Showing Up Daily

Today I found a yes. I found a resounding yes to a decision that I have had in my balance beams for some time now. This is never an easy place for me, and my history with decision-making has not been great when taking too much time weighing options.

I knew this about myself and even set myself a personal deadline by which to decide. But I let that day pass last week and figured I would give myself another. Well this weekend came and was almost gone when I got a short text asking the beautiful question, “Are you in?”

So right there on the spot, without any hesitation, I reached down into my freshly practiced vulnerable embodied self and said, “Give me another night to think about it?”

Yeah, I sort of chickened out, but it was honest. I didn’t feel ready.

I hadn’t quite mustered the voice to say yea or neigh. I had been weighing, and feeling, and imagining, and writing, and feeling some more. I spent a long time being patient in the company of myself in the feelings of both yes and no. This conversation was the one I needed to stop having. It was time to ask for help. It was time to decide. Through the magic of serendipity, an old friend and trusted advisor of mine happened to be in town and was expecting me for dinner. This felt like visible and invisible help conspiring to come to my service in this moment.

We sat down and it was like time hadn’t passed. We first knew each other after I had come down out of the ivory tower of the university and was determined to engage the world with my hands. I was living on a rural property and was teaching people how to build homes with local materials and alternative methods. I was, literally, elbows deep in shaping my life.

Face to face with this old friend I could recall the feeling of that younger self. I could recall it in my hands. I felt the excitement for adventure and call of curiosity. I told her about the decision that lay before me, and before I finished talking I felt the answer emerge, from my belly. She looked me dead in the eye, and gave voice to what was headed from me toward the light, “Yes, of course. There is no question.”

It felt like fresh water hearing here unequivocal response matching my feeling. Excitement rose and then ebbed and for a moment and there was a pause. She knew, and caught my eye. “Give me your phone. Write the text now.” It was one of the best texts I’ve written:

“No need for anymore sleeps. Hell yes. I’m in.”

It was a little scary and a lot exhilarating. At first I worried that deciding so quickly would somehow diminish all the work that I had done to care for myself in the decision process, but it was the opposite. This was what all that work made space for. So hell yes, I’m in.

Today I am up against a familiar feeling of frustration that grows frantic with grasping for an answer, and is unwilling to trust in the awareness that there just isn’t one in the way I am thinking. In the past, these moments have felt debilitating. They have rocked me into a state of denial, inaction, and ultimately retreat. This is not the kind of regenerative retreat where I am able to renew my feeling of connection to the world and find healing in my heart and body. It’s the kind of retreat when the zombies are coming at me 7 deep and I run screaming for the hills.

I am so grateful for my lizard brain that makes decisions so clearly. It is a pure surge of unadulterated unmitigated choice. Choosing fight or flight has a purity and a simplicity that comes from its most primal and purely biochemical roots and memories.

But right now nothing is trying to eat me, and no one is trying to kill me. So opting to pull the emergency handle is way too extreme and frankly a bit melodramatic. But that’s the point. If I am unwilling to let go of my need to make sense of what is going on, then being theatrical is the only way that I can make sense of things. It’s here that a beautiful question has arisen.

What if I stop making sense?

In the face of confusing and frustrating circumstances, what if I engage the world using different resources? Making sense is another way of saying, “taking control”. As I sit and cultivate the robustness of my own emergent vulnerabilities and direct them toward my developing practice, I am learning that control is an illusion. Shaping my response to the world based on how much sense I can make of it, is kind of like building a house of cards on a foundation of dried leaves. At the very best it is highly fragile and flammable, and really it just doesn’t work.

As I strengthen my voice with the tonal qualities of an embodied emotional awareness, I deepen my capacity to experience the feelings of others and not grow frustrated or frantic in needing to understand them. I ask for help that matters, and can listen for invitations.

Instead of being concerned with what it all means, it’s time to pay attention to how I feel, as well as how those around me are feeling, in a new way. When I can share from emotion and not expectation, and can listen with curiosity and not reactivity, then I can sit more comfortably in things that may appear contradictory. I can build solidarity, and I can break down distrust.

There is so much distrust in the world. There is so much inertia moving our relationships away from uniting and down the slippery slope of skepticism and divisiveness. I believe that it is our need to make sense of things that drives wedges between us.

How can I support myself in a practice to “stop making sense”? How does that practice reinforce personal boundaries while creating greater collective opportunities?

This becoming can hurt. It’s a promise that it will, sometimes. It’s bittersweet. For in so much as I am experiencing pain in this process, the hurt comes not from sadness that emerges, but from the recognition of the moments when I shut down feeling it. That awareness of my part in my own pain, my ego’s role in suppression, is gold.

My ego’s natural resistance to sadness is only equaled by its resistance of the unknown. I am engaged in a reorientation toward my choices about shaping myself in the world I am moving into, and away from reactivity rooted in my limiting effort to control outcomes and define my future.

In order to build structures of support and shapes of awareness I need to learn the territory. I am exploring the boundaries of emotions that I am currently operating with. I apprentice myself to those edges and slowly over time also apprentice myself to practices that expand the reach of those edges. These cannot be grand gestures or sudden shifts. Their efficacy and longevity depend on a continued dynamic and deep relationship with my core, the heart of my matter, the divinity of which I am a part.

I am in a dynamic engagement with all the juicy, kinetic, generative, revelatory, patient, curious, imaginative, quiet, creative, sacred, and brilliant adjectives I can access applied in an iterative gradient across my lifetime of experience laid bare….

Sometimes.

“Sometimes” needs to be given deep consideration. “All the time” is an abstraction. Nothing is ever, all of the time. Time has no end, no real measure save that which we use to create an illusion of order and structure to our days in pursuit of things that often serve to abstract our experience even further.

There is tidal quality to all things. A seasonality of experience that is, for me, at the very heart of the sacred in my life.

This morning, right now, I am in an ebb of sadness. This was preceded by a flow of awareness in sleep while dreaming a powerful message to myself. That came after an ebb of deep reflection yesterday afternoon brought about by the flow of a profound and invigorating exchange with a dear friend hiking through the woods. Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, a rhythm to my practice of becoming that I am watching with such a different lens.

Building a practice and developing artistry is about manageable change over time. The more agency that I develop through participation in that change, the closer I come to shaping rhythms that speak from the deepest part of myself into a receptive and waiting world. And that takes time. It takes time spent in the presence of patience, and time spent in the world calling out, listening quietly to what may come back from the unknown.

What are the pieces of the practice I’m building? How can I support myself to remember the qualities of ebb and flow in the world? Where can I share what I’m finding?

This journey with the unknown has an adventurous quality that is challenging me to drop in, hang on and open up. Like the poet says, I am becoming “a half a shade braver”. This bravery doesn’t come from more knowledge. It comes from a sense of willingness and a healthy dose of surrender. It colors my attention with inquiry. It gives my intention a spirit of curiosity.

Practicing this kind of bravery is not new to me, and yet is crucial to recover in service to navigating the territory ahead. I have embraced the world with this bravery before. This is a quality that I have known in my life. For some reason, I have decided it is no longer of value. It is time to give myself permission to remember.

It is not important to analyze the details of what specific events or people triggered me to stop being brave. That is not my path to revelation. It is a mechanism designed to deepen my melancholy and keep me bound in self-doubt. My deft mind and strong analytical sense can quickly abstract moments that I can use to “prove the point” to myself. This kind of analysis cuts me off from the fullness of my memory.

Permission with out proof is that first difficult tiny step: permission to be vulnerable, permission to play, permission to share, and permission to screw up from time to time. This is an expression of faith in both myself and my place in the world.

The more I open up to the possibility of this kind of permission, the more I am tested by these fabrications of fear. The thoughts that are triggered are not in service of the exploration of expansive inquiry. They are focused more on suppression, self-criticism and contraction. The testing is a vehicle designed to shut myself off from experience. It comes like a force closing a door ahead. My fear would rather stop and start pondering the details of the molding, trim, door handle, and deadbolt, then to move with curiosity through thresholds ahead into new terrain.

When I am that half a shade brave enough not to be distracted by this chatter and delusion, I drop into a state of curiosity. I can access my memories in their fullness of emotion, experience and detail. With this agency, I can explore the feelings I was having without judging their merit. Half a shade braver I can access details filling out the narrative as guidance not judgment. It gives my stories the heirloom quality and richness that they deserve. They retain a transcendence through which they can be of service.

These heirloom memories, my inheritances from my experience, are powerful reminders to settle and take a step deeper. They are the generative force that tempers the quality of engagement in the deepest conversations with my own unknown and the unknown of relationships and organizations around me. The practice of becoming is as a practice of permitting myself to share, in its fullness, what has been happening for a very long time.

The rain is falling, as it has for the last few days, and I am staring out at the wet emerald green of ivy crawling around the yard. I am wishing that the wet leaves and rumbling traffic would give way to crisscrossing shadows from a stand of palm trees and the gentle reverberation of the sea tickling the sand.

I have such a powerful feeling to bail right now. Naming it with the keyboard makes my heart pound with anticipation. It’s all I can do to not just click over into an Expedia expedited reality and peek at what it would take to get me into that hammock. It would all be better then.

Exhale. The bathtub warm water with its salty healing and buoyant bounty of fresh fish, beckons me to make the tough choices. Should I sleep more or take a swim before I have another cocktail? Should I eat some fresh fruit or go for a walk down the beach?

Inhale. My chest tightens and my head gets heavy. The image of that seaside sanctuary is poured into a bottle and cast off into the “delusion bin”. A crack of criticism stings my cheek still warm from than moment in the sun.

Exhale. My shoulders drop and my eyes can lift and I can go back inside. But this time, I don’t need to conjure. I don’t need a fiction. I do, however, need some healing. It’s not about going anywhere right now. It’s about being with you all, right here.

Inhale. The hard head hardly capitulates but changes tack. Critique of my writing blends into anxiety about the current project I am producing out in the world, which makes it difficult to resolve either, which adds a layer of confusion and judgment, which builds into a micro whirlwind of urgency, which generates more speed, which starts to hurt, which starts to scare me, which makes me forget to use a period to end a damn sentence, which…

Exhale. I put my hand on my heart.

Inhale. Hand still to chest I can feel the rising of my breath, and I can feel the tightening in preparation for the next wave of pressure. But it doesn’t come. Hand to heart, I reconfigure the circuit. I interrupt the cycle of thought for just a moment.

Exhale. More begins to settle. My arms and legs soften, don’t loosen, and I sit deeper in my seat. Curiosity shows up, and the tiniest smile sneaks out from behind the beard.

Inhale. I look out the window. I track patterns of redwood bark hinting at the spiral nature of the majestic tree’s growth. I see that the ivy actually has at least five shades of green that reverberate between singularity and gradient tonality.

Exhale. It’s beautiful outside today. I get to live here right now, and I have time to take a moment with you and share what it feels like to take a few breaths.

My stories are always good. Ok, maybe not always good, but they are mine. I am, after all, writing this month in the service of robust vulnerability and not selective vulnerability. Quite a few of these gems I have told a number of times over the years in a number of contexts. Lately they have felt like performances that lack conviction. I find myself using them to leverage a response from someone, not really sharing something meaningful to me.

That realization has hurt, because I love my stories. I love the way a good story can transport someone from a place to a time around an idea and back to the present moment. Mostly the pain has come from feeling the like the magic is leaking out of these pivotal moments of my life. My retellings are falling flat because I am trying to refill them with forced hot air: air that has been compressed by self-criticism, and without faith in their value in the first place.

I found myself, yesterday, listening to myself tell someone else a story. It was innocent enough. I was telling one of my stories from Scotland. It was one of the big ones. It had lots of adventure: living in a small fishing village on the North Sea working as a carpenter. It had drama: cutting off the end of one my fingers and being rushed to the hospital. It had humor: spending days on “whiskey tour” with a bandaged hand driving on the wrong side of the road. All in order to culminate with a powerful life lesson: ending up getting fired because I decided to be honest with our client. There it was, outlined and ready, wrapped in a tiny bow, coming soon to a cocktail party near you.

However.

Thanks to our collective efforts, my dear cohort of luminary pilgrims, I have been practicing patience with myself. I have been slowing down a beat or two and allowing time for intimacy to grow. I am leaving space to embody how I choose be in a conversation. By slowing down yesterday, I got to learn something from the story. I was moved. It wasn’t a recitation, like it has felt so often. I was letting my story tell me.

I realized how what I have always considered the “end” was not. For the first time I realized that this story, in its deepest voice, was calling for what was about to happen a week after: an epic road trip across the continent that unfolded into my romance with my Mediterranean lineage and territory. I smiled to myself.

The magic hadn’t disappeared; I just stopped listening for it.

My stories aren’t fragments or objects. They are voices, parts of a composition that can be arranged like a choir. Sometimes there are solos, but most times they are harmonies. When I am trapped in thought, I lose that awareness. My opportunity is to arrange them and offer them in service of the world around me.

When did I get so serious?

I love the faculty that I have developed over these years of my life to watch for patterns, account for difference, and interpret meaning. I do it a lot, and I do it pretty well. But Good God, when did I get so serious?

Please infer as little as possible as I will try to imply even less.

The sun was just setting, my feet dangling out the open door of the train car. A hand hewn clay cup of sweet fragrant chai warmed my hands and filled my lungs with its deep fragrance. I was heading north toward the Himalaya, I knew that much. I didn’t have much concern for anything else. I had been in the South for weeks and was now moving toward new territory. The red velvet clay earth glowed from being baked all day by the sun. The leaves on the trees were shining emerald casting cool shade below. The wheels on the tracks counted time so that I didn’t need to anymore. Their rhythmic cycle was more a heartbeat than a drumbeat. I was happy.

I awoke one night, late, to the sound of the waves brushing the beach outside. The cool breeze those waves carried ashore coaxed me out of bed and out to the sand. Rubbing sleep from tired eyes I saw lines of glowing foam in front of me. Now with eyes waking to focus I saw, that as each wave crashed, a liquid light show would spark through the water. With no thought, just a surge, my clothes were off and I dove headlong into the Pacific. Emerging from the surface, I immediately opened my eyes to see the electric luminescent drops fall from my hair. Swirling hands and feet produced trails of electric turquoise. There was no time for biochemistry, only time to play. I was happy.

My aunties had been in the church basement now for a couple days cooking in preparation for the Howell family Thanksgiving. With nine aunts and uncles, their spouses and kids, and any of our families’ new or old friends that wanted to come, these were big feasts. I was young, but I remember so vividly. There were older cousins outside elbow deep in car engines making sure they could get back home. They were never so busy that they couldn’t stop for a moment to teach a young boy how to throw a football or other secrets to becoming a man. The kitchen smelled of turkey pumpkin heaven and was always 10 degree warmer than the rest of the church. These sisters moved with purpose and grace. There was always a moment to plant a kiss and give a treat to a passing young hungry face. My uncles sat with the important task of making sure the football game was not too quiet with screams and shouts of approval and disgust. The game was never more important than a nearby nephew who needed to hear a joke or tell a story. I was happy.

I had a great conversation recently with a friend about the relationship between desire and expectation in regards to outcome.

We were telling stories about past relationships. We each recounted versions of that age-old story that country music careers are built on. You know the one about one person wanting more than the other, and yet the one left wanting could not move on, nor understand why.

My focus only on a specific outcome, her being mine, caused more distance and separation between us. It was a singular focus on the wrong thing, and not a commitment to the dynamics of a changing life, the unknown, that we each were engaging in. I did not commit to the relating, the process. I committed to the abstract person I wanted to have. I objectified her and idealized an impossible union. I missed what could be in favor of attaching to an impossible outcome.

In my 3^rd year in college, I had the opportunity to spend a semester studying in Zimbabwe. A large focus of my work and research was centered on a local youth development, empowerment and leadership program in the township where I was living. One day the director of the program, and my host, suggested that I teach a class.

I was nervous. There was a game I had played with groups before and it allowed for great teachable moments. I planned and planned. I anticipated answers to questions and concerns that could come up in the game. I had note cards at the ready in response to each possible scenario. I was going to teach the pants off this lesson.

Well after the game failed, I recovered by moving into a discussion. With carefully planned cards at the ready, I asked for comments. The first hand up was that of one of the youth leaders of the group and her answer blew me away. It was nothing that I had thought of, and was absolutely the right answer. I had prepared answers that didn’t help. I wasn’t ready for what she had said. I felt stupid, scared, and had to get control of the situation. Gulp.

So I looked this young woman right in the eye and said, “You are absolutely right. I never even thought about that. Please tell me more.” I threw my index cards in the air, rolled up my sleeves and listened very carefully. Her comment spurred another, and then his comment inspired a third. It was a powerful conversation about teamwork that was relevant to them, not abstract theory. I was able to provide a class on teamwork that looked nothing like the one I expected to teach planned for, but it was exactly the outcome I wanted.

What does it feel like to practice faith with flexibility in my conversation with the unknown? How do I hold desire without expectation? What are the qualities of the trust that it takes to maintain that?

There are moments when I am in such awe, reflecting awareness of the sublime beauty in the world, that I need to take a pause. I fantasize about the apparatus that would be required to capture that moment: the sights, sounds and feeling. How can I share adequately the moment when the air has no temperature, when there is no discernable sound, when the smells don’t register, when, with eyes wide open, I see nothing? And yet, all of this is happening while I feel beyond my senses, before my thought can even be conjured, that I’m living an ancient truth.

You’re not peeking behind a curtain. You are looking deeply into Divinity. It’s not about comprehending. It’s about a heart-knowing. It’s a radiating feeling that takes your breath away while filling your lungs with possibility.

It’s not about good or bad, not about joy or sorrow. It’s about a purity of connection to a source of truth, big truth, beyond reasoning and metrics. The moment is about standing faithful, willing without a shadow of a doubt, to give voice to a dynamic that needs no defense or qualification. It is a harmonic of the deepest, lowest frequencies of the choir of ecology and cosmology at play. Where we are and why we are sound out an ancient melody of who we are.

…It’s about the quality of the moments that resonate, not their grandeur. They become bigger and smaller in the retelling, that’s the storytellers privilege. But the root, the ring, the sticky bit that makes that story worth telling is the absolute sacred truth.

I have experienced this as a child watching a swallowtail butterfly dance among the delicate blooms of mimosa tree wondering how such a color yellow could ever be more beautiful. As a young man building a coffin for a dear departed friend, I was struck by the sacred reverence of working in service. I remember one moment in a field on the Tuscan coast when my heart cracked open and I felt love so big that I was scared and full and never more peaceful. And even this morning, during one particular sip of my tea while reading my book, I felt a moment when there was balance in all things.

What are the practices that cultivate that listening? Certainly this song rings in the mundane as much as the miraculous. I’ve put myself all in on the bet that tea kettles and telephones make great bridges to the unknown as much as mountain tops and far away lands hold truth treasures for my soul.

But the question still remains. What does a life look like that is open to these subtle and grand moments of connection? I didn’t know when they were coming, and yet each one prepares me to go deeper the next time.

Who am I becoming? How is that becoming in service of the song I’m already a part of? How do I share that in the world?

It wasn’t all flowers and dinner parties. When I was a kid I spent a lot of time alone, and it wasn’t always fun. I want give this side of me some space to speak.

My childhood bedroom faced up the street. This perch gave me a prospect and a watchful eye over what was happening. When someone was coming to pick me up, I would ready myself early. I would sit on my perch and like a hawk, watch the lane in anticipation and readiness.

It was the most incredible physical display of impatient stillness. I wasn’t sitting playing with toys or reading a book while waiting. I was watching. I was on lookout. I needed to know the moment things were going to change; the moment that car was coming and I only had 1/10^th of a mile left until it happened.

I wasn’t just excited for what was coming, that was the strange part. I was afraid that if I didn’t see the car coming I would miss it. It was as if not being ready right away to go with whoever was coming meant they wouldn’t take me, or there would be a problem. So I waited, “patiently”.

Waiting wasn’t a feeling of hopefulness. It was a feeling of attention and urgency. It was a feeling of separation and longing for a moment of connection. It was like I didn’t trust that what was supposed to happen would happen.

It was in those moments alone, waiting, that I started to tell myself stories, or more correctly I started to script stories about what I was going to do. I needed to reframe my experience so that I would be okay waiting during these perceived eternities. I would retreat to my mind and craft a story, a plan. I never found the story that let me relax.

That moment, when I saw the right car coming down the road, I would be nervous, almost scared. That surge toward connection, that heart-led openness mashed up with a fear of loss. In these moments I wasn’t in my body. I was more worried about: who was I going to be? Where was I going to go? What was the right thing to say? Would I be accepted?

Fear was fueled by robust creativity. Crafted with such detail and vigor, I would create these terribly abstract scenarios that I needed to prepare myself for. And as a young boy, there was no way to deconstruct the abstraction. They were filed away as normative.

I want to tell that boy a new story or two. I want to talk with him about impatient moments. He needs to hear a story about the beauty of patience with presence. I want him to trust in that. He needs to give himself a break. Or as least let me lend a hand.