I had a dream once, that my body had become part of the landscape. The curve of my belly was now a hill that people and animals were walking across. Small children were playing on my forearms and trees were growing in the soil between my fingers rooting my hands to the ground. It was not an unpleasant dream – in fact I found it quite comforting to witness my body sinking into the soil and becoming a part of it. I awoke feeling rooted and at peace.
I’ve been remembering that dream these past weeks as I’ve been wandering in the woods and along the shoreline of this island that is becoming my new chosen home. After sixteen months of traveling the world with my laptop and a small suitcase, I’ve landed on Vancouver Island – a place I’ve long felt drawn to but have only had a flirtatious relationship with.
I want to become part of the landscape here. My wandering feet are ready to root themselves, to find familiar paths that feel like home, to learn to know trees that feel like kin. Though I was born and bred a prairie girl and will always know the prairies as my first love, there is something about this landscape that brings both soothing and aliveness to my body in a way that feels right for this season of my life.
On these misty cool days of a Pacific north-western December, while I deepen my relationship with this landscape and this climate, I’ve found myself drawn back into the work of John O’Donohue, a poet and mystic who could translate landscape into language in ways that most writers only dream of. Reading and listening to him anew has awakened something in me that feels true and good for this moment. While I am here, I want to slow down and live as the mystics have taught us to live. I want to unleash the inner mystic in me and lean into whatever wisdom awaits among the tall trees and rocks on the wild shoreline.
“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.
“When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” – John O’Donohue(From Beauty: The Invisible Embrace)
On Saturday, I sat on a rock at the edge of the sea, looking out into the shrouded expanse of the horizon. Noticing movement at the edge of my vision, I looked down and there was a seal, floating on its back just feet away, looking up at me with curious, friendly eyes. “Welcome to the neighbourhood,” it seemed to say. “Take care of the place and treat your neighbours well and you’ll find a way to belong here amongst your kin.”
In January, I’ll be moving into a small apartment in a quiet little town near a lake. When I first came here, I thought I’d be living in the city. I’ve become accustomed to having the conveniences of a city available to me ever since I left the rural life behind in those restless days of early adulthood. But I surprised myself when I landed here by falling in love with a place and becoming intrigued with the idea of returning to a more rural life. It might have something to do with the fact that I put “proximity to good walking trails” and “space to set up a hammock under a tree” on my wish list for my next home (a wish list I’m happy to say that this place fulfills completely).
While re-listening to John O’Donohue’s interview on the On Being podcast, which he did just before he died, his words about thresholds felt particularly timely. “If you go back to the etymology of the word ‘threshold,’” he said, “it comes from ‘threshing,’ which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness.”
I have a lovely and nostalgic relationship with the word “threshing”. Among the highlights of my childhood were the visits we sometimes made (in years when we could afford such an outing) to the Austin Thresherman’s Reunion. After the parade of antique farming equipment passed by, the old threshing machines would be lined up on the dirt floor of the arena and the farmers (and wannabe farmers) would gather for a friendly threshing competition. My siblings and I would always coax our dad out into the arena, knowing that if he went down there, he would almost certainly bring home the prize – a shiny silver dollar. Few people could beat my dad when it came to the stooking competition. (To “stook” is to stack the sheaves of wheat in upright pyramids so that the heads of wheat have the best chance of drying.) Afterwards, the stooks would be fed into the threshing machines and the wheat would be shaken from its husks.
a picture my sister took at the Thresherman’s Reunion long after our dad’s death
Years after losing my dad to a farming accident, I stand at this new threshold, reflecting on what it means to metaphorically separate the wheat from the chaff as I prepare for the seasons ahead. What will be harvested to nourish me over the winter and what will be saved for planting when the sun begins to warm the soil?
It’s not lost on me that only a week after I move into my new place, I’ll be launching my next book, Where Tenderness Lives: On healing, liberation and holding space for oneself. It seems an auspicious time to be sending this book, which I’ve worked so hard to gestate, out into the world. Like a pregnant parent, I’m now in the nesting phase that often marks the turning point when birth is on the horizon.
“I think a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit,” O’Donohue said in that interview. “And I think that, very often, how we cross is the key thing.”
Two territories of spirit. That’s an intriguing thought that won’t leave me alone. What is the territory I am leaving? What is the territory I’m moving into? How do my new book and my new home play into that? And how do I wish to cross over?
If these past few weeks have given me any clues (and I believe they have), the next territory of spirit will have something to do with a deepening relationship with Mystery and a kinship with the non-human beings I encounter in this new place. Perhaps while I lie back and look up at the giant tree that’s near the small patio where I intend to put up a hammock come Spring, my dream will be realized, and my body will become part of the landscape.
As I set my intention for how I wish to cross over into this next territory of spirit, I turn to Richard Wagamese, another wise guide whose final years were lived out not far from where I now live.
I want to listen deeply enough that I hear everything and nothing at the same time and am made more by the enduring quality of my silence. I want to question deeply enough that I am made more not by the answers so much as my desire to continue asking questions. I want to speak deeply enough that I am made more by the articulation of my truth shifting into the day’s shape. In this way, listening, pondering and sharing become my connection to the oneness of life, and there is no longer any part of me in exile.
Tucked into the corners of the mirror in my bedroom are two photos of me. In the black and white photo, I’m a young child, reaching across the table to dip my finger into a bowl of sugar. In the coloured photo, I’m a twenty-six-year-old, standing next to my sister, with a large backpack on my back and a smaller one on my front.
Mostly, I forget that the photos are there, but sometimes I catch sight of them and then I pause for a moment to remember those younger versions of me. When I’m feeling particularly reflective, as I am today, I wonder about the thoughts, fears and dreams of each of those younger versions of me.
They are both, in their own ways, reaching for sweetness. The young child, with a guilty look on her face, is trying to sneak some of the sugar before the grownups notice, snatch it away, or shame her for it. She’s already grown accustomed to being called chubby, and if she didn’t know by then, it wouldn’t be much longer before she’d find out just how undesirable it was to be fat and how shameful it was to want a little more sweetness in her life.
The young woman is standing on British soil on her first grand adventure. She’d reached for sweetness across the ocean, backpacking across Europe to feed her wanderlust. What you can’t see on the photo, though, is the engagement ring on her finger. She’s coming home from that trip to get married and settle down. It will be years before she crosses an ocean again.
Beneath the sweetness of both photos, there is an undertone of sadness. When you peel back the layers, they tell the story of a young woman who’s learning about the limitations of what she is allowed to reach for. She’s learning how far she can go before she gets pulled back. She’s learning not to want too much. She’s learning about shame and expectations and acceptability and responsibility and… all of what it means to grow up a woman.
****
In the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, Evelyn Wang is a Chinese-American woman who runs a struggling laundromat with her husband, Waymond. Through a strange turn of events, she discovers that she’s living in a multiverse and that every choice she’s made throughout her life has created an alternate universe where another version of her continues to live out the consequences of the other option of that choice. (For example, in one, she chose not to marry and is living a successful life as a movie star.) In the Alpha Universe – the original universe – people have discovered the existence of other universes and they have found a way to “verse-jump” between them, to access the skills, memories, and bodies of their parallel universe counterparts. They have come to Evelyn for help.
The multiverse is being threatened by Jobu Tupaki, who turns out to be Evelyn’s daughter Joy, whose mind was splintered in the Alpha Universe when the Alpha version of Evelyn pushed her to extensively verse-jump and inhabit other bodies. Evelyn (the laundromat version) is tasked with stopping Jobu Tupaki in order to save the multiverse. To do so, she must verse-jump and briefly inhabit other versions of the person she could have been if she’d made other choices.
In the end (spoiler alert), she must repair a breech with her daughter and talk her out of a nihilistic, destructive view of life so that she doesn’t destroy the multiverse.
****
As I stand in front of the mirror, remembering those other versions of me, I can’t help but wonder what life could be like if either of those two younger versions of me had made other choices. What if young-child-me had chosen not to accept the shame imposed by a fatphobic culture and had learned to live a life of radical self-love right from the beginning? What if young-adult-me had admitted to herself just how much she loved to travel and how much she doubted that marriage was the right path, and she’d sent back the ring and extended her stay in Europe?
Where would I be now, if I hadn’t been trying so hard to live in a way that was acceptable to my family/community/religion of origin? What if I’d had – right from the start – the kind of safety and belonging I needed to know it was okay to make different choices?
I used to think it was wrong to have regrets, but then I listened to Dan Pink talk about his new book, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, and now I’ve changed my tune. I’m letting myself see the places where I could have made other choices. I’m holding that regret with tenderness, not with judgement, so that I can make more conscious choices going forward.
****
What we only see a glimpse of in Everything Everywhere All at Once is the long-term impact of laundromat-Evelyn discovering the alternative outcomes of the choices she made throughout her life. I want the sequel, the rest of the story. Does she simply accept the status quo, accept that she’s doing the best that she can, or does she recognize the possibility for making new choices that free her from some of the restraints of the old ones? What adjustments does she make in order to live a more liberated future? How does she learn to love herself into her own wholeness?
That begs the question outside of the multiverse… Is there a moment when a person can wake up and see the past, present, and future through less clouded lenses? Is there a moment when you have both the vision and the strength to hold the possibility that your life could still turn out differently? A moment that doesn’t bury you under the weight of regret over the intervening years since those original choices were made? A moment (or, more likely, a series of moments) when you can choose a path toward a life more free of the burdens of other people’s expectations and rules, and the weight of the cultural systems that have shaped you?
I believe there is. Like Richard Rohr in the book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, I believe that most of us reach a threshold in midlife when something happens – a fall, a tragedy, a failure, a relationship breakdown – when we can choose to cling to the life we’ve worked so hard to construct (a life that lives up to the standards we thought were acceptable and that offered us safety and belonging), or we can lean into something more ambiguous, more openhearted, and more authentic. It’s a liminal space moment, when we can choose to fall into the abyss – to release the past, deconstruct the rules and expectations we were working so hard to follow, and dare to become more fully ourselves.
Like a giant game of Jenga, we construct our lives out of the pieces we’ve mostly inherited or constructed based on what we’ve been taught – belief systems, values, rules, cultural practices, relationship patterns, identity, career path, gender expression, and so on. Then, somewhere in the middle, a few pieces get knocked out of our foundation, or we choose to remove them, or we see that they are made of nothing but vapour. Then suddenly what we’ve constructed begins to tumble. Suddenly we see that what we’ve built is precariously balanced and not as sturdy as we’d imagined it to be.
We can choose to accept the deconstruction of the tower, sit in the messiness for awhile, and then find the courage and strength to carry on. Or we can desperately cling to what was and keep plugging the holes and propping up the tower.
****
Easter weekend always brings back memories of a particular moment when I knew my Jenga tower was about to crash. In 2011, on Easter weekend, we got confirmation that Mom had cancer that would likely kill her. At a family Easter gathering, just after we’d learned about the cancer, my former husband and I got into a big fight. On the way home, while I tried to keep the conversation restrained so our sleeping daughters in the back of the van wouldn’t hear, I told him I was ready to end the marriage and would only give it another chance if he would take the initiative to find us a marriage therapist. Then, on Sunday morning in church, after years of trying to hang onto the shards of my faith, I finally admitted to myself that I no longer knew how to find meaning in the version of the Easter story I’d always heard in church.
Two years earlier, I’d quit my job to start self-employment, but didn’t yet have a stable income. A few years before that, my dad died. That meant that the four foundational pieces on which my Jenga tower was built – marriage, faith, career, and parents – were all at risk simultaneously, some by my choice and some by forces outside my control.
I woke up on the Monday after Easter with an all-consuming sense of dread, terrified that my whole life was about to be destroyed and that my daughters would be taken down with me. For the next few years, I tried desperately to plug the holes and prop up the tower. I kept going to church and I kept trying to save my marriage. Five years later, though, everything was gone – mom had died, my marriage ended, and I stopped going to church. There was nothing but a pile of Jenga pieces on the floor at my feet.
****
In a game of Jenga, the toppling of the tower marks the end of the game. Life is not like that, though. Instead of marking the end of the story, deconstruction offers an invitation to write a whole new narrative. It’s the moment when you learn that you can let go of the pieces of the tower that don’t belong to you, and you can begin to build something much more sturdy, beautiful, and true. It’s the moment when you realize that the tower was probably also a cage.
My life was not destroyed the way my anxiety told me it would be. It was wobbly for awhile, and I woke up many mornings with that familiar sense of dread, but then I discovered that my deconstruction was liberating me from my tower/cage. It allowed me to tell the truth and to free myself of the parts of my life that didn’t feel true. I discovered I could build the kind of work that gave my life purpose and joy. I could grow relationships with much deeper and more authentic roots. I could search for the version of faith that felt most alive for me. I could say yes to what I loved and no to what limited me. I could find healing for the wounds left behind by the cage and I could grow in ways I never dreamed possible.
Today, when I look at those two photos of younger-me, with the reflection of current-me in the mirror between them, I invite them back into my life and I tell them that, from now on, I will do my best to be true to them. I will build a life that their dreams can be proud of. I will not let them be shamed for the ways in which they reached for sweetness. I will not let them be tethered to other people’s fears or limitations. I will continue to dismantle any of the pieces of the tower/cage that might still bind them.
Unlike laundromat-Evelyn, I can’t step into a parallel universe to discover the alternative outcomes of the choices made by either of the younger versions of me. But I can make choices on their behalf that honour and liberate them, choices less bound by whatever kept them caged.
