I’ve seen change happen in myself, in others, and in the world.

Life is hard. Trauma is real. Injustice exists. Not all of us make it out. If we’re awake, we see evidence of this everyday.

And this is also true: there is a power and a magic within us that creates worlds. We are truly remarkable creatures. Let’s not forget this, okay?

Our Rage is Necessary

I want to talk about rage.  This emotion is often misunderstood and villainized – pushed away or misused in ways that cause harm or hurt.  But we need our rage, as it serves so many important functions and is a natural response to injustice, oppression, and brutality of all kinds.  Now more than ever, we need the full spectrum of emotion – including our rage – to navigate the world, discern paths forward, and care for ourselves in the midst of hard times and difficult circumstances.

First, I believe rage serves an important function in not letting us forget what’s real. It tethers us to reality, reminds us who we are, and calls us to live in integrity. As an ambassador of the truth, our rage is holy and important.

Rage helps us call out and resist gaslighting (attempts to disconnect us from our truth and groundedness in reality through manipulation, isolation, and denial because we are easier to control that way). Because in addition to the violence, injustice, and villainy that’s happening in the world, we also have to sort through and deal with the cacophony of voices that are minimizing the horror, denying reality, and refuting basic facts. Our rage helps us do this by pulling us back to center, empowering us to set hard boundaries, and connecting us with others around shared purpose and values.

I believe rage does not want to be fixed. It does not want to be controlled, forced, coerced, or judged (to be clear: this is different than choosing our words and actions responsibly in response to our rage).  Rage wants space to move and permission to be.  It wants to be loved and accepted as a valid energy that deserves to exist - that often needs to exist in order to name injustice, transmit information, inspire action, and move energy.

I notice that when I push against an uncomfortable or painful emotion, including my rage, it fights me back, often refusing to let me go until I listen. But when I acknowledge its presence, accept its company, and trust that I’m big enough to hold and be with it, the emotion can more easily do its alchemizing work and keep moving.  Feeling rage is often still difficult, but trusting myself (and remembering my emotions mean me no harm) brings relief and helps me more easily access the gifts that come with surfing the rapids to the other side.

I also believe rage and joy can coexist. More than that, they have to.  Over the past few days, I've been in a constant state of rage - everything from outright fury to despondent anger to steely resolve. I have also intentionally made space for joy, care, and connection.  Last week, for instance, I painted walls with my sweetheart, coached a client I adore, and went dancing with a friend. This was essential.

Rage is a powerful energetic source that we can use and channel into all sorts of goodness: just action, true words, fierce care, creative projects, and bold resistance. So where is the energy of your rage calling you next? What truths are underneath it? What love is fueling it?  And how will you answer the call of that love?

Compost and Creativity

For the past several years, I’ve been on a mission to embrace, explore, and express my creativity - basically, reclaim it from the clutches of academia, where creativity was encouraged, but limited to the parameters of the Chicago Manual of Style and the norms of scholarly discourse.  Since then, creativity has infused my life with newfound vitality, expansion, and imagination.  It’s propelled me toward risk and adventure.  It’s led me to new edges of self-expression.  And as with any energetic leap forward, it’s also illuminated some patterns and shadows to be processed and untangled along the way.

Productivity is one of the more consistent themes that’s come up in the process.  I often notice that when I’m unproductive in my creativity (like when I feel energetically blocked or artistically blobby), I get frustrated and a little panicked over the time and energy I’m wasting and losing in the process.  

When I’ve looked more closely at all of this, I realize: it isn’t untrue.  I do waste a lot of time, energy, and potential.  I throw away a lot of what I create or could create.  And this is okay.  More than that, it’s essential.

Because we are organic and evolving creatures, our systems need space, give, and excess.  And our creative projects, also organic and evolving, need the same.  We need the nourishment of composted waste and recycled dead things to continue to grow and expand.

As I’ve found again and again, creativity defies notions of productivity as linear progression and absolute efficiency (which is what makes art such a fierce, defiant, and effective challenge to capitalism, as well as an essential tool in rewriting narratives around value, labor, and production). Whereas capitalism tells us we need to function like machines – staying in zones of activation, overdrawing our resources, and maximizing output at all times– creativity reminds us that moments of stagnation and slowness are part of the process, which not only allows for convoluted wanderings and wasteful inefficiencies, but actually requires them.

Whenever I waste my creative potential – for whatever reason – I am often tempted to either send it away to a landfill so I don’t have see or deal with what I lost, or, out of denial, stuff it in a jar with some preservatives and put it on a shelf, so that I can pretend nothing is lost. 

But there’s also a third option I’ve been trying to practice more and more.  And that is composting the wasted thing – burying it in my own garden, so that it can be recycled and incorporated back into my system.  But here’s the thing: the catalysts that instigate this composting process are the feelings of grief, regret, and frustration over what was wasted.  I have to feel this stuff to compost the loss.  Which means I carry the residue of the loss (even as it’s transmuted and transfigured) in my garden forever. 

But this is creativity and creation in general.  Waste, death, and break-down are part of what makes it possible and sustainable – together with the beauty, flow, and alchemy, all of it opening a path ahead that – paradoxically – is both well-worn and uncharted.

Embracing Complexity and Paradox

I used to understand the essence of self and life as singular – that there is one path we’re meant to walk and one self we’re meant to actualize in this lifetime.  Of course, we wander around trying to find it, but the ultimate goal is to arrive at the one true thing.

But thanks to recent happenings and some amazing conversations with coach-astrologer extraordinaire KJ Sassypants, I see it another way.  Becoming ourselves is not a process of narrowing or stripping away to get to a tidy, unified something; it is a process of living into the paradoxical plurality of the varied – and sometimes conflicting – forces, energies, motivations, traits, and desires that make us “us.”

There’s definitely a certain kind of narrowing that comes with clearing out the gunk we’ve absorbed from the culture, unwinding the unhelpful stories we inherited through our lineages, and dispelling the lies we’ve internalized from the voices around us, but the more I’ve done the work of unpacking and releasing what I no longer want to carry, the more I’m finding complexity, not simplicity, at my core.

What I’m seeing now deep down in myself and in the beautiful humans I work with is not a simple self, straightforward destiny, or clear answer; what I’m seeing is beautiful chaos, irresolvable multiplicity, and unruly paradox.

In a world that often wants to shrink and flatten us (into compliant citizens and eager consumers), reclaiming our multidimensionality, complexity, weirdness, and apparent contradiction is a life-affirming and radical act that’s profoundly important. 

Living from this space of all-and (KJ’s phrase) with integrity and alignment requires an expansion into ourselves and into the world.  It means embracing the unwieldly internal chaos and paradoxical mystery that is always pulling us past the edges of who we thought we were.  It means reaching toward new horizons of meaning.  It means living a big life. 

For me, this perspective has been super liberating.  Instead of jumping into the fray of endless internal conflict or fighting with the aspects of me that don’t always get along, I’m forging unlikely truces, building imaginative bridges, and just showing up as me.  I’m embracing the convoluted weirdness in my own self and in others and appreciating all the ways this makes life more interesting, expansive, and magnificent.  So shine brightly and weirdly and paradoxically, friends.  The world needs our real selves.

Remembering the Truth About Change

Change is a tricky and beautiful process.  I’m endlessly amazed at our ability to transform, shift, and create, whether that’s new habits, new mindsets, or new lives.  But I’m also aware how change is often a slow and winding process that can leave us feeling stuck, discouraged, and convinced we’re failing.  Whatever process of change I’m in at the moment, I find it goes a whole lot better if I remember the following:

Change is energy work.  Forming habits, shifting patterns, and creating something new involves working with and moving the energy of our thoughts, beliefs, and emotions.  Energy is dynamic.  It expands and contracts.  It’s always on the move.  The energetic expansion that comes with a breakthrough, insight, or step forward is often followed by a contraction as our system recalibrates, as the energy seeks new equilibrium, and as the old, dying thing fights for its life.  This might not feel so good.  It may feel like you’ve lost the thread.  All of this is normal.  Be gentle with yourself when there is big, energetic movement happening in your life and self.  Rest, drink water, cuddle with loved ones, all that good stuff.

Change is not about linear progress.  It is not about sustaining the energy of a breakthrough indefinitely.  Change is forgetting, remembering, then forgetting again.  It’s a process of laying new tracks in our brains, step by step, through conscious attention and intention.

Change is deeper than the things we’re building from and around it, whether that’s states of being (like feeling more calm, grounded, and clear), habits (numbers of days in a row we've meditated or gone to the gym), or tangible creations (words written, meals cooked, canvasses painted).  Real, sustainable, durable change happens when we go back in after we’ve missed a day, fallen off the wagon, or drifted from our calm, clear center.  It’s the shift we create within when we notice where we are, allow ourselves to be there, look around for the lost thread, and pick it up where we find it to try again. 

When you’re in the midst of a messy transformation, what do you most need to remember?  How can you show yourself love, gentleness, and care in the midst of the changes, chosen or unchosen, rocking your world?

The Gifts of Boredom

I think there are a lot of misconceptions out there about boredom: that it’s what happens when we’re not doing enough to keep ourselves entertained, engaged, and stimulated, that it goes away as soon as we get moving and start doing stuff.

But I’ve found the opposite to be true.  Boredom is my reliable cue to move toward the stillness and quiet, not away from it.

Because in my experience, boredom is the thing I feel when I’m pushing away something that’s trying to enter my awareness.  It’s what happens when I try to bypass whatever messy, uncomfortable somethings are rising up to be felt.  In other words, boredom is a product of repressing and resisting what’s real (in an attempt to get to peace, contentment, joy, etc. prematurely.)

I discovered this on a 9-day silent meditation retreat.  With 10 hours of daily meditation, I expected the boredom of it all to crack me a little, but much to my surprise, I was never bored.  I learned silence and stillness aren’t boring; they’re endlessly fascinating.  Boredom is about what I do with the feelings that come up in the stillness and silence, not the stillness and silence themselves.

Boredom also happens when I do too much action, resisting the quieter, slower parts of the growth and healing cycles.  Basically: when I forget (or refuse) to do things like receive, digest, listen, compost, fall apart, unwind, rest, heal, regenerate, feel, and exhale.

So, what might boredom be signaling for you?  What is asking for your attention and focus in the still and quiet places of your life?

Building in the In-Between

I was chatting with a friend recently about life upheaval and the mayhem that follows.  For her, this included moves across state lines and international borders, losses around health, shattering transformations to her relationships, career, and identity, and frightening adventures looming on the horizon.  And the fact that many of these changes were instigated by her own well-thought and intentional choices didn’t make the breakdowns that followed any less disorienting or uncomfortable.

With grief behind and uncertainty ahead, she felt stuck, frozen between the death of her old somethings and the births of her new ones.  And with the next wave of change on its way to knock it all down yet again, what was there to do?  What was there to build or even hold on to?

As someone who’s experiencing my own version of the in-between, I’ve been asking similar questions.  And here’s what I’ve found: in times of change, transition, and death-rebirth, our ideas about substance, form, and creation need to shift with us.

We have this idea in our culture that things matter only if they have monetary substance, tangible form, or enduring material value, but ultimately, we each get to decide what “counts for something.”  Uncertain, murky circumstances may halt our plans and interrupt our ambitions, but life, creativity, and growth keep happening regardless.  We can still build.  Our creations may not be concrete, durable, or permanent, but this doesn’t mean they don’t matter or that we can’t carry them with us.  And we can always turn our energy and attention toward what we’re building in our own selves: imagination, connection, courage, intuition, power, wisdom – which I believe is what matters most in the end anyway.

So when I find myself thinking it’s all for nothing, I try to hold to the truth of the opposite: it’s all for everything.  I’ve said before that while I don’t believe everything happens for a reason, I do believe we can make meaning and choose our reasons – that we can use the raw materials we have to craft creative, unexpected, and redemptive replies to whatever life gives us.  And in the moments of muddled uncertainty and apparent futility, that’s where I build from.

The World Within

Whenever I notice I’m beginning to drift into stagnant waters of despondent malaise or veer perilously close to a swirling vortex of panicked mania (not uncommon happenings in these times of political mayhem and imperial villainy) I know it’s time to take a deep breath and reassess some things.

Because if I’ve reached the point of spiritual lostness, despairing stuckness, or existential discombobulation, I’ve likely lost sight of the vision or strayed from my reasons why.

To get back on track, I often start with this: Am I giving to myself what I want for the world?

Since I began working in DV advocacy a few years ago – and especially since the election – I’ve been thinking hard about what I’m doing here and how I’m doing it.  Basically: Am I being who I want to be in the world?  How am I participating in, responding to, and/or divesting from systems of oppression?  What am I building, creating, and supporting?

The deeper I go, the more urgent and nonnegotiable these questions feel.  And also: the more I understand how we must absolutely find ways to give ourselves what we wish for others and what we dream for the world.

It can be tempting to overlook this part for all sorts of reasons, but I’ve found that if I bypass this crucial step on my way to resisting injustice and contributing to the effort of building something better, there is a pretty good chance (speaking from experience) that I’ll get tangled up in a manic, swirling charge of unproductive shaming that becomes a fractile of the very system of oppression I want dismantled.

Can we do it?  Can we make real in ourselves what we’re striving to make real in the world?  Can we prioritize and center our own flourishing, wellness, and liberation?  I think to be okay and have any modicum of effectiveness in what we’re trying to accomplish here, we have to.

This is basic integrity: holding myself to the same standard of care I want for others and for the world.

If I want clean air, land, and water, I cannot pollute myself with self-hatred.

If I want peace for others, I cannot speak violently to myself.

If I want every voice to be heard, considered, and valued, I cannot silence my own.

If I want an equitable distribution of wealth and resources, I must give nourishment, attention, and love to all parts of me, not just those I believe are worthy of it.

If I want all people to receive the resources and care they need, I have to be real about what I need and then give it to myself.

If I want white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and capitalism to end, I need to dismantle the hierarchies that live in me and silence, oppress, and kill what I cannot love and accept in my own being.

So let’s not forget to include ourselves as both active participants and worthy recipients of this beautiful thing we’re imagining and building together.  Let’s remember that we bring our dreams of liberation, justice, and possibility into being not only by what we create on the outside but by what we plant on the inside – what we cultivate in our bodies and nurture in our spirits.  So let’s do that: make our life-affirming, world-expanding visions alive, not only around and between us, but also within us.

Living from the Ground-Up

I’m someone who likes to make a plan, set long-range goals, and hold to meticulously crafted overarching visions, but as I’m learning, sometimes life just needs to be figured out as we go.

In other words, living a life that makes getting out of bed each morning more an occasion for jubilee than a descent into drudgery requires a fair amount building from scratch, piecing together raw, unrelated materials, and flying by the seat of my pants.  The 10,000 foot view is great, but if that’s the only place I’m spending my time, I’m probably missing out on a vast array of creative opportunities, unpredictable misadventures, and bizarre detours that spring from the ground up, and if given the chance, could create something entirely unexpected, wonderfully weird, and oddly delightful.

Still, I have often been tempted to hold on to a lifeless goal, vision, or aspiration, even after it’s clear it’s no longer working.

Perhaps my best example of this is how hard I clung to my grand vision of earning my PhD and becoming an academic, even after it had become a miserable endeavor.  But I loved learning, and this is what I had always imagined for myself.  How could I give up now?  The day it became clear, I was walking in the woods, deep in the process of applying for doctoral programs after graduating from a grueling MA program a few months before.  As I passed through the trees, I noticed a sudden and strange feeling: the glorious absence of anxiety (and the sublime freedom that filled the vacuum it left behind), something I hadn’t felt in years.  In that moment, I knew I wanted peaceful walks in the woods more than I wanted a PhD, and that was that.

In an instant, my top-down approach collapsed.  The gap between the theoretical vision I held for my life and my actual life reality had become too wide.  And for a time after that, I had no big goal, no guiding vision beyond restoring my relationship with my body, spirit, and inner wisdom.  I was living bottom-up instead of top-down, allowing a new vision to rise up from there.

In my experience, living this way requires intuitive flexibility, attention to the small stuff, and responsiveness to my life as it actually is, rather than my theoretical ideas for what it should be.  It requires starting with the seemingly random and chaotic sparks of interest, alignment, and desire and allowing them to inform or even create the big vision from time to time.

All of this reminds me that life is an unfolding creation rather than an unchanging assignment.  So these are the questions I’m asking of my visions, goals, and intentions in 2018: are they organic and dynamic or rigid and stagnant?  Are they life-giving and expanding or life-constricting and confining?  Do they show up as obligations or as invitations?  Do they allow space for unexpected variables, surprising detours, and extended pauses?

If this sounds interesting to you, here are some ideas and practices to play with:

• Think of your big vision and aspiration and instead of focusing on what it would look like to achieve it, notice what it would feel like.  What would it give you?  Why do you really want it?  How would it change your life, and how would that feel?  Notice and tap into that feeling or energy and ask yourself: What small thing or action step fills me with that same feeling or energy?  Maybe it’s related to the vision or goal, and maybe it’s not.  Let it surprise you.
• Carve out an empty block of time – 5 minutes, an hour, an afternoon – to play with no goal in mind.  Ask yourself: What would feel delicious?  What would feel like freedom?  What is pulling you forward?  And see what arises.  Do that thing.  And perhaps challenge yourself to allow more of this thing into your life, even if it doesn’t directly move you toward a particular goal or objective.

Accepting the Gifts

I received a generous and surprising gift this week. As I opened the box and unwrapped its contents, I was filled with delight, excitement, gratitude…and nervous discomfort. It’s not always easy to be on the receiving end of generosity, and in this case, staying with it felt like an act of sustained spiritual concentration.

This is what I know: living a meaningful, grounded life requires being available for the unexpected, the abundant, the generous, and the grace-filled, but actually living this way often feels like an uncomfortable challenge, in part because of the systems we live in.  Like capitalism.

Free generosity violates its rules and logic. In it, everything has a price tag and our worth (and very survival) is tied to our labor and reduced to our productive output – our existence spins around monetary exchange; resources and power are distributed inequitably; and our intrinsic worth is not an inherent given.

So when I received my gift this week, I immediately asked myself: what have I done to deserve this? Nothing, of course, and that made me nervous.

It has me thinking: how much goodness am I tempted to shut out because I’m afraid (subconsciously, probably) that it will reveal my innate unworthiness? How many gifts do I reject (from loved ones, strangers, or life itself) because I’m afraid I’ll be found out as “not enough?”

All of this goes deep, and it seems the first thing has to be finding a way to agency, freedom, and enoughness. This is what creates space for goodness, grace, and beauty to pass through – those things that already belong to all of us: the gifts that surprise us, defy convention, and maybe even challenge but we thought we knew about the world and ourselves. There will be voices that say you don’t deserve these gifts, that they’re not meant for you. Unwrap and enjoy them anyway.