by Heather Plett | Apr 27, 2012 | Uncategorized
My hotel room smelled like cheap disinfectant. It wasn’t the ugliest room I’ve ever slept in (at least it had a functional toilet and properly-wired light switches), but it was close.
I knew I couldn’t spend the whole evening there. I needed green space. I needed fresh air. I needed some mindful wandering to help me process all of the wonderful things that had happened on my trip before returning home early the next morning.
So I did what I often do – I opened Google maps and looked for the nearest green patch on the map. About a quarter mile away, past the industrial wasteland, across a freeway, and at the edge of the suburbs, there was a strip of green along what looked like a tiny creek. Hmmm… it looked promising.
What a delightful surprise I found when I crossed that freeway and climbed the embankment! There was a protected greenbelt running along the creek, with a beautiful walking/biking path that stretched out for seemingly miles.
I’m happy for groomed trails when I’m on my bike, but when I’m walking, I always look for the “path less traveled”. Sure enough, closer to the creek was a rugged path made for adventurers like me. Everyone else took the easy path – I climbed through the underbrush to find the one closer to nature.
For the next two hours, I wandered wherever my curiosity would take me. I climbed under bridges, I knelt on the damp ground to get closer to the violets, I scampered after bunnies, and tried (unsuccessfully) to take pictures of an elusive red bird. I scratched myself on low-hanging branches, and I nearly got stuck in the mud.
I was my 10 year old self again, finding secret hideaways in the woods on our farm.
It was heavenly. It was like a deep exhale after an exciting but full and intense week.
Wandering is my meditation, my therapy, my brainstorming session, my stress-reliever, my playtime, and my teacher. It fills me up in a way that few other activities do.
What about you? Do you love to wander? Or perhaps you haven’t discovered the beauty of wandering yet. Check out my e-book on the topic. It’s full of goodness, including interviews with a dozen other people who know the power of wandering.
by Heather Plett | Apr 26, 2012 | Uncategorized
I am Kensington Market.
I am colourful, bold, and a little disorganized.
I love being in the centre of multi-cultural conversations that stretch us all.
I honour the messes in life and don’t try to hide them behind polished facades.
I value eccentricity, uniqueness, creativity, play, and spirituality.
I provide safe spaces for people to play and explore and become more fully themselves.
I foster art, music and creative expression of every kind.
I’m curious… which neighbourhood (or park, city, mountain, place, etc.) are you?
Note: To learn more about why I’ve adopted Kensington Market as part of my personal brand, sign up for my newsletter (over there in that box on the right) and read the full article.
by Heather Plett | Apr 20, 2012 | Joy
First, you need to stop.
STOP!
Stop trying to make Joy your bitch.
Peel your fingers off the hem of her cloak.
She doesn’t respond well
to your frenzied attempts to master her.
“Oh, but the letting go…” you say,
“My heart is torn open
and I don’t know when this river will stop
flowing from my eyes.”
“Will she ever come back?” you cry,
desperate, lost, lonely.
I’m here to tell you that she will.
In the most unexpected ways.
But only when you extend the invitation.
and leave the rest up to her.
Joy responds well to invitation.
Grab a paintbrush and write the invitation on a big bold canvas.
Joy will meet you there in the middle of the mess.
Sink down on the floor and welcome her.
Wrap the invitation around your body.
Dance like a wild woman or run through the woods.
Joy will emerge with the sweat through your skin.
Let the invitation flow with your funeral tears.
Joy will be there in each remembered story
you share with the loved one lost.
Whisper the invitation into the wind
as you stand at the roots of an impossibly tall tree.
Joy will be the breeze that rustles the leaves.
Plant the invitation in the moist Spring earth.
Joy will grow in the compost made up of
many deaths from seasons past.
Crumple the invitation into a ball and toss it
into the circle of friends who gather to support you.
Joy will be the fire in the middle that keeps you warm.
Send the invitation off on the wings of a butterfly
joy will flutter past and remind you that her presence
can only come through the caterpillar’s surrender.
There is only one way to create joy.
Stop trying.
Extend the invitation.
And then prepare your heart for her arrival.
Note: This post was inspired by Jen Louden, Susannah Conway, and Marianne Elliot, three beautiful souls who are hosting a Creative Joy Retreat that will be luscious, fun, and inspiring. The post will be part of a free e-book that will be available soon..
by Heather Plett | Apr 14, 2012 | Uncategorized
I was at a social justice conference once when a well known storyteller got up to speak. I settled comfortably into my chair, preparing to be inspired.
He told a great (and very short) story, and then sat down. I thought he was just taking a break – maybe a musical interlude or dramatic pause – and then he’d get up to tell us what the story meant or how we should apply it to our lives.
Nope. Nothing. That was it. End of story.
I felt cheated. It was, after all, a social justice conference. We’d come to be inspired, to take home a toolkit full of take-aways and lessons-learned. If I remember correctly, his story didn’t even seem to have a social justice lens. It was just a story.
But was it?
The truth is, it stuck with me throughout the day, and into the week – long after I’d forgotten the take-aways from other talks or workshops.
One of the things I learned from his story is this: we don’t always need to hear the moral of the story. Sometimes, in fact, there is no moral. There’s just story. And the story becomes what each of us needs it to be. (Kind of like Jesus’ parables, right?)
I am a meaning-maker, a metaphor-finder, and a teacher. I like to follow story threads to their natural conclusions and then wrap the threads into neat little bows that allow you to take the stories home in pretty little packages to unwrap later. I’m used to shaping my ideas into teaching tools so that you have useful takeaways. It’s what I do and it’s often what I expect others to do.
But sometimes I try too hard and sometimes I do the story a mis-service by giving it only one shape when perhaps what you needed was a different shape entirely. Perhaps the story is still what you need, but through your lens it looks different and I’ve just ruined that for you by prescribing my own shape to it.
I’m finding lately that I’m growing somewhat weary of blog posts and social media updates, mostly because there seems to be too much expectation that we make sure every story has a moral, and every thread is tied.
We want to make sure we’re offering “good content”, and so we tie those threads. The blogging professionals remind us of how many extra hits we get when we can give “helpful tips for an easier life” or “do-it-yourself advice for ending the story as successfully as I did”, and so we give every story a nice juicy moral that readers can apply to their lives.
In doing so, sadly, we lose some of the messiness (and beauty) of life. We take out the really raw bits, because they don’t fit into neatly tied packages. We don’t tell the stories that end unhappily or not at all. We ignore the journeys that don’t conclude in simple and profound destinations.
This is one of the blocks I’ve had lately. This blog is now part of my business, and so I should be giving you good content that will keep you coming back for more. I should be offering you neatly tied packages. And I should do that on a regular basis so that you’ll come back often. And I certainly shouldn’t post this blog near midnight on a Friday. It’s blog suicide.
Unfortunately, many of my stories are messy and rarely do they come to me at appropriate blogging times of day. And often they don’t fit into clean frames or end with simple-to-communicate morals. Many of them are just little pieces of my journey and so the end is simply the beginning of something new. Sometimes (like when a man climbed through my window and raped me more than twenty years ago), it takes me years and years to process the lessons I’m meant to take away from a story. And even when I think I’ve learned all there is to learn, something new shows up a few years later and I realize the story hasn’t finished unfolding itself in my life.
And yet… I know those stories, as messy and unfinished as they are, are worth sharing. So I’ll keep offering them to you, but sometimes I won’t bother tying the threads together. I’ll let you find your own threads and see how those threads weave into your stories.
I am reminded, once again, of one of my favourite quotes.
“I’m not a teacher, only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.”
– George Bernard Shaw
Traveling is what I do. It’s what we all are doing. I haven’t reached the destination, so I can’t give you the “moral of this life-long story”. But maybe I can help you navigate some of the rocks that tripped me up.
Where am I going with all of this? I don’t know for sure. I haven’t figured out a way to end this post with a neat little moral either.
So I’m just going to leave you with what it is… some of the thoughts finding space in my head.
