A Year of Spiritual Thinking: 1.3 (First month, third week)
Two humbling lessons
backyard moon bright arc, so slim and new chases golden sunset
That moon! I stepped outside after sunset and there was the brilliant arc, sparkling slightly in the evening sky. I always look for the new moon, to me a sign of hope and possibilities.
Hello friends, and welcome to Practicing Terraphlia and a Year of Spiritual Thinking! If you’re just joining us or haven’t read the newsletter in a while, go here for an explanation of my Year of Spiritual Thinking Project and here for the first month's call or challenge.
It’s only the third week in my year of thinking about what spirituality means to me, and how that shapes who I am and the way I behave in the world. And I’ve already encountered two important lessons, which I’ll talk about below.
But first, I want to share a podcast interview with me that just dropped a few days ago. Breathing Wind, Naila Francis and Sarah Davis’ podcast, came out of their experiences of dealing with loss, and is aimed at providing insight and resources for something we often prefer to pretend we aren’t experiencing: grief. Sarah and Naila, who call their episodes “a hug in podcast form” aim to show us how to live with loss and grief in healthy, mindful ways. Please listen and share if you feel moved!
First lesson: Taking life more slowly
Presence is about taking the time and space that we need to connect with ourselves, to connect with others, and to connect with what’s going on around us. Our ability to be present or lack thereof, has a huge impact on how we experience ourselves and how we experience the world.
—Kemi Nekvapil, coach, speaker and writer in “Planting Bulbs in Winter” an interview on Jane Ratcliffe’s Beyond newsletter.
I have spent much of my adult life searching for a sustainable pace for my life and work. As those who followed my blog know well, it’s a subject I have visited more than once with insights and new resolves. No matter what I learned though, I just couldn’t quite “get” how to consistently slow down and be present.
Maybe because I grew up small, the youngest in my family, and I wanted to keep up with everyone else. Maybe because I come from a culture of achievement (in my family, we do not rest until we’ve inched the world a mite toward being a better place); maybe because I have been constrained by my own particular health with an autoimmune condition that lets me know very vocally when I overdo it.
Whatever the reason(s), for most of my life I have raced along until I crashed. And then picked myself up, determined to learn a more sustainable pace, and gradually speeded up and speeded up until, yup, I was racing along toward the inevitable crash.
As Nekvapil says in the interview on Beyond, our ability to be present or lack thereof greatly impacts how we experience others and how we experience the world. I’ve always been pretty good at being present for others and for this living earth. But being present for myself? Nope. I fail consistently at that.
On the drive home from my spiritual field trip to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge a week and a half ago, I thought about what it means to be present for myself, and why that is so hard for me. I recognize that as an area of my life that is not working, and I believe there is a spiritual component inherent in why I consistently fail myself that way. So part of my task this year is to learn how to be present for me, at least as much as I am present for others.
Paradoxically, I think part of being present for me is recognizing and balancing my intense need for solitude with an equally intense need for connection with other humans, at least in measured doses. The more difficult life gets, the more troubling the times, the more I tend to go inward and hide in my own burrow as it were. But that isn’t necessarily the healthiest response. I am struck by what Margaret Renkl wrote in her New York Times column last week about preparing for what she sees as a very difficult year ahead:
To make it through the gathering disquiet, I will need embodied connection. … I will need to seek comfort in the warmth of others this year. Whenever the cold creeps in, wherever the dark night pools, I will need to look for others. I will need not pixels but voices. Not distances but reaching hands.
“Embodied connection”—what a lovely phrase! Isn’t that what we all need to keep us sane and healthy as we deal with life in all of its complexity and challenges? The warmth of a hug, the smile from a stranger, the soft fur of a four-legged companion, the spicy resin of sun-warmed pin needles in your hand, the joy as a bluebird flashes in to drink from the bird bath, warbling a few soft notes. A community of writers and readers…. all are embodied connections.
What embodied connections sustain you? Hit the comment button below and share your embodied connections.
Second Lesson: About that call to write your spiritual bio
I realized as I wrestled with my spiritual bio that I can’t write it yet. In offering that call, I was way ahead of myself. I thought that I might write a spiritual bio at the beginning of the year and one at the end, and then compare the two to see how my understanding of my spiritual self had changed.
But I don’t know my spiritual self yet. I haven’t spent enough time with her in a focused way to know her values and what she believes. (That’s that deficit in being present for myself.) My spiritual self is intuitive, not intellectual. In other words, I have no words for that me. Yet.
Hence this year of spiritual thinking: to learn and deepen the part of me who believes deeply in this earth as a sacred place, in the interconnections between species and individuals as numinous, in the holiness of the recycling of life and death in that endless dance of living and dying, of disarticulating into our component atoms and molecules so they may be taken up and used in new existences. I know all of this in my cells, but I rarely articulate it.
So this is my confession: If you struggled to write a spiritual bio, you are not alone. I’m there with you! So maybe put that call aside for a few months down the road and then pick it up again and see if you’ve got more to say. That’s what I’m going to do.
Next week, I’ll dip into what I’m learning from reading about Celtic spirituality, plus a lesson in intentions. Blessings to you all!
This is all very interesting. I consider myself essentially as an animist and all as inspirited. My practice, I realize, consists of anything I do to connect with or nurture earth’s sacred life force. Sounds a bit self-important put that way, but I truly believe that tending to my native plant garden, volunteering for land restoration activities and speaking to the trees, birds, animals and other nonhuman entities I encounter as I walk the landscape are all helpful ways of loving this beloved Earth.
I don't think I've read Joan Halifax's book. I'll check it out. And Jack Kornfield gives talks on Monday night, sometimes once a month, through Spirit Rock. He's very inspiring.