I’m still processing my retreat.
Way to state the obvious, Jen.
One reverberation of my time with these wildly loving people is I discovered a huge hunger to live a more hand-crafted life.
It’s not that I live a McDonald’s reality TV sort of life right now. It’s pretty contemplative around here.
Still, the retreat showed me there is something new that wants to coming into being through me, something maybe quite a bit different, and yet the same. Something to do with this hunger.
Threads showed up during the week. I want to be brave and, gently, tug on them. See where they lead.
One thing I know: whatever is coming, it won’t have a landing page.
So This Week I Will
sit with this hand-crafted hunger. I will sit by the side of whatever was stirred in Kalamazoo. (Which means land of the boiling waters, which makes me smile as I certainly feel boiled and that I am boiling, in a very good way, and without boils, I’m happy to report).
I imagine lots of pausing to smell the lilacs and stare at the tulips and read the poetry from all the poets I spent last week with.
I feel such a commitment to whatever it is that is stirring in me and I feel the parts of me that are speedy and driven rallying for a fight, taunting me — “hand-crafted life, my ass,” they hiss. “Go feed some hungry people.”
Oh well, the conscious life is a life of holding the opposites.
We shall see.
How about you? What opposites will you hold this week? What tulips will you stare at? What hunger, what hand-crafted stirring, is beckoning to you? As always, I cherish your comments and read them again and again.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Hiro Boga Apr 26, 2010
Jen, I love your image of a hand-crafted life.
My work emerges from an open-hearted engagement with the unknown. So my practice is to be at the boundaries of my inner world, and to invite connection there from that which is different from me, yet resonant with my own being.
This requires seclusion, spaciousness, receptivity.
It also requires the active inner work of extending myself to make that connection, and to communicate with consciousnesses whose worlds and work are sometimes startlingly different from my own.
Such connection deepens my understanding of the wholeness of which we are each a fractal. And it offers rich avenues for learning, co-operation, service and growth.
By its very nature, this process requires a setting aside of any personal agenda, without abdicating sovereignty.
So those are some of the contradictions I hold in the cupped palms of my hands.
And then there are the necessities of business, which require the other, measured-by-time side of my brain to function smoothly.
They may seem antithetical, until I back up and see how they too are a function of wholeness.
Then, it’s just about right relationship between these different aspects of being.
So right now I’m typing this, and pausing to gaze out my window at the cherry blossoms drifting on the wind like so many shivering snowflakes.
And I’m connecting with your beautiful heart, and feeling so thankful for you.
Love, Hiro
2 Suzyn Apr 26, 2010
Yes! I have felt this same stirring lately, but I haven’t done much about it. Right now I’m still working on your blog post of about two weeks ago, which helped me to to see – duh! I’m exhausted! So I’ve been aiming for bed at 10, and trying to gently rein in the 8000 creative impulses that go storming around my head most of the time like so many wild horses (I need to launch a product line! I need to write a play! I need to get a master’s degree in … something!)
I’m really excited to watch where your impulses take you.
3 Ingrid Apr 27, 2010
With glue still on my fingers, I am pausing from my hand-crafting to send you love and joy and freedom and spaciousness and bliss and creativity and blessings. Jen, I enjoy how generously you share your heart, your longings, your process. I have felt enlightened by you so many times, and moved to appreciate my life and my living more deeply time and time again. Thank you.
4 Susan Gallacher-Turner Apr 27, 2010
A hand-crafted life…since I am an artist working with my hands in clay and metal and paint…and I write working with my hands on the keys…I guess I am living a hand-crafted life.
But I know that I forget that almost every day, as I answer emails and worry about class sign ups and contact galleries. Then, I just see the never ending post-a-notes and to-do lists.
Yesterday, I was in that mindset, again and feeling frustrated. I decided to close my computer and clean my house. Two hours later, not only did I have clean towels, I had a clean mind.
It was then, I found my hands back to crafting in clay. Funny, it wasn’t on my to-do list, but yet, it got done.
And I still had time to smell my lilacs, too.
Susan