I have been wanting to write to you for some time.
It’s four months since my last post—a short blurt on wanting to be ‘there’ and a kind of how-to for when you’re not ‘there’ yet.
In it I made a shortlist of entries from my book Find Your Way, the titles of which can settle the uncomfortable stirrings that accompany ‘not yet’.
Themes of presence, practicing acceptance and the power we have to put meaning to the meaningless.
But I neglected to mention one of the most fundamental factors of the journey from here to there.
The one true thing we can count on whether we arrive or not.
Our becoming.
It happens when we open ourselves up to what’s unfolding—via frustration, a genuine curiosity, or a semi-forced surrender—and apprentice ourselves to the process.
It’s what happens when we let the unknown change us.
When we let go of what was and what isn’t yet and grow.
We learn—from it and through it.
We work with the unknown by using its challenges and the discomfort to awaken, disarm and dissolve what is outdated within us, allowing our strengths and virtues to break through.
When we do this we move ever closer to our truest selves.
And our light—and love—will glow a little more brightly.
This is how I do life.
It’s what my business and writing name Seeker & Sage is based on.
I even have an entry in Find Your Way called Learn Your Way. I’ve recorded it for you to listen to—it’s up in the bar at the top of this post.
But in the four months since I wrote my last post I had forgotten.
I had forgotten about the learning and the opening and the growing and the becoming.
One of my old revered teachers Alan Cohen used to say that our struggles could be likened to enrolling in a seminar—an analogy implying that every issue we face has the potential to elicit all manner of inner transformation—if we are open to them.
In my case this not-knowing and my subsequent fear around it could surely be a seminar called: How to be with the unknown.
Which naturally begs the question:
What am I learning from this seminar life has presented me with?
To answer that I must tell you a bit about where I have been—literally and figuratively.
With regard to the latter, I can honestly say I have spent much of the past 4 months living in a fearful state—not only did I feel lost but I had also lost myself.
A series of difficulties that surfaced in July had me questioning who I was if I wasn’t a mother, a wife, a friend, a daughter, a writer.
It was a perfect storm: absent husband, empty nest, peri-menopause brain and body, pets who neared death and the isolation of winter in The Goldfields all catalysing this painful but profound enquiry.
What was my place now? Where did I belong? And without my work—or any work—who was I then?
And what was left?
Speaking of ‘perfect’ I mentioned my trouble with perfection and vulnerability in that post back in July.
Toward the end I posed a question—a question I had no idea would be the rumbling of the thunder or start my enrolment in the seminar called How to be with the unknown.
The question was:
How do we be vulnerable with ourselves and others?
Because isn’t that what fear and the unknown is all about—being vulnerable?
We’re afraid of what we don’t know. We fear what we can’t see. We want safety and security and will cling to whatever is ‘real’.
Because being vulnerable is extremely uncomfortable.
Fear is really scary.
And not knowing can be downright terrifying.
And as for the former—where I have actually just been is on my annual retreat.
I knew I would need it when I booked in back in May, but little did I know just how vital it’s timing would be.
Like a beacon of hope it stood steadily waiting for me to surrender the months of anguish and give way to the tenderest fears and most vulnerable truths I had safely hidden away.
And while I could write pages on the goodness and growth that came from the silence and the sea and the sisterhood, for now I will focus on what happened on the last day.
In the most intimate, delicate, humbling way we each emerged from the silence to share for three minutes what had transpired for us over the course of the retreat.
My turn came and I looked out that great long window to the east, the clouds grey and white forming and falling and forming again, just like my tears as I spoke what was my deepest softest truth.
I was vulnerable with a capital V.
And I was me.
On the four hour drive home there were more tears—of gratitude, and joy, and sadness and reverence—as I processed what I had just experienced.
Four days of communal solitude with a group of perfect strangers in all their perfectly human humanity, and me in mine.
The end of the perfect storm.
It was beautiful. And sad. And agonising. And hard. And painful. And joyful. And amazing.
I can’t tell you word for word what I said in my three minute wrap, but earlier on that last morning I wrote this in my journal:
Humans. We’re so precious, we’re so frail, we’re so strong, we’re so stubborn, we’re so forgiving, we’re so resilient, we’re so stupid, we’re so…we’re so…human.
We’re so human.
It’s all so human.
Life is so human.
And so sad. And so beautiful.
Look at that rainbow! The mystery and beauty of Love in all its forms—
It is shocking…shocking us back into love and to what it is—what it means—how to love.
Everything is beautiful. And I am grateful. Every thing—the smile, the fear, the laugh, the tear, the rage, the joy. All are beautiful. And I am grateful.
This is what it is to be human.
And with 20 minutes left of the journey my heart fully bloomed with the final realisation:
I had been living ‘in fear’ and was now ‘in love’.
It is human to fear the unknown. Human to want to stay safe. Human to fear fear. Human to seek comfort. Human to want to protect our vulnerability.
Human to hide our humanity, and therefore our vulnerability, for fear we will be shunned, rejected, ridiculed and shamed for it.
But it is so human. It is our humanity. And it is beautiful.
In learning how to be with the unknown we learn how to be vulnerable.
In learning how to be with our vulnerability we learn how to be human.1
From my heart to yours, Gena2 xx
Yesterday when I was re-writing and deleting and deliberating what to tell you I turned to my most trusted set of cards called Peace Oracle. And there was the perfect guidance: TRUST.
And this perfectly apt quote from Rumi that to me demonstrates what it is to be ‘in love’:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
What’s even more amazing is that when I went looking for this quote on the web to check its original spacing I found an article stating that there are three words often missing from the end of it.
I read on.
The meaning of the full quote is exactly what we need to do to love ourselves and each other more with all of our humanness and vulnerabilities.
Here it is in it’s full unconditional beauty:
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it, and embrace them.
There is more to say about this topic and this transformation. It has spurred me on to want to take the plunge and offer live Zoom sessions next year that support us to be more embracing and welcoming of every little and big thing so that we can become more of who we are…wiser and kinder. I’ll keep you posted! Until then…enjoy the season that is upon us : )
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