Incubation complete!

Remember the first rechargable batteries? How the older they got, the longer you needed to recharge them? I think Compelling Inspiration is like that. The longer you live with it on the periphery, lovely to think about but not the driving core of your days, the harder it is to shine it up and warm it up til it's a perpetual energy engine. Stoke that fire or it will barely flicker forever, making no difference at all in your illumination!

No time like the present.

Sitting in simple presence with 95 others -- in the same pace of growing up, with the same concerns shaking off unhappy programming, the same undirected fervor that now is the time for something -- was a steady positioning of self-conscious sight in the lens of living today. Meeting in the woods with 560 others -- of four generations, with the same

Today I'm back from the women's herb conference, and I'm trying to polish this spark. This past month has been about settling and taking stock, a lot of internal work -- a lot of the time I doubt this "just thinking" (daydreaming, planning, remembering, hoping, fearing, wanting, avoiding, judging, justifying, narrating, actually seeing it all happen in my mind) and I have to call up patience to sit with it, still, and let this unravelling thing soften me up. Like a roast in Brother's crockpot. The meditation retreat was one thing, familiar, skill-building for its own sake. But a weekend with these women!, these herbs, this great yawning healing wellspring of magic; this is another continuum altogether. The weekend storming, in hurricane tail and drumming and honest voices, familiar in my marrow but like having my old face wiped away with snakeskin. A tipping point, I can feel something churning up in the silt of my soul, some molten thing sliding up behind me, some ladder urging me outward, upward, forward. And I'm ready to go.

No time like the present.

My dear, that thing you love, that you have always loved since you opened your eyes, that your body pulls to with the honest magnetics of trust; do that thing. Once. Today. Now.

Again.

"Yes, but what is she Doing?" -- a weather-check

I am in Boston, and trying slow down long enough to shift into a new gear. In Phase One of my adventure-sabbatical, I'm releasing --  home and homeland and purposeful career, identification as a brokenhearted girl -- and I've made time, little time at least, to clear the playing field. Call it gestating, or the quiet before the storm, I'm on purpose not-doing, and trying to meet whatever floats into the moment. It is surprisingly uncomfortable, with lots of grappling between claustro- and agorophobia-esque urges; but with a deep developing kernal of  freedom. And washed over with relief.

I'm in Boston til the end of August, which feels like spending all of summer with my Brother, since the weather has just gone golden. Heat, heat and huge thunderstorms -- they say it's the tail of hurricane Bill wagging its way up the east coast. Weekdays, Brother works and I read, get lost in the city, and master the public transportation system. the greater Boston metroplex is a great place for Phase One; a real puzzle city that defies all attempts of imposed order, with lovely little pockets of greenery, ocean views and architecture. Weekdays I wade through tiny unmarked colonial-city streets and find museums, bookstores, 99-cent Chinese-novelty stores and parks where I can read in the sunshine.

Weekends we play and talk. Brother and I are good talkers, and the conversation is excellent. He is a Budding Big Kid, and we spend time making his apartment more homely with useful tools and function-minded feng shui. On my first round of Growing Up Edits, I share the patterns that work for me and tap into his newer edition of formalized human training (Little Brother is a Compassion Commando behavioral-psychology-social-worker, and has a lot of useful "why" information.) 

This weekend is not such a good example, because I'm going up to NH for the women's herbal conference and Brother is going to NY to visit friends, but most of our weekends are together, mobile and fun. We get out of Boston altogether and head up the coast for pastoral drives, treasure hunts for antiques and architecture, or we go down the coast for beaches that stick out into the Atlantic on long fingers of sand marsh and good seafood lunches. We visit and compare far-flung modern-art museums. We go to drive-in double-features and compare them like they were modern art. (P.S. for pop culture conspiracy theorists: Consider G-Force and GI Joe. Obviously named by the same school of cool-marketing, both about elite forces -- yes, one is a group of guinea pigs, just roll with it -- that are chosen (no free will here) for their roles, both entertain a surprising degree of disregard for the laws of physics and the limits of science for being set in the "it could be happening today" world, and both use the same summer smash hit "Boom Boom Pow" for their theme songs. What does this tell us about the future of the supersoldier genre? About the way we market militarization to our youth? About the merging identity of Man and Beast? Discuss.) 

Since Brother went on retreat with me, we have a whole new shared vocabulary of perception to add into the conversation. And since he got a higher degree and found a job he loves since the last time we talked face to face, he is a whole new kind of awesome that I love getting to know, and insight that keeps me feeling well cared-for while I do all this less-than-concrete work. The weeks go and I will miss this daily connection, and my Brother has helped me find the lightness of foot and the solidness of heart that I needed from Phase One. 

Spiral staircases

What is this strong desire to move in circles? I revisit places from vacations, resee artworks that moved me, reread novels to feel again the flavor of their words. Is this reviewing a way of cataloging, closing a circle by putting rememberances in place? Or is it a hallmark of stuckness, a fixation or fear that binds me to the known, the un-put-away, the familiar no matter how it abrades?

Or is it something else entirely? This life, dizzy and delightful, moves in circles that change. These paths and patterns revisit themes, dreams, all our content, always from a different perspective as time moves along. So more spirals that circles, helixing onward. And what if, instead of the patterns we see being placemarkers along the line of that spiral, the constant, compelling and reccuring dreams are the hub we re-evolve around. The strong staff of content coiled 'round by the sinuous momentum of context, the rod of Asclepius the healer. The core ideas, sentiments, Big Work of a life constantly circled, reexamined, reapplied through the mobile mind of a being in growth. Always within reach, always ready with the infinite depth of the past and width of the future.

Delight & Wonder #1

Have you noticed we taste each bite of food during our exhalation? You probably know how intrinsically intertwined smell is with taste, how smelling is the better part of tasting, but now I also think that smell and taste are two terrific way-stations on the same sense-pleasure circuit.

Try this: Take a bite, a smallish one, of something delicious. Chew with your mouth closed. With each inhale, chew, and pay attention to smelling the delicious that's still on your plate. And then exhale, chew, and taste. 

What do you think of that magic?

For your kind attention, beloved

Dear        ,

For all the well-wishing, permission-granting and vocal support: Thank you deeply for seeing me walking out and about, attempting this great big adventure. For all the unspoken worry, awkward pauses and slight bemused distain: I wish I could take you on retreat with me. It is the straightest path I know to an honest, earnest trust that the world is whole and that humanity is good;  the simplest path between you and I, and us.

I sat a week-long retreat in an environment consciously crafted to give relief from the doing pressure of everyone's everyday, with teachers offering reminders that the simple act of being, and being aware of being, expands the horizons of a human. I sat with 95 others around my age, and we practiced in parallel our part of the Human Project. We sat in silence, which is to say we spoke very little, with much care. The teachers spoke with guidance, the bell rang with timeliness, the birds, wind, and highway sang the way they can; there is no true silence on Earth, but every small piece of quiet carries clarity with it. I settled after a while, able to watch the chatter and flash of my mind, the interpretation/narration of my imagination, at a relatively low volume and from a relatively stable seat. I let my eyes unfocus into the peripheral and my skin soften. The week I spent was not intense, neither dangerously volatile nor seductively blissful. It was simple. Quiet. Aware. Focused simply on breath, on body in movement through space, aware of others and the external world. After a while, my mind, so slippery and fast, itself relaxed a bit, and opened to awareness of the internal world. With perfect timing, just as I was ready to see with softness and clarity.

When I entered silence, I imagined dropping a small stone into a clear dark pool, a query without articulation. Before the week was through the delicate tides triggered by that small intention rippled their way back to me, intercrossing and threading together the deep things below the surface of the pool into one ephemeral crochet response. I have a disillusionment to see my way through, a break in trust to let heal, a gap between us -- between me and you, Life -- to step across. I will get there. It is today's Human Project.