Conspiring with life.

May 15

There’s a paradox, for you and for me, with what is uniquely ours to do and be in the world:

How can we NOT do and be exactly what we’re here to do and who we’re here to be? ever?
And yet, conscious, active participation does seem to be a necessary part of the game of being alive.

This game of being alive calls for active listening to what we’re hearing within ourselves. It calls for learning, responding, and growing the courage to take action, even when many parts within us are saying different things.

Which parts of ourselves do we listen to?
How do we listen carefully enough to choose well?

It’s strange, isn’t it, that it takes courage and active participation to do and be what is already uniquely ours to do and be in this life?

A body of work has been growing in me—shaping me—that began some unidentifiable time ago.

It’s got me, and we co-create each other.

To be lived by it is meaningful to me. In the coming weeks and months, I will engaging the courage to share more into the world.

This body of work that’s alive in me… Did it start two years ago? Yes, partly.

Yet it was also in me ten years ago—as I can see a pile of writing and notes of a talk I gave at the time.

Looking back further, I can see its roots in decisions I made 25 years ago.

Looking even further back, I can see that it really started 42 years ago when I was just five years old—though I couldn’t see it then.

But truly, my bones tell me, it’s actually always been with me—shaping me, living me, blossoming into the world in different ways through the changing seasons—as long as there’s been a ‘me’ to live it.

And yet…

I can also see how, time and again, I have felt:

I needed to chase it. Needed to ‘make’ it happen.
That somehow, if I neglected it for too long, it would leave me.
Or, I would fail by waiting too long—procrastinating, cowering, fearful.
But, if I chased it too hard, it would dissipate, the clarity lost, the authenticity tarnished.

An exhausting tightrope.

I sense now, like breathing…

… rather than trying so hard to carefully pace it

… or getting attached to inhaling over exhaling / exhaling over inhaling

To just… breathe.

Just breathing…

I have a sense that that’s what it’s all really about…

To act together with life. To conspire with it.