Widening the Margins

At this lip of the new year, we tend to focus on all that we will do better, or right. Often the voice in our head is something like “finally, darn it, I will change this thing about myself, my relationships, my life.” And then we buckle down and get to work. But there is so much more to living, to being, than to seeing our life as work, as labor.

The other day, someone reminded me of the words of Henry David Thoreau in which he speaks to loving a broad margin to his life. There is so much generosity in this image, in the empty space between words and the borders of the page, a generosity to self, a spaciousness.

This year, consider broadening your margin. Cultivate spaciousness. Give yourself the permission of ease.

Some people find spaciousness comes from giving oneself precious moments of quiet and reflection through meditation or writing. Others find a good long run opens their hearts and minds, widens the page. There are those who find the greatest opening comes from spontaneous play, from breaking out in song, dancing an impromptu jig in the living room. I often go to the ocean to breathe in the immensity of our planet, to do cartwheels in celebration of our water world.

What ever it is, where ever you find it, give yourself some time each week to cultivate the joy of spaciousness. Widen the margins to your life.

“There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hands. I love a broad margin to my life.”
- Henry David Thoreau

Freedom (or the limits of control)

There is a state of being that we often strive for: being in control. And when we get there, we congratulate one another for reaching this sublime state of order. We’ve got it together. We design perfect plans. We make it happen.

During the holidays, in the cold, damp of winter, with more to do and less daylight to do it in, we often construct elaborate plans with even greater zealousness. There are usually more people involved, so the circle of our control must widen. It is more difficult managing the complexity of other people’s lives, but we plan well, we communicate thoroughly, we are “in control”.

And then something happens. Perhaps something small. Some one changes their mind. Or perhaps the quixotic nature of things presents itself. A flight is cancelled or someone gets snowed in and suddenly all our planning, all our effort and best intentions, come screeching to a halt. It is easy to become disappointed and in this disappoint be reminded of others, of the ways in which people have failed us, life has thwarted us.

But there is another story here. A story about letting go. We can know that we did the best we could to make our desires known, to make something possible. And we can know too that we are not in control. The world and its inhabitants have ways of opening and closing that we can neither predict nor plan are way out of it. But this is good news. What fun would life be for us if we always knew in advance everything that was going to happen?

So take a big, wide, exuberant gulp of air and let go. Take another breath and notice the world around you, the music of the rain, the odd elegance of your thumb, a stranger’s smile. By letting go we allow a sense of ease in our bodies, in our lives, and in our relationships. It is when we are here, in this place of openness, that the world can show up in all its mystery and magic, that the people in our lives are free to be themselves. And they are radiant in that freedom. We all are.

Turning Inward

As the days become shorter and the nights become longer, it seems as if life contracts, the cold and dark directing us back into ourselves. It is an important time for slowing down, turning inward, cultivating self.

In the words of that enigmatic writer, Albert Camus, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” And it is true, in the coldest, darkest moments there is always our internal light. But the light requires cultivation and winter is a great time to nourish the flame.

In the coming months, allow yourself the time to rest, to reflect, to recover. Focus your energy on those things that are most vital to living a life of joy. By buffering your essential light from the frenetic pull of an ever busy life, your flame will strengthen and grow. Come spring, you will be alight in the world.

“Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle … a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl. And the anticipation nurtures our dream.”
- Barbara Winkler

Ambivalence

There is something so lovely, so musical about the word ambivalence. It conjures, for me, images of bodies moving fluidly through an aerial landscape, back and forth, swimming in air. But the word is often most often used as a pejorative, as if to feel intensely, oppositionally is somehow strange, possibly, in Freudian terms, sick.

The word derives from the Latin prefix and root: ambi (meaning both) and valentia (meaning strength). But unlike ambidexterity, which is thought to increase one’s strength and ability, ambivalence is more often said to wreck havoc on our lives. And it can be exhausting, holding the positive and negative emotions, balancing the weight of such divergent feelings. But ambivalence is also a highly generative place. It is not unlike the tension between temperatures and particles that birthed the universe.

Ambivalence is an important marker of change, or a place in one’s life where change is called for; it is the resonant blast of a horn.

Whenever you feel the pendulum of ambivalence, know you are in a place of incredible opportunity. What, you ask, is my life calling for now? Let the brilliant galaxy of this new possibility come forth.

We are this essence of

There is a lake within each of us. It is deep and wide, cerulean, emerald, aquamarine in ever shifting hues. This lake, this zaaga’igan, is everything we have been, everything we are becoming. In it rests the rough, shorn boulders of our past and the tree filled islands our future. If we are still long enough, we can feel the expanse of the lake, hear the wind skating across the water’s surface. Everything we need is here; it is the depth and breadth of our sentience.

There are days when we can only venture our toes in the cool water, when we can barely breathe in the rich juniper that surrounds us. Other moments, we dive head first into the depths and swim as if returning to. Yet in all times, there is the lake within us; we can rest here and know we are already everything we are becoming. It is only how we choose to inhabit the stark granite and lush beauty that marks our experience of.

Magical Thinking

There is a part of the mind that is so clever, so articulate and witty, so neatly folded and perfectly pressed, that we often fail to notice the absurdity of the beliefs being expressed. I call this part of the mind Magical Thinking. It is a name that alludes to alchemy, but it is more akin to a confidence scam. For magical thinking takes the visceral truth of our intuition and turns it into self deceit.

Recently I found myself in the terrain of Magical Thinking. I recognized it by its repetition, the story stuck always at the beginning. Somehow all the lessons I had learned, all the things I knew about myself, life, people seemed untrue, without basis. It is from this place that I often make the same mistake, over and over. And this is why Magical Thinking is born of suffering; it is its twin. At some point we learned a necessary but harmful lesson – that the truth can be too awful to face. There are times, early in our life, when this is true. But as adults, when we do not listen to our deepest, truest selves, when we do not face unblinkingly into the moment, we become our own source of betrayal.

So next time you find yourself circling the same problem, idea or decision again and again, the next time you find yourself slipping as if ice beneath your feet, know you are in the land of Magical Thinking. Close your eyes, quiet your mind and ask your heart what it knows to be true. Let this be your guide.

Licking the Wound

Everyday the earth is bleeding millions of gallons of oil. It is terrible to witness her injury, but too there is something powerful in her rage at the violation of such a deep puncturing. Injuries produce a similar hemorrhaging in our bodies, whether they are visible or not. Usually, we rush to stop the blood loss as quickly as possible. But there is also the thrill of making visible our own interiority, a bright red fluidity to our seemingly solid skin.

Blood is the basis of our circulatory system, it is nutrients and oxygen, the cleansing of waste. When we bleed, we can witness our own regeneration. Often we rush to cover our injuries, to bandage them, wrap them, compress them in order to reduce inflammation. But there is something powerful about presencing our injuries in the way that bleeding does, to acknowledge the damage and bare evidence of its healing. Some heal faster than others, but all injuries provide us with important information about what we want for our lives and who we want to be. Pay attention. This is what the earth is asking of us now. Listen to her, to yourselves.