something that makes things visible or affords illumination: All colors depend on light.
of little weight; not heavy: a light load.
Last week, the word “light” kept showing up for me in what I thought at the time were two different streams. At first there was the stream of light that means the absence of darkness, and then there was the stream of light that means the absence of weight. (Of course, now that I write it down, it seems so obvious, but it took a week of processing for me to finally catch on that I was dealing with one and the same thing.)
The first time light appeared, I was listening to Yolanda Nokuri Hegngi talk about the two years she’d spent in darkness (a story she has written about in her new memoir “Treasures in Darkness”). Yolanda could just as easily have been telling my story. Full of many transitions, deaths, near-deaths, career shifts, and times of great pain, the past two years have taken me through quite a lot of darkness. Every time I thought I was emerging from the darkness, some new shadow would appear.
Yolanda ended her talk by saying “We need leaders who have learned to navigate in the dark.” Wow. I was sure she was speaking directly to me. I’ve learned more than I want to know about navigating in the dark. (Some of you may recall a related post about being called to light a candle for people stumbling in the darkness, just as others have done for me. Yes, callings like that have a way of showing up time and time again, especially when we’re stubborn.)
That afternoon in our leadership intensive, we were invited to write down some intention that we wanted to put our attention on throughout the course of the workshop. In response to Yolanda’s words, I wrote “I am putting my attention on trusting my gift to help people navigate in the dark.”
“You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.” – Matthew 5: 14-15
The other stream of light started to appear around the same time. Our workshop held a significant focus on play – how play can transform otherwise dark circumstances and how we can use play in our leadership to engage people in deeper conversations and shifts. (To learn more about it, I encourage you to read the book Walk Out Walk On that the workshop was based on.) I’d signed up for the workshop partly because I have been yearning for more play in my life (it is, after all, the reason I chose the word “joy” as my intention for the year).
I long for more lightness. I want to carry less weight.
But… after Yolanda’s talk, all I wanted to do was cry. I struggled through the afternoon’s session of the workshop because I thought I’d chosen poorly. I wasn’t ready for play after all. I should probably be in the workshop Yolanda was leading – where tears and deep story-telling were more expected.
Quite frankly, I was fighting resentment and resistance. I wanted lightness, but here I was in a place of heaviness again. The year before, I’d gone to ALIA carrying a lot of pain in my broken heart, and I was SURE that this time would be different. This was SUPPOSED to be the year that pain was replaced with joy.
After the session, I went outside, leaned on a large sycamore tree I’d fondly dubbed “Grandmother Tree”, and I cried. I cried for the pain I was still carrying and I cried for the disappointment. I cried and I wrote, and I let the tree hold me up.
And then, still leaning on the tree, I spontaneously wrote the word “lightness” on my arm.
Shortly after that, when I returned to the main meeting room, I sat down on a meditation cushion next to my friend Brad. He looked at the heavy backpack I was carrying on my back, and at the look on my face, and asked “why are you carrying so much weight around?”
I laughed out loud, knowing the question was meant (intentionally or unintentionally) both literally and figuratively. In my backpack was the weight of all of the story-harvesting I love to do – a big camera with multiple lenses, a video camera, a journal, and various related items. On my face, at the same time, was the weight of my personal stories, heartache, and resentment.
“That’s a good question,” I said, “and it’s funny you should ask, because just now I wrote the word ‘lightness’ on my arm.” We shared a chuckle, and then I promised him that the next day I would show up with a lighter load. “You can feel free to bug me if you see me still carrying this weight.”
After the session that evening, I spent a long time wandering around the beautiful OSU campus looking for the other kind of light – the “absence of darkness” (and maybe the “absence of weight” at the same time). I found it reflected off the water, I found it gently falling on the path in front of me, I found blue versions of it shining from the safety phone posts, and I found it sparkling in the windows of old buildings full of stories.
And when I returned to the dorm, and settled into my room, light appeared there as well. This time, it was the “absence of weight” kind, when a spontaneous jam session started in the room I shared with my friend Ann. When someone with a guitar wandered past the door, I said “come in – nobody carrying a guitar is ever turned away”. And then, before I knew it, someone else showed up with a violin, and a third person pulled out a banjo. It was a beautiful light moment and I took great joy in the fact that I (and Ann) had attracted it into my space. (Light attracts light, perhaps?)
Here’s a little video I took lying on the floor in the middle of the musicians. Appropriately, mostly what you see are shadows, because there was very little of the “absence of darkness” kind of light in the room, but plenty of the other kind.
The next morning, as I dressed, I wondered what I could leave behind to make my load lighter. It was a hard decision, but nearly everything stayed in my room. I decided to trust the fact that others would be there with cameras and videocameras and I didn’t need to do as much documenting as I am inclined to do. (As a matter of fact, by then I’d already found at least one person who was taking exceptional photos and another person capturing great video. I could trust them to harvest as well as – or better than – I could and I knew that they would share.)
In an even bigger leap of faith, I decided to leave my journal behind and trust that something else would show up if there were things I wanted to capture (and doodle about). The only things I decided to take with me (besides the key to my room), were some coloured markers in a small colourful pouch I wore around my neck.
Sure enough, during the very first session, something else showed up for me to doodle on. My arm. I am a dedicated doodler (it’s how I process information), and before long, I was doodling all over my arm, surrounding the word “lightness” with all measure of shapes and wiggles and trees and random words I picked up in my listening.
And… I loved it! I may never go back to doodling in my journal again! You might find me with new doodles on my arm every day – signs that I have been doing some deep process work, connecting with my artistic mind and my beautiful body all at the same time. (Try it! And come back and tell me about it!)
It was a great way of celebrating lightness – by not taking myself too seriously and letting my inner child surface in the doodles on my skin.
Another fun thing that happens when you doodle on your arm is that people notice. And in a place like ALIA, where we are encouraged to be curious, vulnerable, and authentic, they tend to respond in positive ways. Several people asked if they could take pictures of my arm AND one person (whom I hadn’t met before) invited me to participate with her in doing graphic facilitation for the next day’s session. “Anyone who does that to their arm can be trusted to help me co-create at the front of the room.”
Yikes! A doodle on my arm was a catalyst for me doodling on a big piece of paper on the wall in front of 250 people! It was both terrifying and exciting – like nothing I’ve ever done before.
With my confidence heightened, I continued to use my doodling throughout the rest of the week, doodling a learning tree during a session I hosted on feminine wisdom, doodling graphics while I helped a new friend imagine a business opportunity, doing henna doodles on the hands of all of the participants in the workshop I was in to represent their intentions for the week, and doing a whole new doodle/mandala on my arm the next day (that now started with the word “clarity”).
The lightness of doodling transformed my week. (Ironically, it was also a doodle at last year’s ALIA that cracked a door wide open for me and helped me imagine Sophia Leadership. Are you spotting a trend? Now start doodling and see what shifts for you!)
There’s at least one more way that lightness showed up for me last week… During the course of the week, I found myself drawn to several young people who brought incredible energy, vitality and passion to the community. It was exciting to be in circles with them. These are the gifted young leaders we can trust our futures to.
Twice I had the pleasure of being in conversations with women in their early twenties who were wrestling with the big, heavy questions of “what should I do with the rest of my life?” and “how do I use these passions I have to transform the world?” In both conversations, my advice (when it was asked for), coming from a place that surprised me, was “Hold it all lightly. Don’t take your life or your decisions too seriously. Each decision you make will help shape you, but none of these decisions will be ultimate and unchanging. Find a thread you feel called to follow and hold it lightly.”
Wow. I heard myself say those things and I knew I needed to take my own advice as much as they did.
Hold it all lightly. Hold light lightly. Offer light. Pass the light along. Light the way. Welcome lightness. Be a light. Walk lightly on this earth. Don’t hide your light under a bushel.
Be a light. Be light.
That’s it. Light. That’s what I want, and that’s what I want to offer.
I used to think it was just about offering light in a dark place (because I’ve become so accustomed to the dark and because I tend to take the world too seriously), but now I recognize that it’s that other kind of light as well. The absence of weight. The ability to go through life without letting it weigh you down.
There’s just one more piece of the light puzzle that started coming together last week that I’d like to share…
During one session, I participated in a fascinating circle time in which Thomas Arthur shared his Elementals – photos he’s taken of beings in the world, in which all he does is mirror the image of what he sees to create fanciful creatures from nature that speak to him (and to those who have the pleasure of listening with him). He asked us to choose an image that most spoke to us.
Elemental Goddess, by Thomas Arthur
I chose the image you see above. She drew me to her because of her sensuality and the sense that she is rising from some deep place with a smile on her face.
At first, it looked like she had a yoke across her shoulders, which was appropriate, for someone like me who’d been carrying a heavy backpack and lots of worries and old stories around with her early in the week.
When I looked closer, though, and added the purple shapes to the gold, the yoke was transformed into wings.
Like this beautiful Elemental, I want my yoke to be transformed into wings.
Be a light. Carry the world lightly.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. – Matthew 11: 29-30
* It’s a place where you dive deeply into conversations within minutes of meeting new friends because you know that the longings in your heart are shared and your common passions build bridges with these people long before you arrived in the same space. * When you are there, you walk around feeling always a bit raw, with your heart bravely exposed. You dare to live this way there (though you might not anywhere else) because you have an intuitive sense that the people in this community can be trusted to hold you gently, both body and heart.
* It’s a place where you are reminded daily to be mindful, to make meditation a priority, to be a witness to all that is present in the world, and to recognize that the molecules that make you who you are are also the molecules that make the world the beautiful place it is.
* The very first speaker you hear is almost certain to remind you to bring your vulnerability, your curiosity, and your broken heart to this space, because these will be valuable assets in the work we will do together.
* It is a place of incubation, where the tender shoots of your good ideas are fed by other people’s good ideas, and what emerges is exciting and beautiful and is owned not by anyone but by the collective whole.
* In this space, “leaders” come in the form of dancers, artists, students, writers, teachers, dentists, architects, small business owners, and anyone else willing to step forward to catalyze change.
* When you gather in a large sacred circle and hear the stories of your new Japanese friends, who survived the pain of a triple tragedy, you know that nobody’s job is to fix it, but everybody’s job is to listen deeply and hold them tenderly in a gentle space. And then after you depart, everyone’s job is to carry these stories in their hearts and let it change the way we interact with the world.
* Unlike a conference, you don’t spend the week sampling ideas like candy. Instead you dive deeply into a full, nourishing meal of ideas in an intensive workshop with a small community within the larger community.
* Holistic learning is part of your daily experience, whether that means dancing, singing, playing, painting, or doing aikido or big brush strokes. You won’t be at all surprised if one day you’re cavorting around the auditorium with other people, holding wooden sticks tenderly between your index fingers. It will all make sense when you’re there.
* You will have meaningful conversations with amazing people of different generations, different races, and different nationalities. Your world will be stretched, your belief system modified, and your perspective changed.
* The heirarchy you experience in other learning events will be flattened, and nobody will be too conscious of who the “experts” or “teachers” are. You have all come to learn and co-create, and your good ideas and passions are as valuable as anyone else’s.
* Though heirarchy is of no importance, the elders in the room have arrived knowing that they have responsibility to share their wisdom, and the youth have arrived with an intuitive sense that they have responsibility to share their vitality. And the sharing of these and other gifts makes this a vibrant and energetic place to be.
* You’ll hear things like “open space” and “world cafe” and you will learn that those are simply words that mean that you will be invited to dive into meaningful and intimate conversations in a large room with hundreds of other people doing the same. * In some of those conversations, you will have the opportunity to play host and other people will offer gentle support and ideas to help you grow the seeds of your ideas.
* When you show up willing to play a role in the community, you may be asked to do your doodling on a large piece of paper at the front of the auditorium, or to host an intimate story-telling session.
* At the end of the week you will dance with wild abandon because you have new faith in your own body and new trust that your community will honour your fierce and feral movements across the floor.
* When it’s all done, an artist will make a mark on a large piece of paper, and without words, you will know that your experience has been honoured by the ink on that page.
In the weeks to come, I will most certainly be writing more about what ALIA was for me personally. Some of those thoughts are still emerging and so I will give them time to grow. Suffice it to say that my heart has been deeply shifted.
Beth & Diane after building a leaf labyrinth together
Back in October, I had the pleasure of spending 4 days in a circle of powerful, warm, funny, wise women. We listened to each others’ stories, built a labyrinth of leaves, cried together, laughed together, ate together, dreamed together, and plotted ways of changing the world. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I felt like I was wrapped in the warmest hug of feminine support.
Even though I’d never met any of the women before, we were able to create an incredibly loving and energizing environment. This circle of women continues to meet periodically to offer each other support over the phone lines. I feel very, very blessed to have them in my life.
This is not the kind of feminine relationships you hear most about in the corporate world. No, we’re more likely to hear of cat fights, gossip, and “bitches” who do anything to protect their own interest. Some of that is true, and some of it isn’t. I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. I believe that the part that is true is largely due to the fact that there is incongruence between corporate culture and the most instinctual way for women to relate to each other. We haven’t found a way to bring our feminine wisdom fully into the boardrooms and cubicles (and frankly, our feminine wisdom might very well abolish both boardrooms and cubicles).
One of the greatest beauties of the circle/story retreat I was at in October was the range of ages and life wisdom of the women in the room. The youngest was a medical doctor who hadn’t yet reached 30, and the oldest was into her 70s. We had all archetypes – maidens, mothers, and crones – represented in the room, and it was a beautiful thing that reminded me of the best kind of community.
It was a particular delight to me to have such beautiful older women present – women who fully embodied and embraced the “crone” archetype. Beth and Diane in the photo above are two of those women. Wow! These women are amazing! Their energy, wisdom and pure delight in the world continue to inspire me these many months later. They didn’t try to hide their ages behind layers of make-up or plastic surgery as the fashion industry has convinced many women to do. They celebrate who they were, dance in the leaves like phoenixes rising from the flames, and share their wisdom and strength in the most generous way I have ever seen.
How I wish they could live next door to me and I could sit at their kitchen table whenever I need a boost of courage!
Yesterday I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Diane (whose face you see above). Even over Skype, Diane sparkles with energy and love. I adore her. She teaches Reiki, leads women’s circles, has a labyrinth in her back yard, builds sweat lodges, and does all kinds of amazing things in support of other women. She has become one of my most treasured mentors. I can’t tell you what it means to have a cheerleader like Diane who absolutely believes that I am on the right path and will do anything she can to help me along that path. If she believes that I will succeed, how can I not?
Qualla with her birthday cupcake
On the other side of the coin, I too have had the pleasure of becoming a mentor to a younger woman who sparkles with energy and love. Last year, when I was at ALIA, I met Qualla Parlman. We spent her nineteenth birthday kayaking off the coast of Nova Scotia, followed by a delicious barbecue on the dock. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with her at ALIA (as we weren’t in the same sessions), but since then we’ve gotten to know each other better online and I absolutely adore Qualla and I would do anything to help her succeed. She is an emerging young leader who’s learning to trust her feminine wisdom and I just know she will do big things in the world. I am honoured to be a companion on her journey.
It’s the way of women, isn’t it? The true, natural, instinctual way of women – not the way we have been socialized to become (or to believe we are). We are meant to support each other through the generations and across the generations. We are meant to find wise women who will teach us the ways of the world, and then we are meant to BE those wise women and offer our wisdom generously and without apology to others who need it.
Who are your wise women, and to whom are you offering your wisdom?
The above image has become my most powerful metaphor this Spring. I discovered it a few weeks ago and have made a couple of pilgrimages back to it since then. Last night Maddy and I braved a swarm of mosquitos to finally take photos of it. (We tried to do a video too, but Maddy was too busy fending off mosquitos to hold the camera still long enough.)
This simple sapling, taking root in the middle of an old rotten stump, has taught me more than many of the teachers in my life.
Out of the rot of the old, the new will grow.
Nobody understands more about transformation than the Creator does. Look at nature, read the story of Easter – it’s all about transformation, and its all intertwined.
Life happens in cycles. Birth, growth, maturity, death, decomposition, regeneration, new birth, and so on and so on.
It’s the same for every one of us. In order for new seeds (ideas, projects, businesses, etc.) to find places to take root, we need other things to die.
When we fail, we need to have the grace and dignity to let those failures sit and rot and become compost for new ideas.
When a project has reached the end of its value, we need to be willing to kill it, watch it decompose, and then watch what new things emerge out of the space it creates.
It’s human nature to want to hang onto the old “tree” (project, lifestyle, career, home, relationship, etc.), because it offers safety, familiarity and strength. But sometimes that tree has already begun to rot from the inside (the places we keep hidden from each other and even from ourselves) and holding onto it is only serving to hinder the growth of the young seedlings lost in its shadow.
Death is hard. Decomposition is excruciating. I know it – I’ve been through more cycles than I care to count. Rot is ugly, painful, and demoralizing. Some days it feels like it will never end. Some days it feels like there is nothing but rot in our lives.
This past year has been that way for me. Lots of ugliness. Lots of wading through rot. Lots of letting go.
Sitting with rot seems counterintuitive, especially in a culture that values productivity and success and climbing social ladders (with sturdy rungs that never succumb to rot). And yet the rot is an important part of the process. The rot creates the nutrients for new growth, and that takes time – LOTS of time. Compost isn’t created out of freshly killed trees. The tree stump in the photo, for example, was probably dead for about ten years before a new seed found enough nutrients there to sustain its growth.
For each of us, it’s the same. When something old has died, we need to give sufficient time for the transformation before we can expect new growth to happen. Patience is the most valuable part of the process.
Don’t rush your way through transformation. Let rot happen.
Note: If you are currently going through a transformation process, you may want to consider working with me as your Transition Guide. Contact me if you have questions.
They say that some of your best clues about how you should spend your life lie in your most cherished childhood memories. The things that brought you joy as a six year old provide the roadmap to your heart’s desire.
In that case, it couldn’t be more appropriate that I will be walking 100 kilometres in the Kidney March in September AND that I will be releasing a special offering on Friday that focuses primarily on honouring and rejoicing in your wandering soul.
When I was six years old, I did something that I am in awe of to this very day.
I completed a 22 mile walk-a-thon. AT SIX YEARS OF AGE!
There’s a photo of me somewhere (it may have been lost when Mom moved off the farm) at the end of that incredible journey. I’m holding the hand of Walter Paramour (my friend’s dad) and we had both just finished the walk. He was the oldest to finish (in his 60s, I believe) and I was the youngest. If I remember correctly, in the picture I’m wearing a white ruffled blouse (which seems like an odd choice for a day of walking), and homemade polyester pants that are just a little too short for me.
If I can do that at six, surely I can walk 100 km. at forty-five!
Last night after a meeting downtown, I walked most of the way home. Seven kilometres. And you know what I felt as I walked? Pure six-year-old joy. I love to walk, I love to run, and I love to bike. I also like to drive, fly, take trains, ride boats – anything that feeds my wandering spirit – but I especially love it when the wandering happens at a human-propeled pace.
It’s so easy to forget the joy of wandering in our rush-to-the-next-appointment, get-the-kids-to-soccer, get-everything-accomplished-on-my-list lifestyle. We are addicted to action and we forget the beauty of slowing down to a human pace. Walking offers the body and mind time to slow down, to heal from some of the damage too much speed causes in our lives, and to clear the clutter from our overly stimulated minds.
My friend Cath Duncan (with whom I’ll be walking in September) has written beautifully about walking through adversity. Reading her post reminded me just how healing and therapeutic walking has always been for me. I remember, in fact, the time I was on my way to a group therapy session at a rape crisis centre, and when the niggling feeling told me I really didn’t want to be part of the group, I just walked right past the centre and kept on walking. Instead of group therapy, I spent my evening walking. I walked and walked, all over the beautiful old tree-lined neighbourhood I lived in. As I walked, something in me shifted and my troubled heart began to heal.
In the following weeks, it was walking and journaling that helped me work my way through the healing process after my rape. For some, group therapy might have been the right thing, but for me, my feet helped me find the path to healing.
Do you have a story about walking through adversity? Over at kidneyraffle.com (the amazing fundraising site for our walk) we’re gathering stories and we’d love to hear yours. Click on the button below to find out more. Rumour has it there may be a prize or two available for people who submit stories!
p.s. I would LOVE to have you sponsor my journey! You can do it here, or you can wait to do it through kidneyraffle.com between June 7 and 9 and be eligible for some amazing prizes.
And then, still leaning on the tree, I spontaneously wrote the word “lightness” on my arm.
