Turner, Toko-pa. _Belonging_, 2018. # Progressive Summary This exquisitely written book could be read as a companion to Bill Plotkin's [[The Journey of Soul Initiation]]. The structure of the journey is the same. We descend into the depths of soul, where our previous life dissolves, and we discover the gift of belonging. We re-emerge bearing this gift, and become a shelter of belonging for others. In Plotkin's words, "To carry what is hidden as a gift to others." # Key points She thinks of belonging as a skill or competency that can be mastered. - Handmade crafts are a key skill of belonging. > When you learn to make things with your hands, you begin to awaken an awareness of the beauty and value of things in your life. Handmaking teaches us about slowness: the antidote to brevity and efficiency. It shows us, through the patience and skillfulness of our own hands, what goes into a thing. > > When we put those long efforts into bringing beauty into the world, we are honouring that which made us by creating as we have been created. We are taught to respect the slow, attentive piecing together of the life we yearn for. Stitch by stitch, we apprentice the craft. We work in tandem with mystery, feeling its rhythms awaken in our bone-memory. As the hands work, the mind is stilled and a greater listening is engaged as we drop down into the deep rhythm of devotion, where the whole world is in communion. The ferns unfurl, the daffodils trumpet, the rosebuds fatten, and the song of creation can be heard. - Being able to accept pleasure. The receiving muscle. - Cultivation of mythic imagination. - > ... one of the great competencies of belonging is the cultivation of a mythic imagination. So long as we are disconnected or unaware of our ancestral inheritance embedded in myth and story, we will think of ourselves as alone. But when we reunite with that accumulation of wisdom living in dreams, mythology, and stories, we are drawing from the same original well that our ancestors’ stories came from. --- # Resonances [[The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible]] –– [[Reference Notes/These Wilds Beyond Our Fences]] –– Parker Palmer's idea of the soul as a wild animal. [[#^a3b90f]]. –– Bill Plotkin's idea of the mythopoetic identity. [[#^8119bc]] –– Her treatment of negative emotions as unwelcome guests that we must be hospitable towards reminds me of Karla MacLaren's Language of Emotions. –– > The body is the first gate of belonging. And though so many people struggle to feel at home in their own bodies, I am amazed at how rarely it is mentioned in the many conversations I have on belonging with others. Its absence in our consideration speaks volumes. As we’ve explored, there are many contributing factors to humanity’s body-soul disconnection, but the Western medical model is a huge proponent of detachment in that pain and discomfort are considered unacceptable and ubiquitously controlled with medication. This makes me think of Martha Beck's interview with Gwyneth Paltrow, in which she tells the story of asking her audience if they are comfortable, and when all of them say yes, she asks if this is how they would sit if they were at home and no one were watching: - https://goop.com/the-goop-podcast/gwyneth-paltrow-x-martha-beck-what-does-it-mean-to-live-in-integrity/ –– > As Jung says, “Nothing influences children more than these silent facts in the background.” > > “The child is so much a part of the psychological atmosphere of the parents,” he goes on to write, “that secret and unsolved problems between them can influence its health profoundly…causes the child to feel the conflicts of the parents and to suffer from them as if they were its own. It is hardly ever the open conflict or the manifest difficulty that has such a poisonous effect, but almost always parental problems that have been kept hidden or allowed to become unconscious.” This makes me think of William Blake. –– [[#^fd6b7b]] Nietzche's Eternal Recurrence –– [[#^219538]] The spider in The Last Unicorn who thinks she is spinning the galaxy. –– [[#^e404ad]] Why we should have children: > This, at any rate, is how I would answer the anti-natalist position. It makes no sense to think of children as tokens of their parents’ carbon consumption, inheriting a taste for steak and air travel. And it makes no sense to think that whole generations might simply be blindly condemned to a certain fate, before they have even been conceived. The reason for this is that human action is not determined in any hard sense: human beings exist transformatively in relation to their world. Another philosopher, Hannah Arendt, referred to this fact with the concept of “natality” — “the new beginning inherent in birth.” > > The world might well be a terrible place, but by having a child, you are introducing something new into it. Of course, this is a sort of gamble with reality: You don’t yet know who your child might be. But if we dare to do it, to bring something new into the world, we might hit upon the right path — and then things really could, conceivably, get better. > - [[Opinion _ Why, Despite Everything, You Should Have Kids (if You Want Them) - The New York Times (21_04_2021 08_58_51).html]] # Quotes ## Bio > By the time I was eleven, I was preoccupied with thoughts of suicide. What I didn’t understand was that I was internalizing the rejection I felt from my family. Suicide was the ultimate self-rejection; it was a way to ‘make real’ the deadening impulse that was closing in on my heart. When I was fourteen going on fifteen, I ran away for good. For a while, I panhandled for money, slept on floors, and made the worst kinds of friends. Eventually I was apprehended by the police who took me to a detention shelter where I was committed into what we called the System. > > The System was an organization of government-run, ironically named ‘care facilities’ for orphans. Some of us were abandoned, some abused or neglected, some with qualities too strange to manage. Like myself, many orphans still had parents in the world, but for a jumble of reasons were cut loose, drifting on the margins, in various stages of physical and spiritual homelessness. Terrified and confused, with no meaningful source of guidance, most of the kids turned to gangs, violence, drugs, and self-harming. > > The years that followed were the darkest of my life and yet somehow I understood that living in exile was an improvement upon the life of wishing myself dead. At least here I was in the company of orphans, and we were unbelonging together. > > Healing the heart’s contractions from love can be a life-long endeavour. But for the many of us who have been fractured in spirit, it must be said that there is a medicine to be retrieved from exile. That medicine, the treasure lost and recovered, is one that might otherwise never be known. If you can stand fully in your own unbelonging and become friendly with the terrors of loneliness and exclusion, you can no longer be governed by your avoidance of them. In other words, you are on your way home. ## Belonging as a practice > This book is an attempt to exalt what I understand to be the broader definition of dreamwork: the practice of weaving a living bridge between the seen and the unseen, an endeavour that can only be made with patience, an aptitude for grief, and a willingness to assume a stake in the way things turn out, even if we won’t live to see the benefits. This is the practice of belonging. > In north-east India, high in the mountains of Meghalaya, the summer monsoons are so heavy that the rivers running through its valleys grow wild and unpredictable, making them impossible to cross. Centuries ago, the villagers came up with an artful solution. They planted a strangler fig on the riverbank and began to coax its ravelling roots across the river until they took hold on the opposite side. > > Through a slow process of binding and weaving the roots together, the villagers created a sturdy, living bridge that could withstand the deluge of the summer rains. But because it is a labour that cannot be completed in any one person’s lifetime, the knowledge of how to bind and tend to the roots has to be transmitted to each of the younger generations who keep the practice alive, contributing to what is now a thrilling network of living root bridges throughout the valleys of Meghalaya. > Most of us think of belonging as a mythical place, that if we keep diligently searching for, we might eventually find. But what if belonging isn’t a place at all, but a skill: a set of competencies that we, in modern life, have lost or forgotten? Like the living bridge, these competencies are the ways in which we can coax, weave, and tend to the roots of our separation—and in so doing, restore our membership in belonging. > It is my hope that you will be turned upside down, as I have, in your reclamation of the language and competencies of belonging. Where once it was a noun, an elusive object always beyond my grasp, it has become a verb for me: the living practice focused no longer on attainment or possession, but on the deep attending and weaving into love. May it become a verb in your life as well. > > Like an idyllic valley cradled on all sides by mountains who protect it from influence and encroachment, there is a place within each of us that is in a continual dance of belonging together. All of the species of trees and birds, insects, frogs, fungi, and soil are necessary ingredients in this exquisite blend of chaotic integrity. > > Similarly, there is a place within us where everything should be allowed to flower in its own time and way. The way of nature is to accept everything just as it is. Whether with fruits or blossoms, compost or storms, everything has something to contribute to the whole. All of the tributaries from above trickle down into a gathering river that, wild and clean, rushes through our centre in a ceaseless baptism of this too belongs. > > After all this time searching for a mysterious place in union with others and out in the world, may you find there was a home you’ve always-never known waiting within. Unaware as you may have been, it has gone on chirping and creaking and mutually flourishing, waiting for you to stop seeking and allow yourself to belong. > > As you learn to walk with this ever-allowing, others catch glimpses of their intactness in your mirror. This is the great irony of belonging: that in all your searching for a home of love, it was yours to give away all along. And the real reward of your quest is to fling your doors open and let your life become a shelter of belonging for others. ## The waiting stairs > Like so many others, my quest for belonging was seeded in alienation. I remember a recurring scene at the dinner table when, after an episode of hurt, I would run upstairs to my room in tears, desperate for my mother to come after me and coax me back into belonging. But she never came. Instead, I would creep back onto the stairs outside the kitchen, secretly listening to my family going on without me while my belly rumbled with hunger. > > And though we all have our version of the waiting stairs, at its heart this is what it is to feel outside of belonging. It is the excruciating belief that you are not needed. That life does not consider you necessary. When nobody comes after you with invitations, it confirms your worst fear and sends you pushing further into the province of exile, even towards the cold beckoning of death. > If you can stand fully in your own unbelonging and become friendly with the terrors of loneliness and exclusion, you can no longer be governed by your avoidance of them. In other words, you are on your way home. ## Rebellion as necessary ritual > The pathologizing of rebellion in teenagers is one of the great harms we inflict upon our children. As the future shapers of our culture, there is a reason why so many cultures perform ritual initiations into adulthood. Rebellion, if given proper reverence, is the necessary confrontation with society that ensures our sustainability. Just as any relationship must allow for the tension of conflict to deepen our intimacy, so must our young people be invited to contribute their disagreements to our shared aliveness. This is a threshold in a young person’s life when the dynamic between elders and youngers reverses. No longer is the old one in the position to teach, but now must become the listener. After all these elders have imparted, personally and vicariously through culture, they now have the chance at hearing from the young ones how they’ve been doing. > > It is here that the ache and rage of unbelonging is most needed. In the young person’s disagreements and willingness to talk back to injustice, a wild storehouse of creative energy lives and thrives. While other cultures treat this transition with enormous significance, we make a tragic mess of it, treating our young people as aberrant and unruly, needing to be reformed and taught obedience. Instead of inviting the new adult into a seat of authority in our circle of belonging, asking them to galvanize our outdated structures, their passion is driven into shame and repression. > > This rejection has consequences. When the emerging power, both physiological and psychic, is overtly rejected, it can never fulfil its purpose as the foundation of self-worth that it is. Without the welcoming ritual which says, “your blood is necessary, your anger is valuable, your pain is meaningful,” the young person finds no place to commit his allegiance and drifts instead into greater distances of alienation. ## The archetype of outcast > As a consequence of having exposed your true nature somewhere it was rejected, you become protective of those places. You can’t bear to be hurt again, so you refuse to reveal who you really are anymore. You stop living from that place of truth and, over time, unwillingness turns into an alienation from your own nature. > > Over time we no longer feel the acuteness of that which is missing from us. Instead, the absence itself becomes malignant and spreads like an indistinguishable depression or anxiety. Quite simply put, when we feel outcast, we are being shown the parts of ourselves we have cast out. > Our dreams are the first place where the alienated self will appear. Psychic energy that has been cast out can take many forms as it compulsively tries to re-belong to us. This is why I tell people that dark dreams are a validation, in and of themselves, because they mean that something is ready to come to consciousness. Nightmares are just dreams that have turned up their volume, trying devotedly to get our attention for something that is ready to be healed. But if we continue to ignore it, this rejected energy may take the shape of psychological symptoms like anxiety, panic attacks, rage, or depression. > As Jungian analyst Ann Bedford Ulanov puts it, “As the instincts are to the body, so the archetypes are to the psyche.” In other words, archetypes are innate reflexes which get triggered by certain conditions in our environment and, whether for better or worse, determine how we react and behave. ## Belonging as a gift to others > Just as it had been in childhood, absenting myself was really motivated by a longing to be felt as missing. And while this strategy helped me survive those early years, it was now outdated and revealing itself as lacking in real bravery. > > So long as we keep aspects of ourselves hidden from view because we believe only an edited or presentational version of who we are will be accepted by others, we are depriving ourselves of belonging. But also—and here’s the piece that takes some real practice to see—depriving others of belonging with us. > Your small disappearances, your holding back, your choosing to forget, is what breaks the momentum of our belonging together. ## Scarcity and worthiness > But what if worthiness depends on our belonging together? Worth is really another way of saying ‘plenty.’ It is the resting state of abundance. This is our natural state when we live in solidarity with others and in harmony with our environment. When we each contribute our unique gifts and abilities to the whole, we always have more than we need. Conversely, when things go wrong, we shoulder it together, lessening the load for us all. > > Only from a place of combined resources can we begin to defeat the Death Mother in our culture. As we dismantle those inherited values from our intrinsic dignity, we begin to make contact with a unique vision for ourselves and the world we live in. > Though we are led to think the opposite, I believe the self is the macrocosm through which the outside culture is shaped. So rather than thinking of inner work as selfish, we can see it as a service to the cultural consciousness. In order to heal the scarcity wound—created by the lack of nurturing both in our families and in our culture—we must learn to become the loving mother to ourselves that we never had. This ‘remothering’ is the ongoing practice, tremendously helped by a mentor, of learning to care for your body’s needs, validating and express- ing your feelings (even if they’re unpopular), holding healthy boundaries, supporting your life choices, and most of all — being welcoming towards all that is yet unsolved in your heart. > > The reason I love working with dreams to heal trauma is that dreams cast our problems into images we can relate to. They give our patterns form so that we can begin to understand them as psychodynamics. Like the poisoned apple that jumps from Snow White’s throat with the Prince’s kiss, the poison is no longer operating from within but becomes something we can actively work with outside of ourselves. From this tangible perspective, it becomes less fearsome and more approachable. And while this can be a terrifying process, every time we look it in the eye, it loses power over us. > One of the first terrifying steps on the way to belong- ing is to differentiate our indigenous voice from the voice of the Death Mother, both as she appears in our personal lives and how she expresses herself in cultural norms. ## False belonging > For some people, there is a single defining moment when an internal vow of smallness was made. For others, this cringing of the spirit comes from a repetitive and insidious rivulet of disapproving glares, mocking jeers, or shaming of their particular flair. Sometimes, it is the eclipsing nature of another’s personality in whose shadow you lived. But we do learn it. We learn that if we want to fit in, we must split off, shrink down, and make ourselves silent or invisible. > > We learn to live life with a limited palette of colours considered acceptable for public expression, while the darker, more vivid gradients of the human condition are stricken from the conversation. Driven into isolation, our secret grief, hidden failings, shameful desires, and vulnerabilities can survive the whole length of a life in concealment, refugees even from our own view. But by dissociating from the fullness of our being, we become much more susceptible to what the poet John O’-Donohue calls “the trap of false belonging.” > > Our longing for community and purpose is so powerful that it can drive us into joining established groups, systems of belief, or even employments and relationships that, to our diminished or divided self, give the impression of belonging to something greater. But these places often have their own motives and hidden contracts. They grant us conditional membership, requiring us to cut parts of ourselves off in order to fit in. Rather than committing to the slow accumulation of intimacy that it takes to weave a life of true belonging, we try to satisfy our longing by living in marginalizing places. > But everyone is born with a set of sacred agreements to a higher authority than those of this world. Like a pole star, there is a divine Self which directs and shapes our lives into what we’re meant to become. Sooner or later, we must navigate by our star’s light, or risk being lost in the dark night of the soul. ^8119bc ## Silence > The moment something precious goes into concealment is difficult to pinpoint, but it is often a strategy for survival in too harsh a world. In the attempt to safeguard ourselves against vulnerability, we send our gifts underground. Later in life, this separation manifests in crisis or through lethargy and depression. A spiritual or creative paralysis can develop from the prolonged silencing of one’s gifts. This self-imposed exile may once have protected us, but now the energy it takes to keep quiet drains us. > There are as many kinds of silence as there are voices in the world. There is the silence between musical notes, which is a gathering of good tension; the silence that comes on suddenly when it is captivated by beauty; the silence that invites another’s story to be heard; the silence that waits for an opening to reveal itself. But the kind of quiet that is inherited or administered by shame is a darkening shroud upon the wholeness of one’s sincerity. > > If something important is left unsaid, everything in its wake is less truthfully spoken. Some lives are intricately constructed around remaining silent. Maybe there was a cruelty, a violence, a volatility which terrified us into silence; perhaps it is the quiet that grows out of being discouraged; or maybe it’s because the private language of things feels too sacred to be exposed. Whatever the origin or collateral against which a silence may be held, over time it can breed an ambience of isolation from which we suffer, but in which we are also paradoxically complicit. > > Silence is a power because it keeps what’s tender, what’s vulnerable, away from scrutiny, criticism, dismissal, interruption, and exile. The keeper of silence has tremendous control. What she keeps sealed away can never be harmed so long as it remains hidden. Silence is a power, yes, but when does silence turn upon its keeper and become the captor? When does it inhibit the natural impulse to speak, the urge to sing, the longing to contribute? So many wait for the express invitation to speak, for some permission to be granted, to be coaxed into contributing. But what if this invitation never comes? When does silence stop us from fulfilling our purpose, or making connections with others? > > When does silence stop a healthy disagreement, like the one that names an injustice and invokes change? When is silence being complicit, when it should be calling on a revolution waiting to happen? > Like this book—which is more than itself, but the culminate offering of trees and sunlight, minerals and language— your story is a contributing piece of another great culmination. As you salvage all that’s been shunned in your heart, embodying it back into its rightful belonging, you are one of the gentle multitude who are restoring Eros to our world. Through every act of following the feminine, giving her the authority to guide Logos, yours is the great love story of heartbreak being redeemed. ## Yin vs yang > When we go inwards at night, we are restoring ourselves to the multiplicity of our coherence. It is a kind of ‘innernet’ where dreams, visions and insights are transmitted. Here, we find a true centre from which to relate meaningfully to the rest of the world. > The feminine is in direct conversation with that which joins us to all living beings. It is the mystical path that turns us to our own senses, and to the living world around us for guidance and collaboration. We need no mediating authority to grant us permission or tell us how to heal or bring life into the world, because there is a greater authority, a vital impulse which is flowing through each of us at all times. And it is our network, our combined wisdom and experience, our dedication to belonging to one another, which is our true source of power. > Yin is the eternal, or what Rumi calls “the reedbed.” It is the place from which all beings have been plucked and to which we will all, some day, return. Like an ecosystem, yin considers all components essential. Ideas that emerge from this level of imagination serve more than the individual cause—they serve the great togetherness unto which we are all responsible. > > Yang is our direction, focus and backbone. With piercing clarity, yang takes a stand and sticks to it. It is assertive, analytical and works independently. It knows how to discriminate and cuts away the excess. It builds systems and follows through when something needs to be done. Yang is the arrow that speeds to its target, turning our dreams into realities. > ... receptivity is associated with the strengths of yin: waiting, listening, accepting, and magnetizing us to the things that reverberate with our well-being. > To receive well is to know the wisdom of surrender. Yin chooses to yield even when everyone else is getting ahead. Like an inner earth, yin is the soil in which we gestate our dreams, refine our intuition, listen to our bodies, and come into the stillness of our centre. When actions arise from the receptive still point they have real meaning. Ideas that emerge from this level of imagination serve more than the individual: they serve the great ecosystem from which our well-being is drawn. ## Exile and rebellion > The compromise you cannot make is often what leads to initiation. It says, “Will you stand by this? Will you bear the process of attrition? Will you find what’s true within and vow to protect it? Will you trust in the unknown enough to let it carry you into new ranges of belonging?” > > Exile may be self-chosen, like Siddhartha leaving the castle to live amongst the poor; or forced upon us, like the Ugly Duckling who is rejected by his brothers and sisters, or Quasimodo and all the aberrant weirdos who are sent to live in towers or to wander the world alone. But exile is an important and necessary separation from the group or society, meant to bring us into relationship with our resilience and originality. Sadly, in Western culture we don’t have any ceremonial rites of passage to help our young people feel necessary, so they may turn to violence to express their unacknowledged power. If not done consciously, life will find another way to initiate us. As Jung so eloquently put it, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” > We think of rebellion as something we put to external service in the world: we become activists in protest of some wrongdoing, some injustice we must speak against. But I think there is a rebellion before the rebellion—a more intimate form of protest speaking from and for the devalued feminine. > > The feminine has nothing to gain. She doesn’t vie for leverage. She doesn’t want to prove anything or achieve dominion. She does something infinitely more rebellious. She strips falsity and stirs up feeling in the anaesthetized heart. She awakens a kind of long memory throughout and beyond ages. She gives shape to the swelling and collapsing heart. That is all; but it is so much. Because when we sing with her voice, anyone who hears it remembers what they too have forgotten: that we are noble, and beholden to each other. > > Rebellion is the pushback on that long-standing amnesia. Like nausea rejects a poisonous substance, rebellion wants to see what is beneath falsity. What is really enduring when all else is stripped away? What longing, if we undam it, might pound through our lives, bringing life to the dryness of an over- harvested creekbed within? What if there is a story coming through us which is trying to find its way into the world? If we can withstand the trials of exile, can we have the chance at turning that story into something that shows others that they aren’t alone? ## The inner wild > Most of us feel an agonizing longing to contribute something meaningful to the deficits of our time. But weeks, months and even years can disappear in just keeping up on the treadmill of life’s demands. We are in a constant state of being responsive to the world’s requirements of us. Whether it’s our everyday to-do list, which never seems to shrink, or how we wait to be notified of opportunities and invitations, this ‘call and response’ relationship with the external world is such a deeply ingrained habit that we barely know another way to live. But the truth is, if we really want to make an eloquent offering of our lives, we have to step out of that dependency on the external world and locate our source of guidance within. > Unconsciously, we’re terrified to turn away from the world; we think we’re putting our ‘heads in the sand,’ or that we’ll lose everything if we don’t keep pace. But the truth is that there is a different rhythm trying to temper us from within. If we shift our responsiveness from the outer to the inner world, allowing for a periodic ebbing of our external effectiveness, we come to see that it’s in service to a more harmonious way with our own bodies and with our greater earthbody. > There are many practices that can stimulate our reconnection to the instinctual self. Anything that involves us with the natural world—like digging in the dirt, walking in the woods, learning ancestral skills, eating food we’ve foraged or grown, and hanging out with undomesticated animals—can mirror for us how to get back to our own animal bodies. Dance and somatic play are especially wonderful in rekindling pleasurable ways to be in our bodies, which are so often treated as utilitarian machines. So is playing with art supplies; not to produce art, but to enjoy colours and textures and find the shapes of our feelings. > > My favourite entryway into the instinctual wild is through the dreamtime. The first necessity of dreamwork is to receive a dream. In this far-from-passive act, receptivity is the central feminine principle that invites mystery to approach us. In dreams, the mysterious wild Other must be courted by the right conditions—coaxed out of the metaphorest with gentle cooing, indirect attention and steady remaining stillness. If you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of her gleaming feathers, a piercing gaze, her glistening coat, and realize that she’s been watching you all along—waiting for you to get quiet and brave enough to remember her. ^2b0f99 > When you dream of a wild animal, you are touching the part of yourself that can never be domesticated. The animal heart lives according to an ancient set of laws. She doesn’t care about politics and politeness and never takes more than she should. She reminds you of your nobility, your physical magnificence, and the unselfconscious power of instinct. The animal heart sees clearly what the intellect cannot because it follows the innate knowing of the earth itself. > > The animal heart lives behind logic, below reason, under- neath the armour of objectivity. She has lived longer than any of us can remember because it was from her belly that we were born. Half-sighted as we are, we forget and deny her, building our platforms on what we think is her grave. But she is far from dead. She stays hidden not because she is timid, but because she is wise. And if she comes out to greet you, know that you are trustworthy of her approach. ^a3b90f ## The Riddle Mother > Rather than answering everything, it’s important to remember that there are certain questions that should be cherished. In dreamwork, there is a complex alchemy that brews in our not-knowing, which is essential to our becoming worthy of a dream’s revelation. As Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés tells us, there are those who used to refer to the dreammaker as the “Riddle Mother” because when you carry your question into sleep, she responds to it with a riddle. Like any good fairy tale, the task is not to find a direction, but to let the quest shape you into the kind of person who knows which way to go. > So much of dreamwork and, conversely, belonging, is about making ourselves hospitable to mystery. Hospitality is the art of opening a space in our home for someone to arrive there. Rather than forcing the expectation that our needs be met, we make a courtship of that which we are curious about or admire. So let us make our lives alluring. Let us stand with a respectful distance and make an invitation of ourselves, that wildness might decide to approach us. Let us re-member ourselves to the mysterious unknown, even when we hear nothing back. Let us keep returning to that uncomfortable silence and allow ourselves to be shaped by our yearning for answers. ^f3e31a ## Creativity > Creativity is one of those intimidating words, like artist, musician, writer, and so on, which has been co-opted to mean something rarefied and unreachable. We think of ourselves as being ‘a creative type’ or not, as if it were a quality bestowed on the chosen few. But if we decolonize the word and take it back to its true origins, we find the Latin root crescere, a word which means to come forth, spring up, grow, thrive, swell. Like the crescent moon, creativity is the living impulse in each of us which continually begins again. > > Whether we are inventing a new recipe, combining outfits, or simply looking at things in a new way, we are compelled to recreate our world again and again. When things get too stagnant or comfortable, we begin to feel restless and wild. Our vitality is inextricably bound up with creativity. The instinct to create is what keeps life pulsing through our veins. Like Kahlil Gibran writes about trees in an orchard, “They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” > Whether through dreams or ‘gap time’ in our schedules, creativity is something that natures through us when we give it the room it needs. “It takes a lot of time to be a genius,” wrote Gertrude Stein, “you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.” > > From this perspective, originality is not something you invent so much as an utterance through you by your origins. By origins I mean that Grandmother Well from which every human being drinks. That which is dreaming us. You might call it god, nature, source, instinct, but whatever word you use, it is an act of great unfolding through us. - This makes me think of John Ruskin being left alone to study the carpet on the floor for hours. It makes me think of how I like the defintion of nature as "origin". > Originality then becomes the practice of unhindering what’s already there. This work is essential to belonging because your creative offering is like a holy signal to those who carry a similar vibratory signature. In hearing or seeing what you’ve created, they will find a sense of belonging with you and, by being found, so will you. - I love the idea of a creative offering as a holy signal. > Initially, there is a dark fog you must pass through. I like to think of that fog as a curtain which obscures the outside world and turns us towards ourselves. Like the bowl that has yet to be filled, there is an emptiness that precedes creativity that is alive with potential. With ordinary eyes, it’s easy to mistake this emptiness for stagnancy. We may think, “I have nothing of sub- stance to offer! I have no original ideas!” But down at the invisible base of things, there is a holy dance taking place. Though we may want to run from the tension, the polarities are in constant motion, readying themselves into harmony. Far from dormant, this dance is the active receptivity that calls things into form. We are such a vessel. These times of ‘nothingness’ are actually busy with living into a new capacity. > > Originality comes when you stay close to that emptiness, making it a welcoming place, adorning it with your divine longing, learning the shape of it, and filling it with your questions. Every great artist I know is obsessed with a question, and their artworks are less attempts to answer that question than they are exaltations of asking. As Jean Cocteau says, “The poet doesn’t invent. He listens.” > We need more wayshowers, who have penetrated the fog of their own uncertainty to find something truthful. Something human and tragic and beautifully lost, something small but utterly true. Like cupping your hands around a tiny flame, if you can protect the young embers from the harsh winds of your dismissal, it may become a real heartfire. That fire then becomes a beacon for others to sail towards. Not to imitate it, but to emulate its quality of bravery, which has been left like a vibratory signature on the thing you’ve made. Paradoxically, there is nothing new in eternity, but what is new is your alchemical en- counter with it. ## Perfectionism > Perfectionism is one of the great pillars of patriarchy, used to stem the rise of the wild feminine. > Psychically speaking, there is no such thing as perfection. In dreams, we come to learn that as soon as a room is perfectly tidy and clean, someone tracks dirt in, or a rat begins scratching in the floorboards. In other words, the moment we give into the belief that we’ve reached attainment—or that we’re done with personal work and have risen above suffering, pain, or shadows—darkness will come calling. Nature will always take what is too high and bring it down to earth. > > In some aesthetic traditions, like the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, artists will go out of their way to put a flaw into a creation that is too perfect. As the author Richard Powell explains it, “Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. This Buddhist approach is wonderfully respectful of darkness and the wisdom it can bring into our creativity, lives and relationships.” > This bittersweet quality is what the Spanish call duende. Duende is thought of as a goblin or dark daimon that possesses the artist in a moment of pure, magnetic honesty. The artist must, as the poet Federico García Lorca says, “rob herself of skill and security, send away her muse and become helpless, that her Duende might come and deign to fight her hand to hand…” ## Enthusiasm > As you begin to dance with a safe dose of chaos, be wary of any influence in your environment that dismisses or judges your enthusiasm. Without it, you would become anaesthetized to life itself. Anyone who demands this smallness of you is in danger themselves and may have contracted this insidious, deadening monotone. Enthusiasm is the vitality of spirit, ex- pressing itself through us, and its grace in our voice should be welcomed and cherished. The word originates in the early 17th century, from the Greek *enthousiasmos* meaning ‘possessed by god.’ Now, more than ever, the world needs your enlargement, your weirdness, your fiery crescendos of rebellion from boring. ## Dreamwork > While learning to understand the language of dreams is an art form that takes years to master, there is one question that can almost always take you into the heart of a dream’s meaning: “What is the strongest feeling in my dream?” While so many aspects of our dreams are dressed in symbol and metaphor, feelings are never disguised. They are honest representations of the feelings you are having, or not having, in waking life. Even if we don’t have associations to a certain dream figure, we always know how we feel about them. > In the Taoist way of understanding creation, there is a nu- anced spectrum between the polarities rather than a clear-cut boundary between positive and negative. And like any continuum, the opposites are always in a conversation with each other. Negative doesn’t mean bad, it simply means opposed to the way things are. Like stones in a river, there are obstructions that arise in the flow which must be navigated. In mathematics, negativity is the space between and around matter. As we explored in the Chinese yin-yang symbol, negativity is the open, yin-like receptivity between actions. So if we remix those definitions, negative emotions are a disagreement with how things are and, if we are receptive to them, they can change the way we are navigating our lives. > Far from the flaccid suggestion that when something isn’t working we must “let it go,” Kali is the ruthless power behind ‘negative emotions’ that clears the way for new life. She is the boundaries Anger wants. She is the pounding of Grief’s river, rushing us to new vistas. She is the freedom Anxiety shakes for. She is the siren of change that Boredom signals. She is the expansion into which Fear longs to cross. > > Just as fire can transform food from its raw form into something digestible, our darknesses are radical transformers. Instead of airbrushing our personalities, we should practice at exaggerating our blemishes, leaning into our stagnancy, wounding, and discomforts. If we really want to evolve, all we have to do is be more expressly where we are. > > As an Ambassadress of the Darkness, my message to embrace these uncomfortable emotions is sometimes misinterpreted as an invitation to wallow, or let your base impulses run wild. But what I’m really talking about is getting out from under spiritual override long enough to acknowledge the validity of your feelings. Yessing your conflict doesn’t mean staying in it. It means making a compassionate encounter with your difficult feelings until they reveal their hidden intelligence. > > For most of us, enlightenment isn’t a sudden awakening, but a slow process of shining the light of consciousness onto those rejected, forgotten, and denied places within. ## Dark guests > Learning to grieve well must begin with the self. There are ruins in each of us. A place where ‘what once was’ lives on like an echo, haunting the landscape of our lives with its weathered foundations. Abandoned, scavenged, and dismantled by time, the ruin is the holiest place in our heart. It is the ways in which we have been broken that have earned us a place to stand. It is in our life’s absences that a wild longing is born. This ruined place is a temple in which to worship, to throw down our grief and our forgetting, and praise what remains. After all, these remains are the evidence of how greatly we have loved and they should be venerated as the legacy of survival that they are. > The events of your loss, the discrepancies in your upbringing, the deficits in your making, are what shape you uniquely. Your limitations are what give rise to the imagination, and your regrets are what put you into right relationship with your future. So you must bless every grief you’ve encountered on your exquisite and treacherous courtship of Self, for they’ve made you the slow diamond that you are. Like rain, the more excellently and prodigiously you grieve, the more growth and fertility you can expect. There is a future beyond the aridity and meaninglessness in our times that is teeming with life. If each of us has the tenacity to retrieve the elixirs of our discomforts, our combined medicine can heal the collective wound. > Resilience is our ability to meet with difficult feelings and setbacks, and not only trust in our capacity to adapt and recover from them, but to find something redemptive hidden within adversity. > There is a special quality of stillness in a person who encounters their shadow wholeheartedly. Your body may relax in their company because it understands, in the subtle communications of their presence, that nothing is excluded in themselves, or you, from belonging. Such a person, who has given up guarding against the shadow, who has come to wear their scars with dignity, no longer squirms from discomfort or bristles at suffering. They no longer brace in avoidance of conflict. They carry a deep willingness to dance with the inconstancy of life. They’ve given up distancing as a strategy, and made vulnerability their ally. > Because we often think of vulnerability as a negative trait which leaves us exposed to harm, I thought we could do with a new word which acknowledges its power: *vulnerabravery*. Instead of putting up our defences when we meet with conflict, vulnerabravery is the conscious choice to keep our heart open so that we might discover what’s hidden within it. It is a great paradox that when we let ourselves be undefended we find our true strength. ^84e372 > I have a dear friend and mentor named Rita who, for the last five years, gets up with first light and begins chipping away with a small axe at a giant root in the centre of her garden. Her vision is to make room for a bench to enjoy the company of the many perennials she has planted around that spot. Even though she could rent a machine that would dig the root out in one fell swoop, instead she makes this humble progress her daily ritual. **Healing is like this. Relinquishing the race to arrive for a tender devotion to being present with what is.** ## The body > The body is the home we never leave, though some of us may try. It is the place where our soul has taken root for a lifetime and it is only through the body’s senses that we come to know the world in which we live. It is with our hands that we offer tenderness, our voices that speak truths, our ears that differentiate noise from music, and our feet that take a stand. It is in the souring of our bellies that we know the wrong way, the rising of our temperature that expresses our longing, and our hearts that flutter at the anticipation of newness. > > The body is also the first place of separation from belonging, where we leave our mother’s body to become our own person. It is the terrible-wonderful learning ground upon which we come to know where we end and where otherness begins. > > For those whose mother was absent or lacking in kindness, there is a much harder road ahead in recognizing and navigating pain. If you never knew the comfort and safety of a mother’s presence, you will have grown up, as I did, unaware of the value in attending with presence to your body’s needs and feelings. ^1ba640 > As Paul Levy so beautifully puts it, “we have the precious opportunity to liberate these ancestral, rhizomic strands of trauma which extend far back in time and equally far into the future, but which also converge and are spread throughout the present in the form of the society and culture in which we live. We can be the ones to break the link in the chain and dissolve these insidious, mycelium-like threads, which are literally the warp and weft upon which the tapestry of the past, present, and future history of our species is woven.” > In an unconscious bid to gain or retain belonging, so much of our lives are constructed around how to be useful and impressive. But when you’re no longer entertaining or can be of service, what of you is left? As anyone who has been in long-term pain or illness knows, there is a deep humbling that takes place in injury. All the anglings of the personality to ‘get going’ or ‘push through’ are made useless and you are brought down into the very essentials of your beingness. > Rumi says that to cry out in weakness is what invites healing to pour in towards it. He writes, “All medicine wants is pain to cure.” How strong one must be to allow themselves to be seen in their weakness. And how brave the other to be unwaveringly helpless. Pain took me into the practice of showing up empty-handed and still being loveable. Pain and injury and illness ask us to consider that our lives are worthy without justification. > True healing is an unglamorous process of living into the long lengths of pain. Forging forward in the darkness. Holding the tension between hoping to get well and the acceptance of what is happening. Tendering a devotion to the impossible task of recovery, while being willing to live with the permanence of a wound; befriending it with an earnest tenacity to meet it where it lives without pushing our agenda upon it. But here’s the paradox: you must accept what is happening while also keeping the heart pulsing towards your becoming, however slow and whispering it may be. ## Ancestry > We imagine, and sometimes witness, the pride a person feels in carrying an ancestral heritage. It is as if they are made richer, stronger and more dignified by their inheritance of a long-standing tradition. Maybe in hearing our ancestral songs or language, or seeing a dance in ceremonial clothes, or even tasting a meal that’s been prepared the same way since anyone can remember, we are suddenly transported into the depth of our longing to be woven into an older story that ennobles our own life as the fruiting from an ancient tree of kin. ## Separation and longing > Many spiritual traditions put an emphasis on detachment from our desire-nature that causes ‘endless suffering,’ but this is often misinterpreted to mean that we should bury, suppress, or rise above longing. Different from desire, which is the projection of our longing onto form and is always interested in being satisfied, longing is not something to be quelled. > Lovers are drawn together through their longing, sometimes creating life itself in their coupling. Eventually the time comes for the child to leave his mother’s womb, and a longing is born to keep returning to her breast, that sweet comfort of safety and nourishment. But one day the child must separate from his mother, becoming his own person. Until one day, he grows a longing for the tenderness of a lover and the cycle begins again. This is the rhythm of life itself. The togetherness is what breeds apartness, and in that separation, a longing for to- getherness is born. > Loving again would mean doing so from a broader and more complex understanding of life itself, including the ambiguous partners of betrayal with trust, exile with belonging, separation with attachment. In the same way that Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden for eating from the Tree of Knowledge, there is a price to pay for consciousness—but the gift of consciousness is a more mature and nuanced relationship to life. I think this is the true meaning of forgiveness: not to forget what has happened to you, but to stop wishing it had been different. To choose it after the fact. ^fd6b7b > We are learning in every moment how to fully belong to a choice, an idea, a place, our body, a relationship, a regret, a loss, our story. All of this can be contained within a single embodied moment. > Though your body may be trembling with the terror of being that close to your edge, it won’t always be this way. You will eventually become able to belong yourself to it. The time will one day come when you shake less and laugh sooner. > The awareness of our separateness is what often brings on despondency and despair. We begin to think of our small human lives as inconsequential, even unnecessary, to the great diversity of things. If we let this awareness unconsciously drive us, our lives can become endless treadmills of desperation. Wishing to create a legacy, to make a mark, to create evidence of our specialness, we build from the lowly perspective of the drop. Forgetting our belonging to the greater ocean body, we become trapped in this cult of individualism, where nothing we achieve can ever be enough. > > But purpose, in its purest sense, is not that different from being an organ in a body. By themselves organs are useless—unless they work together, in their wholly individualized ways, to serve the greater body. So Rumi asks us to hold both: we are not separate, but also we are. We are these completely unique individuals who are capable of infinite configurations of innovation and beauty, but we are embedded within and entirely dependent upon the larger ocean of allness. > > In the mystical way of understanding it, longing is a memory of belonging to god. As we follow our personal longing, we are coming back into that original coherence. Though we need to learn how to live with the grief of having lost the traditions of our ancestry, we can reconnect through our longing to the origins from which those traditions were birthed. > I do not know what hungered in me to connect these chapters, to collect these disparate names; what in me was longing for a coming together, a cohesion, both a beginning and a proper burial. It is like the effort of the spider who lets the wind sway her as it will, but then, in the brevity of its pauses, works with all her upwards might at the invisible structure to create a new plane between things. I do not know what kept me in search of the familiar, but perhaps it is the same thing that swims salmon, or murmurs starlings. Maybe it is the earth upon which I’d not yet tread but which my body remembers from before the before, whose landscape is always pulling me home. ^219538 > It is liberating to consider that when we heal an ancestral pattern, we are healing backwards through time, liberating all those souls who were left unresolved, unforgiven and misunderstood. ^e404ad ## Jung and alchemy > Taken symbolically, alchemy is about turning the lower, primitive aspects of the self into a purified state; to illuminate the darkness with a sense of value or meaning, making conscious what is unconscious. This becoming whole is the process Jung called individuation, which is what we’re doing with dreamwork and belonging. > > One of the key conditions necessary for alchemical transformation was a hermetically sealed vessel that could withstand the pressure necessary to synthesize base elements, that prima materia, into gold. I’d like to propose that commitment is that container. Like the alchemical crucible, commitment is the vessel in which something raw and undisciplined can be transformed into something valuable. Commitment is like a womb in which a new life can grow. > > It is hermetically sealed so that nothing extraneous can enter into the process. No projections can be made upon it, no introduced doubt or criticism can reach it during its critical formative stages. But it’s also sealed for our own good, so that we don’t have an easy out. In times of exhaustion and suffering, fear and frustration, we must hold the tension of wanting to give up while remaining committed long enough for the process to complete itself. ## Commitment > What is needed to bring about the new world you yearn for but devotion to its course? The calling is in your blood, like a vow that was made for you. Everything your dream requires is within the provisions of your being. If nature didn’t intend you to succeed, why would you have been given the urge to? All a dream asks is for your vow to be made back, through every small contraction and expansion, renewed in a continuous ten- dering of devotion. ## A knife > Consider, for example, a knife you use every day. Like most people, you probably bought yours in a group with others just like it, at a large store in your neighbourhood. It was likely made by a machine that was created expressly for the purpose of making things efficiently and homogeneously. The knife performs a kind of slavery for you in its endless cutting of things that you consume. Because that is the extent of your relationship with the instrument, it is reflected in the way you use it. > > But imagine for a moment that your knife wasn’t like any others. Imagine you sought out a bladesmith, who procured the metal from a miner whose lifetime has been spent collecting iron from the earth, and who knows the ancient alchemy of alloying elements. Then imagine your bladesmith shapes it in a fire he always keeps alive at a forging heat. Notice its handle is carved in bone, only one of the precious elements of a fully esteemed deer who was killed in a night-long hunt that bestowed its hunter the honour of its death. Then imagine your bladesmith is allied with a leatherworker who has cleaned, tanned and tailored the deerskin into a sheath that protects your blade which also sits snugly at your hip. > > A knife like this would humble you with its beauty. Every time you felt its weight in your hand, you would remember the earth that gave of its bones to become your blade. You would think of the man who lives in the dark to find your metals. You would remember the fire, fuelled by so many trees that gave their lives for the heat. You would be astonished at the artfulness your bladesmith has mastered with his life, as well as your indebtedness to his skills. Every time you sheath your knife, you’d think of the deer who ran through the dark forest by the strength of its brave heart, and the hunter who left a generous offering to the deer’s spirit, whose body would feed his family for a half a year. ## Pleasure > Our capacity for embodied pleasure depends on our ability to receive, which is like a muscle that can atrophy if it’s been habitually contracted. A learned sense of unworthiness can act as a barrier against our well-being, keeping us from opening to the beauty that’s all around us. Whether it’s our ability to receive positive feedback and support, or to expect things to work out in our favour, we may be distrustful of goodness even when it stands on our doorstep. > Even thinking about pleasure brings pleasure. At any given moment we can attune ourselves to well-being, which is a tributary of belonging. It is that place in our hearts where we are grateful for all that we’re receiving and, for a moment, want nothing more. ## Dreams associated with lack of yin > When we’re not observing yin, we might have dreams that we’re driving out of control. In waking life, this might look like busyness or a constancy of ambition to get somewhere with your endeavours. Dreams like this are asking us to put the brakes on. To come into quietude and well-being before we make ourselves sick, or burn out completely. > > A similar dream is the inability to find a bathroom or find privacy to use the toilet. Since the bathroom is the one true place of solitude in the house, it is the symbolic out-breath; the place where we check in with our feeling body and release what we’ve been holding. If you have one of these frustrated bathroom dreams, you will likely notice a corresponding lack of pleasure and well-being in waking life. ## Receiving > One of the reasons we avoid the receptive state is because it’s scary. We’ve all heard the old adage, “It’s better to give than to receive.” But giving and receiving happen simultaneously: they are interdependent acts. And underneath the phrase is the unspoken suggestion that to receive is to be the weak one, the needy one, the poor one. Of course, from this perspective most of us would rather be the ‘giver’ than the ‘taker.’ The giver is rich and secure and doesn’t need anyone’s help. But taken to its extreme, giving becomes pathological. > I’ve heard it said that the soul doesn’t live inside our body but that it is more like a womb in which we are contained. With some practice, you can drop the perceived boundaries of your ‘self’ and tune into the larger womb that stretches far beyond your own body. Imagine that it extends several feet beyond your body, then several metres, and see how far you can extend your perception. Feel how you can then draw on the nutrients and support of that womb so your ‘small self’ doesn’t have to do it all alone. ## Hospitality > We spend so much time worrying about how to approach our future that we rarely consider how approachable we might be. We armour ourselves with savvy, strength, and certification so that when our moment arrives we feel sufficiently prepared. But with our shoulder always to the wheel of life, we can miss the very encounter we’ve been preparing for. To be approachable to life, to each other, and to mystery, we have to cultivate an inner hospitality. Like the host who prepares an extra helping of food, a fire in the hearth, and a seat at the table even when guests aren’t expected, belonging always begins with an invitation. > Whether we are looking to create closeness with others, with nature, or with the living mystery, an invitational presence is the prerequisite to any form of intimacy. Like the physical flinging open of our doors to guests, we can cultivate a quality of hospitality in our presence which signals to the other that they are welcome in our company just as they are. This quality naturally emerges when we put down our own manoeuvrings long enough to be truly interested who someone is, what they need, and what they love. Simply put, it is to clear an opening in our hearts for the other to take shelter. > > When your presence is hospitable, the other can become their essential self in your company, even if just for a holy moment. One of the greatest contributions we can make to our communities is to hold this welcoming presence for others, without any presumption that they give something in return or conform to our expectations, without giving into the temptation to change, fix, or solve their questions for them. This presence silently communicates that it believes in the part of them that knows which way to go. And they can feel that. With their inner knowing reflected, they begin to move in the right direction. > > If you’ve ever had the experience of someone listening to you not just with their ears, but with their heart, then you’ll know how contributive this practice is to belonging. When they listen to your secret pieces at this level, they begin to carry them as their own. And at some future point, they may even hand you back those pieces in a better order and say, “I remember this,” and the tenderness between you grows.' ## Patience > Soul is not a thing, but a perspective. It’s the slow courtship of an event that turns it into a meaningful experience. It’s the practice of trusting that if we sit silently and long enough with the absence of magic, the miraculous will reveal itself. Nothing is sacred until we make it so with the eloquence of our attention, the poetry of our patience, the parenting warmth of our hospitality. > Instead of being swept up in the urgency to attend to the world ‘before it’s too late,’ let the way that we walk be slow. Let us listen to the pleas of our surrounding thirsts. Let us acknowledge the forgetting that drifted us onto this terrifying precipice. Let the grief of it all make its encounter with us through our remembering. And may beauty come alive then, under our feet. ## Ambiguity > Dreams teach us how to be wondrous by offering us endless ambiguity. Though it is our habit to always look for a bottom line so we can have certainty, dreams operate on many levels at once, forcing us to diversify our viewpoints. People often ask me something along the lines of, “Is this dream about having a conflict with my partner, or is the character in my dream an aspect of myself?” But ambiguity and the lack of taking sides answers the either/or question with a strange, unchoosing “Yes.” Reminds me of [[Ernest Hartmann's Contemporary Theory of Dreaming]], which suggests that the role of dreaming is to promote lateral free association. ## Education > Imagine an education system that does not treat subjects as separate but as belonging to each other. Contextualizing a topic within the greater whole creates a ‘point of entry’ for every type of learner. For example, in the reading of a children’s story, we also learn about and practice the illustration of images; the physical binding of the book; we learn about how a tree must be harvested to make the paper upon which the story is written; and study the impact the tree’s removal has on the rest of the forest; we learn then what it takes to grow a tree, planting one ourselves; and we make up a song to help our saplings take root. > > A whole year of lessons and activities could revolve around this one cycle of learning. It would require us to be present through them all, lest we miss a link in the story. During this long-form learning, we’d be intimately engaged with the environment around us, to which we are naturally indebted. We would be more inclined to preserve, replenish, and express our gratitude. In this gratitude we would better understand our own belonging. We would see more clearly the particular ways in which we might be useful to our place and people, and we would share our own gifts with a humbled sense of where they merged with the larger dance of life. We’d aim to give more than we take from that which gives to us so unconditionally. Exactly what Kieran Egan describes in [[Reference Notes/Highlights/Books/Learning in Depth]] ## Myth > While almost every known religion has a creation story, nobody knows the origin of these sacred myths because they come from a time before language was recorded. But it’s possible to imagine that early people received these transmissions from a visionary or dream state and passed them down the generations through the oral tradition. What’s astounding is that all the world’s creation stories can be roughly categorized into five central motifs: creation from chaos, life out of nothing, birth through a world parent(s), emergence from another form, and the earth-diver who finds the first grains of earth deep in primeval waters. > Whether we are working with nocturnal dreams or with our own stories, we must look for the mythical thread that tells us where in the story arc we are. From there, we can follow the archetypal patterns which, by their nature, never remain in stasis, but always move us towards redemption. In the act of con- necting to archetypes we feel the spark of vitality, a hint of life, a tiny becoming. We begin to remember who we were before we fell under the enchantment. We trace back to our root purpose, when we were engaged and alive, when we were our best selves. ## Dignity > Dignity is not something that can be given to you, it is the marrow-deep recognition of your own worth. To have dignity is to be comfortable in your own skin, unlike the person that lives so far outside themselves that they are always garnering appreciation and validation from others. > > Dignity emerges in the way you finally carry your own story. Through your painstaking efforts to write yourself as the hero or heroine at the helm of your own life, your losses cease to consume you. They are not forgotten or made invisible but rather aggrandized in your telling, passed on through the line of mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, as the mythical ‘obstacles to flight’ that they were. Forgiveness is coming to a place of reconciliation within, where you no longer wish for things to have been different than they were. To choose things wholeheartedly as they were and are. ## Village > It may seem obvious, but two things are absolutely necessary to creating community over the long term: someone willing to take the lead and invite others to gather, and someone willing to answer that call. Taking the lead requires great risk because you are braving rejection. Whether it’s a potluck, a book club, or a women’s or men’s circle, you may be opening your home or putting big effort into organizing an event, and there is no guarantee that others will come. So answering the call is also a kind of generosity. Beyond receiving what the other is offering, it is also a way of giving relevance to their efforts. It says that no matter how busy or tired I might be, community with you is important to me. Ideally it isn’t just one or two people doing the organizing, because at different times we all need to be held. But with enough calls made, and enough answers to those calls, the fabric of community is eventually woven. > > Leadership is essential to community, but in the reciprocal model, this role can rotate between members depending on the needs of the group. Unlike the way we normally think of leadership, as one person telling others what to do, reciprocal leadership is about engaging everyone to find the way forward. It is spherical in nature, rather than hierarchical. In this way of seeing things, a great leader is an expression of their collective, not its star. If done well, a leader should oversee, guide, and represent the collective’s vision. But the right person for that role might also change as the group’s needs change. At times, we may need a confident and outspoken leader to power us through a tangled passage, but other times we need the leader who quietly sees the network of connections within the whole. Sometimes we need a leader who hangs back so another may practice at stepping forward, challenging us to be better than we think possible. Reciprocal leadership ultimately recognizes the circle itself as the teacher. > If you are doing your part to brave the beautiful values that are coursing through you into the world, then all that’s left for you to do is to notice who notices. Don’t dismiss the invitational presence in others. Keep these ones close by noticing their gifts in return. Practice at opening the heart, yours and theirs, through fierce inquiry and the expression of truth. > > So many of us are out at sea, looking for home. We try this way and that way, battling the endless march of adversaries, led by cynicism and apathy. We fight them with every poetry we possess. We are gentle. We yield. We get back to navigating our crafts. But every once in a while, exhaustion can turn into despair. The tiny flame, which takes all our resources to shield, blows out in an unexpected gust. This is when it helps to think of more than ourselves. It helps to see the earth workers, the artists, the mothers, the lovers, the singers, the poets, and dreamers, as threads in a web. By ourselves we are fragile strands, songs with no listeners, but together we are a relentless network. Wherever there is depression there is colour made vivid by the grey. > Where you long for the friend who calls only to find out if you’re well, be that caller for another. Where you long for eloquent prayers to be made of everyday things, let your own clumsy words bless your meals out loud. Where you wish for ritual under the moons, be the one who holds the heartbeat of gathering. Where you ache to be recognized, allow yourself to be seen. Where you long to be known, sit next to someone and listen for insight into what they love. Where you wish you felt necessary, give those gifts away. > We are so enamoured with the construction of our own endless, narrow tunnels of productivity that we have become alienated from the very body that supports and sustains us. > We are remembering how to be an ecosystem. As sustainable living writer Vicki Robin suggests, “Treat everyone within fifty miles like you love them.” {103} I would add that we include in our image of ‘everyone’ the standing people, the feathered people, the rock people, the water bodies, and so on. We must reconstitute the world through our many small contributions, collaborations, and togetherness. As we work to protect the last stands of wilderness around and within us, creating beauty from loss and heartbreak, we will meet each other: those with no extraordinary power but the devotion to do what we know we must do—and look after each other. We include each other whenever we can by doing things in pairs or circles and groups, like work parties and generosity circles, clothing swaps and protests, practicing at the power of our belonging together. Because as times get tougher, we will need a strong, reciprocal web of skills and attributes to be called upon. > In kissing our own beautiful idiot lives, I believe we are contributing to the larger presence we need to cross the threshold of our collective initiation. We are being called to stop turning away from ugliness, to witness the shattering, so that we can consciously participate in the reconstitution of a new world. It’s only in remembering our wounded, outcast selves that we can belong our world back together.