| www.flickr.com |
Slowing down and embracing the spaciousness of the un-scheduled moment has been an increasingly important and elusive goal over the last few years as I experience too-regular calendar overwhelm and a daily Sisyphean battle with my in-box.
Thomas Merton articulates the problem perfectly in a quote I've used here before and will no doubt come back to again:
"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence.
More than that, it is cooperation with violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his work for peace. It destroys her own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
To begin to redress the violence I've been doing to my soul and restore the tender roots of my own inner wisdom, I've decided to begin this new year by re-claiming something I'd almost forgotten - the weekend.
No small thing as - slowly but definitely - the weekend seems to have migrated from rest-time to work-time in the popular imagination. Turning the tide appears to require a personal declaration of some kind, a stance against the cultural pressure to over-work. Therefore, I have ordered home delivery of Sunday's New York Times and hereby publicly proclaim that I can no longer be relied upon to read email over the weekend.
Yes, you heard that correctly. I'm embarking upon a "occupy my life" campaign in 2012 that kicks off by fully occupying my weekends, so unless we have arranged otherwise, you can pretty-much figure I won't read anything work-related after 5pm Friday until Monday morning. With the accumulation that's sure to have piled up by then, you may not even get a response til Tuesday!
Even God didn't work 7 days a week.
May the Light and Love of this season grow in our hearts and expand out to embrace all that exists. May we walk in Beauty, all of us, as we celebrate the holidays and step into this new year.
Every since my work as Vision Nest Studio with FireHawk Hulin, I've been paying attention to nests. I'm drawn by the powerful metaphor of incubation they suggest, serving as a container for the transformative process; a safe space for Life to emerge.
When we were planning the first Vision Nest Studio, FireHawk shared an inspiration he'd had for our name.
Synchronistically, I'd just watched a television Special on bowerbirds and their nests. The bowerbird is an artist - each bird builds its nest from what is around and each is completely unique, with its own aesthetic. So the bowerbird turned out to be an apt symbol for the group of totally unique individuals that took our class, and its nest a perfect metaphor for the space we built for their emergence as fully creative beings.
Some time later, FireHawk sent me a link he'd found about an artist in Big Sur who builds and installs gigantic human nests and I remembered having seen one of them at Esalen. Then I found (and immediately bought!) this gorgeous book at a bookshop out in Pt Reyes: Fifty Nests and the Birds that Built Them.
There seems to be a theme emerging, so I thought I'd post about it, wondering if perhaps we all need a few nests in our lives... I know I do. If this metaphor resonates with you, too, perhaps you would share something about the nests that hold your forms of emergent Life?
Recent Comments