From last weeks blog:
And yet, it wasn’t all dreary. Because in letting go of something enormous, something that I’d completely entwined my life around and that had entwined itself around my life, I created space.
What happens when you’ve got someone wonderful to spend time with, an empty calendar and the collapse of your professional identity and job? On February 9th 2020 there was no way on earth I could have guessed where I’d be on February 9th, 2021!
I want to linger a bit more on the loss of my business, Traditions Mexico. Not to be gratuitous, but 1) it has been a huge event in my life and 2) because I feel there is wisdom to be found in moving through calamity with one’s senses open.
In May of last year, I announced the closing of Traditions Mexico and included the following metaphor:
“When a tree falls in the depth of the forest,...a gaping hole is left in the canopy. Blazing sunlight now pours down into the understory that moments before was a place of dusky, moist, serene equilibrium. Everything has changed.
Nature is wisdom embodied. Where there is death there is life. Always. Energy transforms. Where there was once one thing, there will now be another thing...
... All around the momentary, cataclysmic turmoil of the fallen tree ten thousand new opportunities for creative outpouring now exist in that piece of the forest.
... a new story begins to unfold among the broken branches and bright sunlight.”
It is worth imagining this scene, fully. Put yourself into it. Imagine yourself sitting in the middle of this torn open space in the forest the moment the tree has settled onto the ground. You are sitting atop the fallen trunk, it still reverberates from the fall. Leaves are falling all around you, while birds are flying away in every direction, cawing and squawking. Rays of sunlight cut through the swirling dust and the air smells of dampness and green and earth and heat. The atmosphere vibrates with torn wood and dryness and ripped air.
Sit there in your mind’s eye. Sit still and feel this place change. Feel the birds flutter further away and become quiet. Feel the leaves settling around you like green and yellow snowflakes covering the soil. Sense the softening of the air through your pores, the cool edges that touch you as they waft in from the shaded woods. Soak up the bright, enlivened rays of sunlight that warm your back. Silence begins to fill this space. Silence and the sluggish passage of time.
Now listen. Listen slow and careful and long. Listen through a day and a week and a season. You will hear the sounds of change. The trunk sighs and groans as it settles into the earth. The earth sighs as well. It sighs and ever so slowly rumbles. Hear the stretching and unfurling sounds of leaves and branches as they reach into the sunlight and the scratching and scurrying and padding of forest creatures exploring this space. Sense the very air whispering as it warms and dries and swirls through the sun and shadow. Inhaling and exhaling.
Now, deeply settled in this radically changed and fully accepted shift in reality, look up to the sky. Up there above you, that sky was once filled with branches twisted and tangled and stretching; so many tendrils of the story of a certain tree doing a certain thing. But now what you see is blue sky and light. Openness, emptiness, a void. A sun-drenched place where anything is possible.
The soil beneath is still fertile. The rain still falls. Sit in silence and feel into that openness. Dream into the spaciousness. Surrender, for a moment, to the unknown vastness of the sky.
……. And so I began to understand this collapse, this loss, this tremendous shake up in my world as a rare, precious and even holy moment. A transformative moment filled with an invitation to rethink everything. An opportunity to be shaken out of the well-trod rut I had unknowingly created for myself through the many years of living.
Life is too precious to spend dancing the whole thing to the same song. And yet it’s damn hard to change tracks.
Over the course of the last 24 years I had created a wonderful job for myself, a dream job of sorts, running my cultural tourism business. It fulfilled my long-held desire to be immersed in the world of the traditional people whom I so admire and explore new places. It gave me the gift of being able to share some of that with others, generate income for many, including myself, work with good people and be my own boss. I became recognized, appreciated and respected in my areas of knowledge. Not a bad track at all!
But here’s a little secret that only you readers get to know. Something happened as that business grew over the years. My job slowly changed from one of being in the field building relationships, guiding, exploring and interacting to being one of delegating, managing and administrating. I spent more time working on money management and looking at profit and loss reports, addressing issues with guides and clients, worrying about taxes and studying business management systems than I did eating tortillas in smoky kitchens or heading down unknown roads. And as this happened, I enjoyed what I did less and less.
I didn’t get into the cultural tourism business because I loved running a business. The business got into me because I love the world of rooted humanity.
But I’d built my life around something, something actually quite good, something I had created from scratch with my own two hands, something that fed me and provided for others. This was a good thing, I thought. A thing worth feeding, growing and seeing what I could make of it. It had become my life’s work and with it I would retire.
In the meantime, I pushed aside a quiet and growing discontent. I fought off an insidious angst. I did my very best not to examine that thing that had me tossing and turning in bed at night. That thing that was my soul trying to get me to listen as it cried, “you’ve forgotten about me, and I am your bright fire”.
Every single day the invitation exists within us to take a deep look at what we are doing with our life, what we’ve let ourselves become and check in with our deeper being to see if we are in alignment. This is something that requires frequent tuning. It is truly challenging work, especially if we put it off for years. It carries within it a genuine threat to our hard-earned status quo.
And so weeks become years become decades and we dance to the same track. It’s not necessarily so bad. It can often be quite good. But as the distance grows between how we are playing the game of life and the calling of our souls, so too grows a deep seated discontent in the core of our beings.
Life is too precious. And so it sends us the unbidden gifts of cataclysms (whose spelling is not so different from catalysts). You are dancing in the room and bump the record player, causing the needle to skid across the grooves and fall into another track. A storm blows through the forest and knocks down an enormous tree. A pandemic sweeps around the planet and upends a billion things.
Covid fired me from my worthy work. My life reverberated in shock. I sat stunned. I was extremely uncomfortable, literally uprooted from the patterns of my life. Weeks and then months passed and silence began to find its way in. I slowed down.
In this silence I found the metaphorical vastness of the blue open sky, a spaciousness that was once filled with the tangled branches of all the doing of what “made good sense” to do. Life had not stopped. Rain still fell. The sun still shone. The soil was still solid and alive. The world around me was still filled with potential and possibility.
In the silence I began to be able to hear. And what I heard was the bright fire of my soul singing:
“Let your creativity be your guide, well connected to your heart, your ancient longings, and the rich experiences you’ve had in your life. Explore, be among the rooted, old-time people, learn, make photos, write, share, give of yourself and tell stories of beauty that uplift humanity. This is good medicine. Blow kisses to the universe.”
As clear and simple as that!
But here’s the thing about the soul. It is like a compass. Listen and it will show you your North, it will point you on the way that’s right for you. But it does not come with a map, nor does it include a guide. It falls to each of us to find the trail and make our way down it. This is the journey of life. The good news is I’ve been here before, many times. All of us have. Life has taught me that if I am in tune with my soul-compass, I can figure out the rest. I’ll find the trail, I’ll figure out how to go down it, I’ll know which way to go when I come to a fork and I’ll know what to do with the obstacles that appear in the path. I’m not saying it’s all easy, because it isn’t. And that’s why it's fascinating.
It might also be true that the Universe is in cahoots with our good journey. It might be that the Universe wants us to blow it kisses for the sheer joy of it. Perhaps, in its own unfathomable ways, it offers us breadcrumbs, obstacles and the occasional cataclysm/catalyst to nudge us in a worthy direction. Along comes a Teresa and magic energy between finger tips. Along comes a pandemic and a gargantuan disruption. Along comes alignment with my internal compass.
I have said that this is the story of how I got from There to Here. Well, we are almost Here. Come back next week and I’ll share where that gem of soulful inspiration is leading me and bring Teresa back into the story as we try to solve the geographical puzzle that appeared on our very first date: LA and Ashland, Oregon are quite a ways apart. How can we bring them closer together so that we can dig more deeply into this growing love?
See you in a week!