Showing Up Daily

In sharing my relationship to vulnerability I can’t seem to get away from Markwood Lane, my childhood home. I need to stay in and among the marsh grass and thickets along the saltwater inlets the of Navesink River, and the eastern woods and streets of Rumson, NJ. I promise to take you on forays to other exotic lands I have had the honor to explore in my life, but this terrain, the land of my youth, sets the scene for a while as I crack the cover on my story. The little boy in me is whom I need to pay attention to right now.

He doesn’t show up in my world these days very often, or at least I don’t give his voice credit when he does. I see the ways I have left him feeling alone and there is a deep longing for connection. I can see that my distance from him compounds in the most dramatic way, the feelings of abandonment that I struggle with, as an adult, in my most private moments.

He was me at my most vulnerable, but full of power. There wasn’t any fear. There was no limiting self-judgment. I did not have a measured approach to how much intimacy I could share. The rawness and freshness was my natural state.

He was the bright eyed, sweet boy who wanted to know everything and everyone he met. I wasn’t particularly shy. I know that’s hard to believe. I was the 5 year old kid that would walk out into the middle of my parents dinner party and shout, “Hi everyone, I’m Jonathan!” I was never afraid to talk with new people. In my young heart, I felt the magic in the world and I could see it in the eyes of people I would meet. It was like there was some answer to some secret that I could figure out if I just talked to enough people.

As I got older, that magic started to give way to reason. And reason started to give way to judgment. Moments of sadness and longing that I felt were given social, structural and external causality. I worked to figure out what I wanted, and strategize my future. This new powerful capacity, for no reason, had come at the cost of putting down my open curious magical approach to wonder and beauty in the world.

It’s time to have more conversations with that boy. It’s time heal old self-inflicted wounds. It’s time to remember that voice and let it also speak among my chorus in this world. So here it goes.

“Hi everyone, I’m Jonathan!”

When I was a boy, I used to walk to school everyday. My family lived in a neighborhood full of kids, but we lived down a lane where we were the only household with kids our own age, and so that part of my walk was almost always taken alone. Markwood Lane was almost exactly 1/10^th of a mile long. (Growing up with an engineer for a father, affords you access to all kinds of data such as this. It’s usefulness in the moment potentially suspect, but I am so grateful for having learned to care for precision and attention to detail. I love you Dad.)

That 1/10^th of a mile, by myself as a child, was never the same length every day. Feet and inches aside, that walk was measured by my state of mind and my feelings that day. It must have been 26.2 miles long on days I had to share bad news about a spelling test, and I am convinced, to this day, that it was only 10 feet long on the last day of school before summer.

There were times, though, when I never paid attention to that 1/10^th of a mile. None stand out quite like in the early Spring, when the crocuses would bloom.

I knew Spring had arrived when along my walk I would start to see the crocuses come up. Everyday I would barge through my front door and my Mother would sit patiently and excitedly for the “crocus report”.

She would take a moment, smile, and then ask me more. She’d ask me which were my favorites. Every day I would talk about the colors. Usually my favorites were the golden yellow and the deep purple. Once in a while, the striated purple and white would catch my eye. Sometime the deep royal orange saffron on the stamens against the bright white would be my favorites. All of these colors set off by the rich succulent verdancy of their new Spring stems and leaves.

The truth was, that for me, the walk was solely and wholly given over to exploring the tiny flowers; the immense variety and detail of color and shape. In my young mind there was no thought, no concern above and beyond the beauty each crocus held and the moments of joy and wonder I experienced each day seeing them. Sharing their subtle changes each day felt like a hero reporting on an adventure. I don’t know how long it took me to get down the lane those days, and frankly I didn’t care. I still don’t. The flowers were more important.

Now in my mind’s eye and my hearts remembering, that time with the crocuses was prayer. It was me singing with the Spring’s chorus. It was learning one of the many names of Spirit. When in conversation with the divine, there is no clock, no measure, no distance. What is important is never urgent.

For as long as I can remember I have been taught to “figure things out”. The way in which I was told the way to understand was to use my head, to think through the problem. I learned well, maybe too well. Good analysis was the measure of a good conscience, and thereby a good decision.

I have been gifted with a sharp intellect and a beautiful mind. I have been graced with an ability to see the relationships between constituents at larger conceptual levels, to make sense of complexity and make connections between ideas and patterns. These gifts have grown strong in the culture of judgment and critique in which I’ve been raised.

But there are other gifts, gifts that I have spent lots of time exploring and little time sharing with others. I have a deep curiosity and care for people. I have a deep trust in the power of beauty and aesthetics as essential to human communication and connection. Through service to others and stewardship is how I touch divinity. And most of all, I love a good story.

David Whyte’s poem The Seven Streams is harmonic with an answer to the Beautiful Questions I am asking myself. Who do I want to be in the world? How do I want to share it?

I’ll start by sharing with you, for the next month, stories that are some of those “streams” for me in my life. I am trusting that my vulnerability can be a faculty and not a weakness. Here will be some of the details of my own “provenance”, gathering together some of the threads and streams of my life.

As I sit here actively resisting all the reasons that you should not read any of this, let alone that I should not write it, I humbly offer you these stories. Full of bad grammar, poor spelling, questionable choices, and likely more that one or two non sequiturs, I hope that they will serve in adding color, depth and tone to my voice in our collective conversation.

Peace,

Jonathan