I'm Stepping OUT and Toward

Week 7

The leaves talking.

The look of recognition from a stranger sitting next to me. We know each other.

I now expect serendipities: “Of course,” is my response, instead of my younger self saying Isn’t that so wild? No, it’s not wild at all! If you are listening, that’s how life works. The information and guidance you need comes to you without you having to seek it. As you know, I have been relentless in my practice of quieting the noise in order to LISTEN. It has been a profound years-long reorientation and the last 30 days have yielding massive insights and shifts for me. Practical or explanatory language doesn’t fit right now—in due time. Much more to come.

All to say, I’M INSPIRED and awake, awake, awake!

Gist: Reclaiming my attention has been an intention since childhood—with a new flavor since smart phones arrived. I have been actively training myself. Choice points. Ultradian rhythms. Cyclical living. Boundaries. Choosing the consequences I am willing to bear. The tone I set more publicly at the start of the 2024 has become “my way” of being: my sabbatical, my trip to an ancestral land, my focus on the tactile and family, my long-distance walking antidote, my continued reckoning, my weaving with people.

My kids (and a friend's kids) climbing during an impromptu visit to Brooklyn due to flight delays, Maine blueberries in all stages of evolution, a tree burl offering from me to it.

Mytho-poetry

Her posture these last five years? Backing into a cave, sometimes dancing, with one hand on her hip and the other straight out like a wooden shield—a firm “Stop!” to the overload of information and the rapid acceleration of modern life barreling toward her. She felt alone. Did others hold her concern about what was happening to fellow humans? If so, where were their voices? Surely there must be others? In that murky and rich and solitary place, she tussled at war with herself. Get out there. Come back in. Out. In. Out. In. Her irritation grew with anything or anyone asking from her. Too. Much. She slumped down in overwhelm and turned her gaze to the life-forms in the soil. Listening. Asking them. Asking the trees: what do we do? She made choices. She became deliberate. One spring, when her life-force drained from her, veins empty of blood, she almost sank down for good and surrendered to the force outside. Vitality, though, is in all of us. She rose again and the cave learned her as she learned it; it became a sandstone dome, an earthen shelter, a quiet place and then—in right timing—it nudged her forward. “Go,” it said, “You are being called. You can resource here, but your time living here has come to an end.”

When the tumbleweed swept about her the month of her 45th turning, she knew the time had come. Her imaginal cells began to take shape into a new being. She giggled. She took herself seriously. What was happening? Was she ready to emerge? Ready to be here in this modernity, to be of it, to heed the call and to hold her wise flat feet giving to and sourcing from the earth. She began to hear the other voices, the artists, the seers. There! Siblings to her. One sultry summer night, the dream woke her and, with wide eyes in the dark and the sound of coyotes and cars and crackles of thunder, she accepted her mission. I chose it. I see it. Energy flowed back into her like a river torrent. Relief. Rest. No need to resist the inevitability. Be in THE NEW, grieve what was and will no longer be, help yourself and others remember themselves despite it, use it wisely, connect, connect, discernment and attention is your offering to the world. Suddenly walking was smoother, making her bed a joy, attending to finances a grounding, holding her responsibilities an okayness, her exhales a deeper well of indigo blue water. More clear. She had been so heavy. She had been so yanked. Her grief for the world had paralyzed a part of her. But there is another possible ‘both/and’ way for all of us.

Feels like this. Dark forest tunnel. Light at the end. Both essential. This is the real childhood place of my beloved.

Physical Stats

• One of my readers wrote an incredible email to me about strength training and up-ended my statement about how it’s contraindicated for pelvic floor issues. Go back to this post and check her story out in the comments section. Very helpful and inspiring.

• You all, the big toe mound! I can’t say enough. How did I not know? I’ve redirected BIG attention here and it’s changing how my legs work. My calves and glutes are sore in the best way, as if they are relearning how to fire and engage.

• My continence is coming on line more—maybe because my walking posture has changed or because I’m in the first half of an un-trackable peri-menopausal menstrual cycle. Hard to know, but I’ll take it.

Nervous System

When our environment is “too much,” we often shut down or collapse. It’s adaptive. That survival mechanism serves until there is enough safety and we can crawl back out. As a highly sensing person (as well as a person navigating some consuming health issues while full-time working while full-time mothering for a decade), I felt swamped by the attention-sick world and the rapid task switching reality. I am not unique in my responsibilities or trials. Perhaps most people feel this way these days. I put up boundaries with modern life in order to “do” life. First, I was cognitive and righteous. Then my response came from my animal. My body simply said, NO. Over and over again. The conditions I put in place benefited me and still do. Now that I’ve had consistent space from the barrage + a recent acceptance of what is, I’m noticing a deeper physiological rest than ever before. I don’t know whether it will last. I’m not here to make declarations. I can now enter back into modernity. Resistance/push both gives and drains energy from the one resisting. Yet… we need resistance. It’s essential for evolution. I’m holding many questions about what to hard-core resist and where to bring my resistant in as a dance and support.

Prayer

May I contribute to this era. May I give instead of extract. May I exchange and weave and support others. May I work to preserve the attention of living creatures so that we can make the world we want.

Ultimately, it comes down to HOW you want to spend your days, your minutes, your seconds on this earth—do you know?

*If you know of other people/voices exploring how to thrive during modernity with full grasp on their attention, please let me know. Community has always mattered.

Love,