This story has no clear beginning and no clear ending. It’s a pilgrimage story, and without going all the way back to the beginning of my life (and even the lives that were lived before mine that thread through mine), or waiting until I’m ready to die, I can only tell you about a small portion of that pilgrimage.
This week I’ve been revisiting my memoir, hoping to bring it to completion and eventually get it published. I set it aside months ago, thinking it was almost finished, but feeling like I might still be missing a piece of the puzzle.
I think I’ve found that puzzle piece. It started with adding the above words to the beginning. The story is now a pilgrimage story, with no clear beginning and no clear ending.
It used to be simpler. The very first time I tried to write it, it was about the three week period in the hospital waiting for Matthew to be born, and how that impacted me in a deeply spiritual way. The second time I wrote it, it was about a ten year transformation in my life, starting with the arrival of Matthew in my life. I was comparing myself to a caterpillar, going into a cocoon for ten years and eventually emerging as a butterfly. Or Theseus, heading into the labyrinth holding the thread, slaying the minotaur, and emerging victorious. And they all lived happily ever after. The end.
But now, after months of contemplation, I know that it’s not that straight-forward. Transformation is not a clean and simple thing that we can put into time frames or boxes. I’m still transforming. I’m still being stretched. I’m still not a butterfly. I’m heading back into that labyrinth again and again.
And so I am more satisfied calling my journey a pilgrimage. My son’s death was one of a long series of initiations, each one taking me deeper and deeper into my own heart. Each one teaching me how little I actually know. Each one revealing something new about God.
Now I am at a new place in the journey. In past initiations on this pilgrimage, I have lost my innocence, lost a son, lost a father, nearly lost a husband more than once, lost a father-in-law, and lost all of my grandparents. (Incidentally, nearly all of those things happened around this time of year.) I have fought the minotaur many times and returned from the labyrinth scarred and yet stronger. I expect my next initiation will be to learn what it’s like to lose a mother.
My responsibility as a pilgrim is simply to put one foot in front of the other and keep following the path. When the labyrinths appear along the path, I need to trust that a sword and a thread will be provided to help me survive.
Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free ‘travel packages’ sold by the tourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage – ‘a transformative journey to a sacred center’ full of hardships, darkness, and peril. – Parker Palmer, Let your Life Speak
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves. – Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
Indeed.
You can be mediocre.
You can fail to capture the attention of hoards of admirers.
You can struggle all of your life to create a masterpiece and then leave it, at the end of your life, unfinished.
You might never get your book published.
Your business might never bring in more than $1000 a year.
You might not get that masters degree you always dreamed of getting.
You may not make it to the Olympics.
You might die without a penny to your name.
It doesn’t matter.
All of those measures of “success” are not important. They are the measures that we have arbitrarily attached to our efforts because we feel the need for yardsticks and goalposts.
But what if there are no yardsticks and goalposts? What if life is not a competition? What if the only winner is the person who lived well? What if the journey is the destination?
What if, at the end of your days, the only thing that matters is that you were faithful to your gift and your calling?
What if the only measurement you need to concern yourself with is whether or not you kept walking?
What if the only thing that’s important is that you let the “soft animal of your body love what it loves”?
Yes. This.
It’s about love. It’s about the wisdom of the bumblebee as it follows its hunger to the next beautiful flower. It’s about the trust of the wild geese as they follow the migration patterns that call them to their next home.
It’s about the soft animal of your body – the part of you that knows nothing about goal-setting or success, but knows everything about love.
It’s about writing and painting and dancing and laughing and connecting and counting and inventing and problem-solving out of our deep and passionate love for that thing we do. It’s about doing it because we can’t be happy any other way. It’s about trusting the gift to lead us where we need to go. It’s about sharing what we do because we feel compelled and it doesn’t matter what other people think.
The outcome is not your responsibility.
The path is the only goal. One foot in front of the other. Winding, dipping, trusting, falling, surrendering, picking yourself up from the ground and stepping once again.
Your only responsibility is to love what you love. And to be who you are. And to dream what you dream.
Now stop telling yourself you have not succeeded. Are you in love with what you do? Then you have succeeded.
Go ahead and ask the soft animal of your body what it loves.
It’s true what they say – the things you loved in childhood are clues in the treasure hunt of self-discovery.
As Mary Oliver says, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
When I was young, I was passionate about horses. I couldn’t get enough of them. In church on Sunday morning, I would draw them endlessly on the backs of the weekly bulletin. In my high school yearbook, it says something about how I planned to grow up and own a ranch some day.
Luckily for me, my dad always said “I’d rather buy you a horse than a TV.” I wasn’t all that happy about the “no TV” part of that equation, but I was certainly happy about the horses.
Together with by brother Dwight and my best friend Julie, I spent my summers on the back of a horse. We rode every chance we could. We never used saddles. We couldn’t afford them, and bareback was more fun and challenging anyway. The soft animals of our bodies became one with the horses and we loved every minute of it.
One summer day, Dwight and I set out for our daily ride – he on Prince (our favourite, fastest and oldest horse) and I on Lady (a rather finicky horse who didn’t like to leave the driveway, but loved to gallop all the way home). We had just rounded the corner from our driveway onto the gravel road and started picking up speed when something went seriously wrong.
Prince, who was part race horse and loved nothing better than running at break-neck speeds along the straightaway, did something completely out of character. He veered into the ditch and started to stumble. Dwight tried to bring him back on course, but it didn’t work. Prince’s head went down on the ground, he tripped and somersaulted, throwing Dwight head first onto the ground about 5 feet ahead of him.
I yanked on my reins and turned to look at what had happened. Prince was lying there, feet up in the air and head pinned underneath him. Dead. Probably from a heart attack while he was running.
Dwight was shrieking, partly from the pain and partly from the grief of losing our favourite horse. I raced back to the yard and got mom. She did what a practical farm wife does when she has a dead horse on the side of the road that needs to be cleaned up – she called the local mink farmer to see if he wanted some horse meat. By the end of the day, Prince was just a stain of blood on the grass.
We mourned the loss of Prince for months, hardly wanting to ride again. Lady mourned too. She got even more finicky about leaving the yard and the few more times I rode her that summer the only way I could get her down the driveway was to tug on the reins and get her to walk backward.
After Prince was gone, I really wanted another horse. I begged my dad for another one, and he did something that, in retrospect, seems like a rather brilliant parenting move. “I don’t have enough money,” he said, “but I have lots of hay. If you can find a farmer who will trade you a horse for some of these hay bales, then you can get a horse.”
I started scouring the Western Producer, looking for a horse. I finally found an ad that actually said a horse could be traded for hay. I phoned the farmer. He had a young Arabian filly available and was willing to deliver it to our farm and pick up the hay. I was ecstatic. I wouldn’t be able to ride it for at least a year, but at least I’d have another horse. (Come to think of it, it’s rather telling that my first business transaction was for a horse.)
Dusty was a beautiful little horse. I was thrilled to call her my own. Sadly though, being a blossoming teen girl with other interests, I gradually stopped spending as much time with her (partly because I couldn’t ride her yet) and Dusty began to run wild in the pasture. The next summer came and she was uncatchable and unrideable because I hadn’t invested the time in building a relationship with her.
I was determined to change that, and that’s when I learned one of my greatest life lessons. The movies may show rough-and-ready cowboys “breaking” wild horses by dominating them and whipping them into shape, but I knew instinctively that wasn’t the way to tame Dusty.
Instead, I spent much of that summer simply sitting in the pasture near where Dusty grazed, talking to her and waiting for her to begin to trust me enough to approach me. For hours I just sat there, waiting. Some days I brought a bucket of grain to try to entice her. On many days, especially at the beginning, she simply ignored me. Gradually, though, she began to notice me and one tiny step at a time, she came closer and closer to me. At first, I left the grain about 5 feet away from me, to see if she could trust me at a distance. Then I moved it 4 feet away, and then 3 feet, and eventually I held it in my hand.
The first time she ate from the grain bucket in my hand, I didn’t attempt to touch her. I knew that if I spooked her, I might have to go back to square one.
It took forever, but eventually, I could reach out and pat her nose. Soon I was able to stroke her neck, and finally she let me slip a halter on her and begin to lead her around the pasture. Eventually – and again in slow increments – I climbed on her back and began to ride.
When I was eighteen, I took my passion for horses to the next level – I began to teach. I became a camp counsellor and signed up as one of the assistant wranglers. I spent that summer helping reluctant city kids get used to horses. On the weekends, I and the other wranglers would take our horses deep into the woods until we were almost completely lost and then enjoy the challenge of finding our way back again.
One of the most memorable moments of the summer was the final campfire of one of the week-long camp sessions, the night before the kids were leaving for home. A mentally challenged girl, who’d spent the week trying in vain to fit in and make friends, and who’d taken a special liking to me, stood up, and in her boldest voice said “I thank God for Heather, because she taught me how to ride a horse.”
You could say that “everything I learned in life I learned from horses”. I learned about death and grieving, trust, passion, patience, teaching, exhilaration, and sharing.
And then, after that summer at camp, I moved into the city, sold Dusty to a young girl who longed for her first horse, and didn’t go near another horse for far too many years.
Always, though, there was a little part of me that knew that something was missing. I’d watch movies with horses in them, and I’d get an ache in my gut. I’d hear other people talk about riding, and I’d say “I’m going to ride again some day too.” Once my siblings and I started having kids, dad got a docile little pony named Paco or Brownie (depending on which grandchild you asked), and we started taking our kids out to the pasture for little rides. But then Dad was killed in a farming accident, and Brownie and the farm were sold.
I longed for another horse, but having one while living in the city just seemed to complicated and expensive. So I never did anything about it.
But, as you know, these things have a way of resurfacing. First, when I was about to launch my business and this blog, I met a horse named Sophia. It was a powerful moment that I can’t fully explain, but I knew that Sophia had a message for me.
Then I met Sherri Garrity in an unusual way (though we live 40 minutes apart, and have actually worked in the same places doing the same jobs more than once in the past, we were introduced by an online friend), loved her instantly, and found out that she has a horse named Spirit and lives very close to the place where I met Sophia.
Sherri started talking to me about her ideas around holding horse workshops for personal development, and I was hooked. From the very first time we met, we knew that we needed to do something with this shared passion.
And that brings us to today. A few weeks ago, I finally met Spirit, and I fell in love. I’m ready to have horses back in my life again.
In just a few weeks, Sherri and I are co-hosting our first Horses and Mandalas workshop.
We posted the registration yesterday, and within 24 hours, we were 2 spots away from being sold out. (They’re still available, but there’s quite a bit of interest, so if you want them, sign up soon.) Clearly we’ve hit on something that people want and need.
In honour of Dusty, Prince, Lady, Sophia, Spirit, and all the other horses along the way who have taught me many life lessons, I’m opening myself up to this new adventure.
It’s my birthday. I’m 46. There’s a very good chance I’ve passed the halfway point of my life. I think I may have just stepped over the crest of the proverbial hill.
But you know what? The view from here looks pretty spectacular! I can see lots of hills and valleys still ahead of me. And a lot of aimless afternoons spent wandering in the woods. A lot of late evenings lost in meaningful conversations with great people. A lot of adventures in unexplored places. A lot of good books still to read. A lot of fascinating people still to meet. A lot of failures still to live through. A lot of triumphs to celebrate. A lot of disappointments. A lot of love.
Forty-six feels pretty darn good. Sitting here in the early hours of the morning while my family sleeps, I can tell you one thing for sure – I have never felt more content about who I am and what I’m offering the world than I feel right now. My forty-sixth year was full of a great deal of personal exploration and a fair bit of struggle, but it was all very good, because I feel more confident than ever about what I am called to do.
One of the things I am called to do is to help guide people on the path through chaos to creativity. That’s going to be the the tagline on my new website (that I’d hoped to unveil today, but decided I didn’t want to rush it). I’m excited about it because it feels like clarity and a little more focus.
I know a lot about chaos and a lot about creativity. I have been through both places on the journey many times, and I will visit those places many more times in this spiralling journey of life.
As I step into the next year of my life, I have more and more confidence that I am being called to serve as a guide in this journey. There are many people stuck in chaos who feel lost or frantic or frustrated. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you need someone to help you shift your perspective, to begin to see the chaos or brokenness or lostness as a valuable part of the journey. Or to begin to invite creativity into the shadowy places. That’s where I come in.
One of the tools I use to help examine the chaos and invite creativity into the space is the mandala. There are so many things we can learn when we sit down with paper, coloured markers, our intuitions, and our openness.
In honour of my 46th birthday, I’d like to offer 10 people the opportunity to have mandala sessions with me for $46 each. One time sessions are normally $100, so that’s less than half price. If you’re curious about them, read more here. (In case you’re wondering, these sessions are usually done over Skype or the phone, so you can do them from anywhere in the world.)
This is powerful, chaos-shifting work (that’s much bigger than me – I am simply a conduit) and I know that a lot of people will find value in it. One of my most fascinating experiences has been a series of sessions I did with Dr. Kay Vogt, a psychologist who found me through a listserv we’re both on. After a series of sessions and many mandalas, Kay experienced a profound shift in her life. Here’s what she said about the work we did together, “Our work together has been extremely powerful for me. As a professional doing something similar to what you do it takes a lot to impress me. I am very grateful for your mentoring. You have been a coach’s coach for me.”
In case the idea of mandalas scares you a bit, let me assure you of this – you need no artistic talent whatsoever to do this. This is not about making art. It makes no difference what your finished piece looks like. It’s about using a creative tool to explore some of things that your right brain wants to discover that are sometimes buried under left brain logic. It’s simply a tool for deeper self-discovery that goes hand-in-hand with the heart-opening conversation we’ll have.
If this feels like something you’d value, book a session for $46 and let’s go on an exploration together.
Discounted price no longer available. You’re welcome to book one for the usual price of $100.
Note: If you’re curious about the mandala at the top of the page, it’s my birthday mandala. I wanted to do something to represent 46 years of growth (there are 46 tendrils growing from the centre) and 46 years of being who I am (there are 46 words around the edge that represent what I love and value).
Last week was full of teaching. LOTS of teaching. In four different subject areas.
I taught six hours of writing for public relations, six hours of effective facilitation, six hours of tools for social media visibility, and two and a half hours of creative discovery.
And in between all of that teaching, I had to create curriculum for all of those courses – from scratch. And I had to mark papers for two of the courses.
That, my friends, is some serious teaching exhaustion.
And then, on Friday evening, at the end of it all, I had to muster the energy to go on the radio to talk about some of the teaching I do (on mandalas, creativity, and community-building). By then, my head was spinning with all of the subject matter my head has been dabbling in. (To hear the interview, click here, enter March 16th at 8 pm, and then wait about 15 minutes before my interview starts.)
Needless to say, I had to spend much of the weekend recovering my energy. Fortunately, the weather was lovely, and I had a chance to wander in the woods, walk the labyrinth, do some mandala journaling outside, and have a wiener roast in celebration of my youngest daughter’s tenth birthday.
Yes, I was exhausted and needed to fill my tank, but underneath that exhaustion was an even stronger current, helping me to sustain the energy to carry on.
More than anything, I feel deeply privileged.
I am privileged:
– to be part of the learning journey of so many interesting students.
– to be able to “pay it forward” and share the wisdom that I’ve gained from many wise teachers who’ve inspired me on my own learning journey.
– to have students who come from all over the world (in one class, there are 8 countries represented) to study in Canada.
– to be able to dive deeply into topics that interest me, so that I can learn enough to inspire my students.
– to be on the receiving end of many, many stories.
– to have had so many vast and interesting experiences and learnings in my life that I can now be qualified enough to teach.
– to be able to help people find their unique paths in the world.
– to learn as much from my students as they learn from me.
– to have this much variety in my life to keep my inner “scanner” happy.
– to sit in circle with interesting people and find community in the classroom.
This is a good life.
It’s exhausting, and some days are very, very hard. But most days, it’s a privilege to teach.
This weekend, when I wasn’t wandering around outside, I finished making personalized mandala journals for the people who’ll be participating in Mandala Discovery. Happy that I soon get to connect with another circle of interesting people in yet another course, I poured a little love and goodness into each journal. It was a privilege to make special gifts for each person and know that they will soon be in my life, and I will get to sit in another circle (albeit a virtual one) and hear more stories. I only hope that receiving these journals is as special for them as making them was for me.
After finishing the journals, I edited the following video where some of the wise women who I got to learn from each week in my Creative Discovery class (that is sadly now over) share their experience. Watch it, and you will understand just how privileged I am.
