At the beginning of every Creative Writing for Self Discovery class on Thursday evenings, after I ring the bell to welcome people into the circle, I read a poem. Usually it’s from a fairly serious, weighty poet like Mary Oliver or David Whyte. We don’t deconstruct the poem like we all used to do in high school English – we just sit with it for awhile and let it seep into us. Sometimes I read it twice. And then we share the way that the words may have pinched or soothed us.
Yesterday I thought it was time for a bit more whimsy and fun, and so I brought in my favourite Dr. Seuss book, Oh the Places You’ll Go! Earlier in the day, I’d spent a fair bit of time with the book, coming up with what I thought were some good writing exercises to use as a follow-up to the book. I was well prepared for a fun, engaging, imaginative class.
Before going to class, I read Bob Stilger’s post about a workshop he’d co-hosted in Zimbabwe. Bob wrote an honest critique of how he and the rest of the hosting team had run the kind of session they’d been hired to run but hadn’t done enough to respond to what needed to emerge in the room. “We did not work well with the needs and hopes present in the room,” he says.
Bob’s words made me wonder, “Am I doing enough to allow the needs and hopes in the room to emerge? Am I creating enough space for people’s stories to be told in the way that they need to tell them, rather than imposing my own style on them?”
This is, after all, why I teach this class in circle instead of a more traditional hierarchical structure. I don’t see myself as the expert in the room, transferring knowledge to my students like a mother bird dropping worms in hungry mouths. I see myself as a co-learner with them, exploring stories as a way to get to our deeper truths. In the words of George Bernard Shaw, “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.”
Yesterday, after reading Oh the Places You’ll Go!, but before launching into the well-planned writing exercises, I asked participants to share the writing they’d done in the week since we’d met. The assignment had been an exploration of personal voice and the passions and delights that are most easily communicated when one speaks in his/her most honest voice. One women shared a beautiful poem that began with words that were something like “my voice rises when I see someone fall.”
The second person to offer something up admitted that she was having a hard time sharing in class. At the first class, she’d openly shared a vulnerable and raw piece about loss and loneliness, but since then something had blocked her from sharing. She feared her writing was all going to the same dark places and she wasn’t sure of the validity and value of that for anyone other than herself.
At that moment, the circle proved its worth. We honoured her reluctance, we recognized her pain, we shared our own pain, and before long we’d entered a deeper place of conversation than we’d been in the past three classes. We talked about the universality of loneliness, and reflected back to Dr. Seuss’ words about the lonely place as one of the “places you’ll go”. We admitted the shame we felt when we’d been lonely in the middle of marriage or parenthood, or a gathering where everyone else is shiny and happy. We talked about the “slumps” and “waiting places” that Dr. Seuss so wisely defined for us.
And then we talked about how these stories connect us with each other and make us feel less alone. We discussed the value of writing these stories and sharing them in order to touch other people’s pain and walk the journey with them. We wrestled with the fine line a writer must walk between being personal and vulnerable, and yet being universal and not too self-absorbed.
Together, we took a deep dive into “the places you’ll go”.
At one point I glanced at the clock and realized that my well-planned exercises would never see the light of day. And when the tiny voice of regret whispered in my ear, I wished it well and sent it on its way. And when the slightly louder voice of my internal critic tried to insist that “you need to maintain order in this class. You need to share your expertise and exercises or people won’t get what they paid for,” I smiled, and then leaned in even closer to the person whose story was slowly and tentatively emerging.
In the end, we let the stories in the room (with a little help from Dr. Seuss) guide our adventure last night. We never got to the assignment, but it didn’t need to be done. We let the whimsy of Dr. Seuss take us from the not-so-good streets to the high heights, past the Bang-ups and Hang-ups, through the Slump and to a place where the streets are not marked. We raced across weirdish wild spaces, sat still in The Waiting Place, found the places where the Boom Bands are playing, let ourselves experience the lonely place where we met things that scare you right out of your pants, and in the end, tried to believe that we will succeed (98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed).
Throughout the course of the evening, we went to all the right places, even though none of them were the ones I’d carefully orchestrated.
The further I go down this teaching and leadership journey, the more I realize the value of the ambiguous spaces – the spaces where we let go of our plans, let go of certainty, let go of agendas, let go of “the way things have always been”, and open ourselves to possibility. It is in those spaces that true creativity can emerge. When we let ourselves (and the people we lead & teach) get a little lost, we can write deeper stories, ask deeper questions, and find deeper meaning.
It’s a scary place to go, and it’s hard to convince ourselves (and the people we’re with) that it’s the right place when we’re supposed to be “in charge”. Nobody likes to feel out of control. It’s scary for the leader and it’s scary for the people being lead. (I remember being reprimanded by former staff for letting meetings slip away from the agenda. There was fear of the unknown in those reprimands.)
And yet, if we want to go to deeper places, we have to be more comfortable with ambiguity and confusion. Rather than trying to enforce our own plans, we have to be willing to let the stories in the room shape what needs to be done. With caution and respect, and an intuitive sense of when it’s time to steer the ship back into safer harbour, we as leaders and teachers need to risk security for creativity. Otherwise, we’ll never leave the shallow water and we’ll never know what’s possible.
This greater comfort with ambiguity is, I believe, one of the gifts of feminine wisdom.
And now, for your inspiration, here’s John Lithgow reading Oh the Places You’ll Go!
One of the things I love most about the work that I now do and the learning I do to support it, is that I’ve had the opportunity to develop deep and beautiful friendships with many amazing women of all generations. As I wrote in this post, I believe that we must all take responsibility for being conduits of this wisdom work – both receiving support and wisdom from women of older generations, and passing it down to the generations following us.
One of the women who has served as mentor and friend to me (and, truth be told, I have also had the opportunity to return the mentorship, so it’s a mutual benefit thing) is Margaret Sanders. I met her last year at a circle/story workshop, and I was drawn in almost immediately by the warmth and wisdom I saw on her face. She is an amazingly gifted educator, mentor, host, and wisdom-sharer.
It has become increasingly clear to me that we, as middle-aged (and younger) women, need strong role models in the generation ahead of us. We need women like Margaret who have forged a new path for women in leadership to support us, encourage us, and lend us their wisdom. I am grateful that I have Margaret in my corner, believing in what I do and challenging me to continue to move forward.
I asked Margaret to share a bit about her life as she steps into this new stage of “active wisdom”, and this is what she wrote…
I am a woman who turned 65 this year, and it rocked my world! Not just a minor tremor. It’s been a full-scale earthquake.
I believe there is significance in my story for others, because I have come to realize that I am at the front line of a surging crowd of baby boomers who are about to face the same thing.
This is my story from the front line:
I don’t see myself as a senior person, but other people do. The arrival of my Canada Old Age Benefit Card in the mail (seriously – who knew?) confirmed my new status as a person. Over the past year, colleagues who valued my presence in working with them or mentoring them have moved on in their careers, and that has caused me to question what I ever could do – or did know. I have been mired in the ditch of questioning whether and where I have value to contribute to this world.
I left my job as a school principal to care for my mother when my father died. She suffered from dementia, and needed “mothering” until her death a few years ago. I successfully reinvented my professional work to be able to give her the kind of loving attention she gave me all of my life.
It’s startling to realize that I am in this situation as a pioneer; I have no role models in my family history for what it means to be a professional woman. As a woman who has been successful and highly regarded for her expertise, who must re-find her place in the world upon seeing opportunities for paid “work” vanish, coincidentally, as the 65 year mark arrived.
Because I have been a new kind of mother model for my 40ish age children, they are extremely competent and confident professionals, spouses and parents who have no need of mothering. I’ve done myself out of that historical elder role.
I have Wisdom, expertise, energy and good health, and I am not sure what to do with those gifts in the currents of today’s world.
My views are broad, wide and long-term and I have come to see things in the way of Proust’s simplicity on the other side of complexity. Younger professionals are focusing on the absolute necessity of meeting today’s challenges. Their lives are frequently frenetic, and they have little time to “waste. ” [We live on completely different planes, and necessarily so – but my deepest instincts tell me that my wisdom has potential for changing their lives.]
I have lots and lots of things that I want to do to remain stimulated and independent and contributing over the next few years. There is a cost associated with all of these things. I want to continue to be paid for the value that I possess. I am trying to figure out how that might work.
So, I am at the point of reinvention again. Unlike all of the other transition points in my life where things seemed to resolve fairly quickly, it is taking a while to rebuild who I am and what I am about. But the good news today is that I know my experience is going to add up to something significant. And my reason for that today is that we have a new 46 year old premier-elect in Alberta, Canada and for the first time he is a woman. I am one of the shoulders upon which she stands. (Her mother died a few days before her election, and the one person she wanted to call first with the good news was her mother.) Invisibly, from behind this front-line head-line news, my experience and the experiences of the women surging behind me, enabled this new story to begin unfolding.
We baby boomer women have stories to tell, and our stories are changing the world. That may be where I come in …
I’ve seen it happen time and time again. We just want to fix things for other people. It makes us feel useful if we can be fixers.
It’s in our nature – especially for those of us who live in affluent countries. Some of my African friends have pointed out that it’s a trait that’s particularly evident among North Americans. It emerges from a culture that values independence over community. To be independent we have to be fixers and givers rather than receivers or dependents.
Now there’s nothing wrong with wanting to help. Helping is a good thing. The problem comes when helping turns into fixing and we end up imposing our own solutions and values on someone else’s challenges. Unlike helping, fixing comes from a place of superiority instead of compassion. It’s something I have to resist again and again when one of my teenage daughters has a problem that I’m pretty sure I can resolve better than she can.
Today, a lot of bloggers are writing about the importance of empowering girls around the world, to help them rise out of poverty, oppression, and even slavery. It’s a cause I believe in deeply. In all of my travels in developing countries, the stories that impacted me the most deeply were the ones about young girls who’d recently escaped from sexual slavery in India, and other young girls subjected to genital mutilation in Ethiopia.
Here’s one of the things that I’ve seen have a significant impact on young girls all over the world (including my own daughters)… good role models. I’m not talking about celebrities or even perfect people, I’m talking about REAL people who live authentic and meaningful lives and let their values guide their actions.
Young girls need to be shown what impact women can have when they have the courage to live with passion and conviction despite the fact that they may fail sometimes. They especially need role models in their own countries and communities – women who have risen above the odds and impacted change in big or little ways.
I have had the privilege of meeting several such women who serve as role models in their own countries. Today, I want to honour them for the part they’re playing in changing the world. To change the world for young girls around the world, the best thing we can do is celebrate powerful women wherever they are, listen to their stories, and then find out how we can support their work.
For just a moment, step away from all the fixing you’d like to do and just listen…
Elizabeth was just 23 when I met her in Ethiopia, but she has wisdom and strength beyond her years. She has committed her life to serving the cause of justice for those who are poor. She gave up her home in Addis Ababa to move to a remote village in the Afar desert to help a nomadic community build a water diversion project so that they can move beyond the hunger that has plagued them for a number of years (since the climate has changed and drought comes more frequently). Arriving in a conservative Muslim community, Elizabeth was told “this project will never work if it’s lead by a woman”, but she persevered and a few years later, dramatic changes have occured. Not only do they have abundant crops where nothing once grew, but there are more children going to school because families do not have to uproot themselves in search of water. The most exciting change is that gradually, women are being allowed to hold leadership positions in local governance, because the community witnessed what Elizabeth was capable of.
When I met Fidelis, I couldn’t help but notice the fierce energy burning in her eyes, despite the quiet calm of her face. It didn’t take long to find out that my first impressions were dead on. This was a women who would stand up to almost anyone without flinching (she had the nerve to tell Jeffrey Sachs he might be wrong on some of his thoughts on the Green Revolution for Africa and encouraged him to listen to more Africans), but still had the grace and compassion to make everyone in her presence feel valued. One of the most striking things she said in her visit to Canada was “Why do you people in the West always think you need to FIX everything?” She was working tirelessly in her native Kenya to help farmers learn more sustainable agriculture practices. I remember a story she told about how they’d learned to give goats and chickens in some villages because then they were more assured that the women and children would eat (men were too proud to eat that lowly meat and preferred beef). Sadly, Fidelis passed away a few years ago. A bright light too soon gone.
Mary Beth left a career in teaching to work in agricultural development because she witnessed marginalized tribes during times of conflict not having enough food to eat and it awakened a driving passion in her to do something about it. She was quickly promoted to leadership and now serves as Chief Functionary/Secretary for the Rural Women’s Upliftment Society (RWUS) in a remote area of India. When she visited Canada, she could not believe how much waste was accepted in our culture. “I visited a potato farm,” she said, “and saw so many potatoes that were left on the field to rot after the machines had finished the harvest. I couldn’t help but think of all the people those potatoes might feed.”
Victoria is the first woman to serve as General Secretary of the Association of Evangelicals of Liberia (AEL). AEL is active in resettling refugees from the many years of civil war, including helping many farmers to successfully return to their land. As a single parent who provides a home for not only her own children, but her nieces and nephews (who she is supporting through school), she was struck by the self-centredness of Western culture. “When we have a surplus, we give it to someone around who does not have enough food. There are always people around who need food.”
Shama carries herself with poise and strength. There is little doubt when you meet her that you are meeting a leader. She works in program management for Church World Service in her native Pakistan. As a woman in a leadership position in a male-dominated world, she often has to assert herself or choose to ignore the prejudice she’s subjected to. Some of the projects Shama manages help families who’ve been displaced because of conflict gain access to food. It is clear she loves her country and she longs for a day when more of the young girls she meets in rural areas have access to education. Sadly, though, even where there are schools, she fears that young people are not being taught to think creatively. “They are taught by rote,” she says. “Questions are frowned upon. I’d like to see that changed.”
I wish I’d had more time to spend with Kabita on the tiny island in the Sundarbans in India where she lives. My first impression of this young schoolteacher was that she had great respect (and expected the same) for the children under her guidance who danced for us when we first arrived on the island. She took my hand and gently guided me around her village, helping me aboard the bicycle transport, protecting me from tree branches along the path, and making sure I was comfortable. With pride, she introduced me to the place she calls home where she works tirelessly to bring education to children from marginalized tribes. I have never felt so comfortable holding another woman’s hand, but there was a special bond between Kabita and I right from the start. There were tears in both of our eyes when we parted.
This morning I was browsing the internet a bit, trying to avoid the task I needed to do (prepare for tomorrow’s teaching), and looking for some leadership inspiration. What I found were a lot of typical leadership blogs that really didn’t appeal to me very much. Many of them are based on old paradigms of what leadership is – the top down, masculine model of a heroic, charismatic, strategic, high-performance, competitive individual who runs the show from a hierarchical position and “never lets you see him sweat”.
That’s not the kind of leadership I’m interested in, and so I rarely read those blogs. I’m much more interested in exploring what it means for the leader to serve as host, artist, question-asker, chaos-embracer, doodler, meditator, and storycatcher.
After blog surfing, I asked myself, once again, whether or not it’s really a leadership blog I want to write. If I don’t fit in with those other blogs, and if I like to write about taking contemplative photo walks, embracing your inner child, and what brings me joy, am I really putting something forward that is of value to leaders and potential leaders? Wouldn’t I be better off simply writing a “how to live a good life” blog?
In the end, though, I kept coming back to this… if I want to contribute to a shift in paradigms, if I want people to imagine themselves as leaders even if they’ll never have those hierarchical positions, if I want to help people take personal responsibility for the state of the world instead of assuming it’s someone else’s problem, if I want us to imagine what the world would be like if more feminine wisdom (and more right-brained thinking) were at play in our decision-making process, then this IS about leadership.
Leadership is about living with integrity and letting our lifestyles be our messages.
Leadership is about recognizing when it’s time to just sit with your mother in the hospital room, rather than rushing off to get another thing done.
Leadership is about wandering through nature and honouring every beautiful thing you see.
Leadership is about knowing when it’s time to take the road less traveled.
Leadership is about spending time at the beach with your kids and knowing that rest and rejuvenation are as important as any meeting you might attend.
Leadership is about slowing down to appreciate and honour this earth instead of forever sacrificing beauty for the cause of efficiency.
Leadership is about inviting people into circles for deep and authentic conversations.
Leadership is about taking an art break and considering what is trying to emerge in your right brain that your left brain hasn’t been able to articulate.
Leadership is about staring at trees and knowing that they are our wise teachers.
Leadership is about inviting the right questions into the room.
Leadership is about recognizing that transformation takes time and cannot be fit into models or rushed through strategic action plans.
Leadership is about being willing to be an edge-walker even when it looks more safe at the centre.
Leadership is about looking deeply into a person’s eyes and letting them know they are seen.
Leadership is about moving, dancing, singing, and laughing.
Leadership is about living well, serving well, and loving well.
Leadership is about recognizing that the world needs your gifts and then taking responsibility to share them.
Leadership is about being truthful even when you’re surrounded by deception.
Leadership is about having the courage to step outside of society’s norms when the systems we’ve created just aren’t working any more.
We are ALL leaders, whether we recognize it or not.
We are ALL responsible for influencing other people, living authentic lives, bringing more beauty into the world, spreading compassion, honouring the earth, and serving the cause of justice.
This blog is about inviting people to take responsibility for these things, while at the same time recognizing that we’ll all make mistakes along the way. It’s about breathing deeply through the fear and stepping forward anyway. It’s about knowing when it’s OUR turn to be light-bearers, change-makers, story-catchers, question-askers, and justice-seekers.
It’s about offering you support, encouragement, ideas, and forgiveness as you step forward into the role you are called to fill.
Go ahead. Call yourself a leader. And when you need strength for the journey, come sit in my circle for awhile.
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
At the beginning of every Creative Writing for Self Discovery class on Thursday evenings, after I ring the bell to welcome people into the circle, I read a poem. Usually it’s from a fairly serious, weighty poet like Mary Oliver or David Whyte. We don’t deconstruct the poem like we all used to do in high school English – we just sit with it for awhile and let it seep into us. Sometimes I read it twice. And then we share the way that the words may have pinched or soothed us.
