We are move-move-moving...
When an Attention Practice Leads The Way
Well, we have rapidly and semi-unexpectedly sold our beloved home after a 15-year deep communion with this land, the owls, cottonwood, firs, rosehips, bears, rocks. It’s the longest I’ve lived anywhere. We aren’t moving far. Across the valley. In the next four weeks. I will tell the story of why and how and what it feels like in later letters. For now, I want to sink into what any of us do when a sudden transition happens, whether chosen or not. Some life events require a massive tangible pause or reorientation, like our fellow people in Palestine or North Carolina or Sudan or Ukraine or many other places. Positionality. It can never be extracted. My whole life I’ve tended to chastise myself about what feels hard for me and whether it should because someone out there always has it way harder. Mid-life is teaching me the importance of both/and.
When it’s a “small” big personal life event (like my upcoming move) and you are living in safety enough, do you pivot? Do you rearrange your responsibilities and agree to the consequences of that shift or hang on tight and grit your way to the other side?
I negotiate this crux in myself A LOT.
On today’s eclipse new moon, I was planning to launch my 6-week workshop on Attention. In form, it has been burning inside me since January. In body, for years. When I voice texted friends about it, they responded with, “Whoa, I can hear the alignment in your voice.”
BUT, my family is now in a moving transition while I’m close to the menopause transition. I heard very clearly to clear the decks, just like I heard months ago that my family needed to move. My practice of attention has (oh the irony!) told me that an Attention workshop is not where my attention needs to be right now.
I fought it.
Old patterns took over: I can do this. I can finalize the new curriculum and write the 1,000 sales emails and teach it and maintain my other work and stay the critical hormone-support course with good sleep and food and exercise while packing and unpacking and re-locating and re-financing and holding the emotional center for my family. I have so much energy for the topic of attention. It matters! People have been asking. All the change-makers in my life are struggling with this; I have struggled with this and I know it from the inside. Of course, I can do this.
I could do it.
We all have the in-built capacity to rise to any occasion if we must.
But what is the long-game?
Do I want to emerge from this transition tight-chested and straggling or settled and ready to output with my feet on the ground? I’ve been living cyclically with the seasons long enough to understand the importance of different paces at different times. My nervous system pattern, though, is to either go full-tilt and do it all anyway or to retreat fully into the sabbatical cave. *I almost muscled through; I almost cancelled everything. This time, I’m choosing the third way.
For October/November,
Stay tuned: I’ve decided (I think) to facilitate a one-time 1-hour “Attention” workshop on October 16th with 50% proceeds going to Women’s Earth Alliance. More on that later this week.
My work energy during this October/November will go into preparing for my January retreat in CA (there is still some space if it calls to you!) and for The Loam 2025, a crew that has become such a deep resource for those in it and for me.
I will chronicle the move transition in this newsletter but in a more flow way (as opposed to ‘every Tuesday’) for this period. Some of you have read The Map of Enough and know how we first arrived on this land. I also want to record the process for our daughters. Obviously, I’ll share extra bits with paid subscribers.
My 6-week Attention Workshop will happen in February. Yes, yes, yes!
I wonder about your third ways.
I wonder how you navigate these transitions.
Trust,
Molly
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Hi Everyone, I received a few emails from Israelis asking me about my sentence above: "Some life events require a massive tangible pause or reorientation, like for our fellow people in Palestine or North Carolina or Sudan or Ukraine or many other places. Positionality. It can never be extracted." Thank you for reaching out. People often email me and many of those conversations end up not public, though I always encourage anyone to comment publicly as that is the point of being a human in sticky conversation with the hopes of bridging to one another. I'm sharing it here as perhaps others of you, Israeli or not, were wondering the same thing this person wrote below.
She said: "I am Israeli, I had to leave my home almost a year ago. Am I not your fellow people? :-("
I responded with: "Thank you for reaching out. Of course you are. Ideally, we are all each other's people, which is why in that sentence I included "or many other places"... I was highlighting the countries where there has been the most destruction and death (in terms of numbers) in the shortest amount of time. I also can't imagine what it is like to leave your home, to live in fear and in such close proximity culturally and geographically to war. I read all of these emails and don't take them lightly and it is always awakening and devastating to hear about any fellow human from anywhere who is suffering. Thank you. "
I can add here that one of my family members (nephew of my aunt by marriage) is an Israeli soldier my generation whose large family still lives there. He lives in the U.S. now, though he was back as a soldier for some months last year, and I've seen him in person a few times. I care about him and the wellbeing of his family a lot. I also care about people I've never met or will never know in Palestine or Israel. Even though I lived abroad as a child, I have grown up culturally-neutral (it's both a gain and a loss) and White American in this lifetime, so have never been part of a group of people who wrestle daily with realities and history of having family members killed at the hands of another group of people and therefore a general dis-ease developing between groups. All to say, I don't know it in my body. My ancestral Irish body knows it, but that's hard to touch or feel fully. It's easy for someone in my position to say (and I hear it from others out there), "Why doesn't everyone just get along?" and I'm saying I won't say that because I have no idea what it's like to be anyone other than me and I would like to learn more. From everyone.
Though I've learned much more about the geo-politics of this conflict in the last year, I have more to learn. One thing we can probably all agree on is that there are angles and implications in all directions and, in the end, major consequences for those closeby and those faraway, for the whole world. It's scary on so many levels and on many horizons. Additionally, we can't deny death toll numbers or genocide.
Molly ~
Paying attention. Yes, and..... The third way. All good principles to guide us. Thank you.
I'm still learning/accepting that my energy levels are different than others. (duh, kindly and with a smile to myself) As a 'mature' person, it's important that I accept this reality.
Be ever so kind to yourself during this time of transition. I, too, am in a time of transaction -that liminal space. I concentrate on the practical demands of the day, prioritize physical exercise and reading (!) and limit my socializing.