Day 21. Fusing embraces the natural. "In fall, we are called upon to participate in the emptying of the world," says Alexandra Kennedy in her Healing Through Expression workshop this past weekend. (Expect an interview with Kennedy here before my tsunami anniversary departure. Her three stages of grief link up with Campbell's Hero's Journey and my own testimony: 1. shock, 2. descent, 3. emergence).
Kennedy continues, "This is the time of world that the veil is thinnest. Nature shows us how to let go - gracefully. And trust that spring comes."
Yes, I know it is autumn right now as I write this. Leaves are changing and falling, squirrels and chipmunks are running around storing and eating the acorns that clunk down from our huge old oak tree outside the window. Pumpkins are everywhere, days are shorter, and Halloween is in the air. Oooooooh.
It is not the season that's affecting me - that's a coincidence.
It's the evolving me inside me. - wonderful post at Tamarika's blog
Jeff Davis' newsletter fluttered into my inbox at just the right time. Sometimes there's a fleeting sense of residual loss that I am not deeply embedded in the tech industry as I once was. That tech.memeorandum simply passes me by. But I've digested, integrated, and weaved that experience into who I am. Sometimes I wonder how I got swept into my fascination with human nature, writing, and ahem, citizen journalism. But the displaced ten-year-old pony-tailed kid who wrote that illustrated story about the first snowstorm in Florida after her move from New Jersey doesn't have those quandaries.
The seasons continue.
The river continues: we can push upstream, or we can flow.
Count the seconds it takes for a leaf to fall from branch to ground. Is that how long it takes to let go and to return home? Of course, the leaf has anticipated this moment for months. Since it first budded last April, it has absorbed the sun's fuel, the tree's juice. It has endured hungry gypsy moth caterpillars, a few red-winged blackbirds, twenty-eight days of torrential rains and blustering winds. Then with the air's quick shifts in chlorophyll, the leaf changed coats. Within weeks, its green hue burned orange, and its skin began to dry. Then, at last, from the south came the slight breeze that released the leaf from its temporary house. The fall lasted all but 3.2 seconds. Would that letting go of doubts and wounds, of engrained patterns and stale conceptions were just that brief and beautiful.
A friend of mine recently left town with only what he could fit in his car and trailer. Everything else he let go of. He returned back south near his hometown for Texas's Hill Country. A remarkable writer, editor, and novelist, he now has opened his first yoga studio with a Buddhist flavor: http://www.dharma-yoga.net. I suspect the last several months, if not years, have been building up to this very moment for him. Another friend told me how after spending five years writing his first novel, 350+ pages, his agent told him that, in essence, he had within these pages a good short story. He could ditch the rest. Which he did. Page by page, leaf by leaf, he lit up the manuscript one night and let it turn to ash. Such burning away may be what we writers can call "Autumn Cleaning," the clearing out of dried out patterns, stale manuscripts, musty ideas that simply need to vanish or, more accurately, become something else. With our mental rake, we can pile up all the crap that's accumulated inside and out and light it up. Call it your "Bonfire for the Sanities." - Jeff Davis, Center to Page Autumn E-Newsletter
p.s. I'm a huge fan of Jeff Davis' writing workshops and his book (don't judge my blog writing against him; punditry and column-writing isn't what's covered. Writing with a sense of wonder is.). Once I have enough pennies saved up for the tsunami anniversary artisan journalism project, then this is what my piggy bank whispers is next up for me. I think Jeff's workshop is among the top things I did this year to prepare for the depth of expressive writing that I'll be called to do year-end:
LAYERS OF TRUTH: A Yoga as Muse for Authentic Writing Retreat in Taos, NM. Housed at Taos' historic Mabel Dodge Luhan House [Mabel was an arts patron, and this is where D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, Georgia O'Keefe, Carl Jung and many others convened], this retreat offers the best features of writing workshops with a unique spirit. We'll discuss matters of craft for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. We'll study writings from all genres to inspire our layered writing. We'll create a safe atmosphere based on compassion and truthfulness. We'll take Writers Wonder Walks to incubate deep images. But we'll also embrace our body, breath, and spirit as part of our writing process and life. March 14-19, 2006. Visit our LAYERS OF TRUTH web page to learn more and to register soon. Spaces are filling up already.
Bonus: Now Mabel was a woman that embraced fall. She (seemingly) inexplicably abandoned the salons of New York and Paris and even her husband on encountering a new love(s). "I have no news, nothing happens here but miracles," wrote Mabel Dodge Luhan to a friend out East that envisaged the worst for the wealthy New York socialite and arts patron whom had relocated to land abutting the Taos Pueblo reservation with no running water, no electricity, and not much more than chamisa (sagebrush) and coarse earth for miles.
Double bonus: Alexandra Kennedy includes many excerpts of her work on her site, including Seven Tasks of Grieving, Creating a Sanctuary, Ten Steps to Grieving the Loss of a Parent, How You Can Support a Grieving Friend, Writing a Letter to a Deceased Loved One, and Healing Daily Losses. For instance, here's a snippet from her Healing Daily Losses excerpt:
Many people don't recognize this deep undercurrent of loss until they lose a loved one. It wasn't until Bonnie lost her mother that she began to acknowledge how much loss was weighing on her heart. In her first session Bonnie shared that her accumulated losses over the past ten years felt like quicksand, pulling her into a deep depression. She listed for me loss after loss-- of freedom when she became a mother, of friends and community when she moved, of her health after three pregnancies, of intimacy with her husband as they both juggled hectic schedules, of contact with her siblings, financial losses, the death of her father and, most recently of her mother. Her life had swept her along while the losses accumulated-- unfelt, unacknowledged, unresolved. Now it was the profound grief over her mother that made her realize the grief that had always been there, just under the surface. Bonnie realized how all that accumulated ordinary grief had shut her down and compromised her aliveness. And she found that she was now weeping for her greatest loss of all -- all the unlived moments of her life.
flickr photo by ohad*'s | tags change writing transitions emergence tao authenticity spirituality grief
Hey! Thanks for the link. Good to "find" you!
Posted by: Tamar | Nov 10, 2005 at 05:13 AM