On Unfolding into Ash

It is Sunday night, I'm still aware that tomorrow is Monday morning. Something inside me urges me to tend to the words I share. I still have all these chores. What am I to do next? 

Where are you when my blog is a meandering unfolding?

My mind is full of flowers and logs, and this blog is a campfire that keeps me warm. What I publish is my ash.

What's different in Guatemala is the judge is quieter here. Fear no longer moves me, I grow stagnant and complacent, listening for other forces of movement. Space to listen for the muse to call me forward. Whatever urges me to action is more gentle now. When I get stuck on a task, instead of pushing through, I step back, I breathe, nap, sit outside until my stillness shudders me into movement.

My work is in marketing, building relationship that touches and moves the ecology of us. Worlds like "Branding" and "Offerings" and "Consistency," and "Marketing Niche" swirl around my head, I think about a focus, an intention. Questions continue to emerge. How do I sell myself while I am being myself?

A breath, let's start by being messy, mumbling and rumbling. Chores, chores, chores.

What's the sweet undercurrent tying all these blogs together so you can stay with me? So I can invite more people to listen and glean the gifts of my work? To be touched with resonance and moved to action? And to feel safe simply witnessing?

I'm shoveling through old posts and holding them up next to each other so I can hear myself, hear what still resonates, and speak from that place. A nature walk through the trees and forests of thoughts!

A theme that seems to be important among successful blogs is some manner of focus.

So, let's take a meandering path through questions about focus.

Let's think about focus as a supportive structure of Knowing in the wilderness of Unknown. 

I am wandering through the wilderness unknown, my ears trained for inspiration, epiphany, Truth. The relief of confession, forgiveness, integration of my fullness in every step. No longer cinched up to fit into others hopes and expectations for me, I am allowed to step away from relationships that do not see, celebrate, or are warmed and nourished by my light, my truth, and my full humanity.

So my wandering-blog becomes the gentle unfolding of fullness into my integrity, gently brushing up against the influence of your awareness, as you choose to give me attention. As I write, I tune into wrapping my light and my bloom with language.

My light and my plumage extend beyond my words, and my words are all that can be seen of me by some. My values, my beliefs, my reality alongside the values and beliefs and reality of others.

Maybe that's what is here to strive for, is a clarity of values. Yes, values formed outside the institution, so as to return to the institution with new ways of seeing and name what I see as it is put back together.

My addiction to external validation has led me into relationships that I don't want to be in, that don't nourish me, and have led me to the kind of self-abandonment that makes me "loved" by all.

IN MY TRUTH, I am not for everyone.

I have long been compelled by the question of how to be Myself WHILE in relationship? There's a value, a focus, my fullness, and connection with me, myself, my heart, my truth, my light, this bright plumage of my nature. Attachment theory suggests that as a child, I abandoned my full self to be certain of my connection with my parents, to be worthy of their nurturing. That self-abandonment continues into all my relationships until I am conscious and can name what is happening, so I can make new choices. 

Awareness begets choicefulness. 

Awareness of unconscious limiting beliefs of old ways the world was, awareness of conditioning and coping mechanisms beget questions to bring me back to this moment now. 

The more full my expression, the more fully I can receive love, because I know you see me, and when I know you can see me and you love me, I know I am loved, and so I open up to both giving and receiving, a full conduit of interconnectedness. 

So I am called to loving myself, to be impeccable with my word and choose to live into my full expression, then I can practice allowing myself to be sloppy instead of feeling like I should be more regimented. My sloppiness is divine! There is medicine in my messiness. 

(I share the words of my wandering feet for those who are also lost and want to be lost with me)

My focal point for my attention and awareness is to know my fullness.To bathe and clothe myself in that fullness with this quilt of my language.

What do I do to move toward fullness? Where do I look? The answers are WITHIN me, that they are called "Intuition."

What is Intuition? What is advice and conditioning? What is my values and what is yours? 

I've lived as if the framework for deciding what to do is outside of me. Parents, teachers, peers, who could see what I could not see. Maximizing my connections, the goodness of my connections, the pleasure of my connections, at the cost of me and my love of myself so I could have their eyes, their approval, their guidance.

And now I'm pressuring myself to abandon the external and reside only within my "intuition" and that I must be willing to follow that against all other advice, and even under direct and forceful disapproval. How can I know my values if I am always bowing to the stronger external will?

I value my full expression. I value relationship with others.

Now I am pressuring myself to see that it is only inside of me and that I must grow to follow something nobody else sees. And to do that is to be in relationship with isolation, be it one of gentle loneliness or fear-rooted condemnation.

Now there's a layer of me wanting to tie this all up in a bow, but something quieter tells me this exercise is already worth itself, it is its own answer. Something quieter says no matter what I write and discover, I am already in my fullness. What life would most honor my fullness? What is the next choice to make to show up to loving myself and leaving a wake of who I am?

So I return to listening to the existential buzz. The philosophical hum of "write and read and revise." Calling my intuition, calling in my inner-knowing to guide my hands through all the words that I could write, honoring the campfire warmth of writing anything at all, and honoring the ash of whatever letters are published.

I was told by my archaeology teacher the secret to happiness, and maybe to peace-of-mind. He told us that the secret was, "expect less than you are thankful for". In my spiritual journey and personal experience, I've felt the weight and seen the power of thanks, and as such, I plan to focus the tone of this blog on just that: unpacking gratitude through narrative.

So gratitude takes on a weighty role in my value system. By focusing on gratitude and reverence, values, focuses, and questions begin to emerge.

This is where my idea starts to take light. It comes from the famous singer/songwriter, Leonard Cohen, who once said: 

 "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

I believe that blogging can be the same way. I'll just take the ashes of my well-burnt life and paint them up on the wall in a wild celebration of experiencing the warmth of experiences. The ash and charcoal that I'll draw with will be something to remind other cavemen like myself that life is in fact good, amidst the mastodons, tigers, and cave bears.

 

So I call on the fire to hear my supposings, with gratitude for the practice and the weaving and knitting of this quilt.

 

Burn, burn, burn, may these blogs be the ash of the days gone by! 

May poems of my gratitude be left in the wake of the life I've lived. May my gratitude and reverence for this life permeate all of my writings, my actions, my choices.