Counter-migration

Photograph is property of Ariana Salvo. May not be reproduced without permission.

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium. It will be lost. The world will not have it.

    It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” 

-Martha Graham  

This morning I did a writing exercise with my dear friend Ahava Shira, who lives on Saltspring Island in British Columbia. Ahava is a creativity mentor, writer, performer and loving inquirer whose work brings together creative expression, entrepreneurial business skills (which she calls Heartrepreneurs) and personal development to help women find success and fulfillment in work that is joy-filled and life-giving, and in their relationships with friends and family. She leads courses, workshops and retreats, and conducts one-on-one sessions. I highly recommend you visit her website and learn more. She also hosts a radio show on which she reads poetry, plays music and talks about the practice of Loving Inquiry called Love in the Afternoon on Mondays at 1pm PST (it is best enjoyed with a hot cup of tea ;-)). 

Ahava and I have been writing together once a week for about a year now. We do so via Skype, which is such a blessing, because it means she can be right in front of me as we write, and I can see her facial expressions as she shares what she has written and vice-versa. The last few weeks she was waiting for a new computer to arrive, so we could not write, but today she was all set up again and rearing to go, so at 10am we were both seated in our respective creative spaces ready to write. 

I rarely share my more creative/journal writing on my blog, but Ahava was convinced that what I wrote and shared with her this morning needed to be on my blog, so I thought I would give it a try and see what you think since I did say that I was going to be incorporating more of my creative writing into my blog posts. So here you have my creative journal writing piece from this morning. It does not (yet) have a title. I think it may end up being "Counter-migration," but I am not quite sure yet. Reading it again now I am quite certain that is is a sliver of a larger piece in the making. Perhaps I will write the rest of it in the new year, looking back. 

Counter-migration 

Morning sunlight on my sheer cream curtains makes me wonder into another day and what it holds. I think my life is shifting, but I have thought that too many times to be sure. The land of snow is pulling my heart north. Soon my body will be island-bound, returning to its natural habitat, bound by water and community. Its wildness reflecting and amplifying my own.

They say when you leave land you love it misses you as much as you it. That there is always a gap there waiting for you to return—slip back into, belong. The way you can sometimes slip back into a relationship with a dear friend with complete ease even after years apart.

If I were a landscape, I would be an island – a small one at that. I don’t really know why that is, in case you are wondering. It just is.

A week ago I watched hundreds of birds migrate overhead, their dark bodies fluid v-shaped streams, one after the other, dark waves against the blue vault above. It reminded me of a fall evening after picking up a load of turnips for market at the end of a long day. Limbs tired, contentment warm in my chest. We heard them before we saw them, pulled over at the side of the road on our way back to the farm, leaned up against the van, our necks craned up, eyes squinting against the last radiance of light stretched out long across the coastline and the inky darkness of the Atlantic. Above, wave after wave of geese determinedly pressed forward on their arduous journey south. Sunlight the colour of honey gave the left over stubble of the hay fields a grainy, dreamlike appearance. A cold wind blew steady. The sensation inside my body was one of contented yearning—for what I am not sure. The seasonal migration perhaps? The biological urge to give in to the pull of the land and sky? There was, back then, a daily conversation between my body and the land. The moon pulled my tides with her full pale face. At the most basic, biological level I was in synch with the universe.

But this is not about the past or discontent. This is my life. I am finding my way home. I am getting on a plane headed north in two weeks--my migration counter-intuitive. Am I fighting the inevitable, or giving in to some inner truth? It is hard to know. I pray daily. Morning, evening, and often in-between. Will something come of this trip north? Will I remain, the return portion of my ticket unused? Will the land, I wonder, still have me? Will it have held my spot open for me to reinhabit?   

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Do you keep a journal to record your thoughts? If you do, how long have you been journalling, and what do you enjoy most about having a journal? I invite you to and write an entry entitled "Migration." If you feel like it, post a sentence or two from your entry in the comments section below.

Have a beautiful Wednesday night, and an inspiring day tomorrow, friends!  

Ode to playfulness

The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.
Buddha  

One of the virtues I am celebrating this new year is playfulness. I have mentioned, in previous blog entries, that I am taking part in an online women's group, called Loving Inquiry: Finding our way to work, which is being facilitated by Dr. Ahava Shira. Every few weeks, Ahava invites us to walk through another "gate" with her by paying attention to, and nurturing a specific virtue or practice in our every day lives. To live more poetically. Right now we are walking through the gate of play, so I have been reflecting over the past few days on how I play in my daily life.

I am a playful person, once you get to know me, however I am also someone who is very attentive, and sometimes come across as being rather serious. So consciously seeking out those parts of myself that are naturally playful and nurturing those babies is reminding me to stay lighthearted, and to make sure to incorporate moments of pure, untethered, silly and joyful play into every day.

This is a picture of one of my best girlfriends back in Cyprus and I. I love how well it captures the playful nature of our friendship!

Everyone has their own unique ways of expressing playfulness. My mother, for example, whistles. She is a spectacular whistler. She also sings, but her whistling seems to hold a certain joy that she has managed to carry with her since childhood that is sheer bliss. I have a good friend and former colleague for whom work and play were one and the same thing. He took his work seriously, but while he was out harvesting berries for the farmer's market, he would listen for birds nesting close by to determine what kind they were, and in the fall he would stop to count geese as they flew overhead. After work on clear nights he would sometimes grab his telescope and a bunch of us would go out in a field to watch the stars before heading home. And while we were harvesting wood in the forest, he would look for coyote dens. One of his all-time favourite forms of play was to give unsuspecting visitors to the farm a generous handful of freshly picked blackcurrants, telling them that they had to try them, because they were delicious. He would not tell them what it was that he was giving them to try, however, and blackcurrants look very similar to blueberries to the unsuspecting eye. The expression of pure, joyful amusement, that would spread across his face when the poor visitors tasted their first mouthful of exceptionally bitter blackcurrants was something that I never got tired of watching, no matter how many times he repeated the stunt.

When I was out on the farm, playfulness was an integral part of every day -- running down the clearing between rows of vegetables to grab tools before I left the fields; running over and down the hill of a hay field, building up speed so that it felt like I was flying, and trying to jump on top of the hay stacks at the end of the day; throwing rotten fruit or potatoes high up in the air every now and then in the direction of colleagues just to keep them on their toes, or just singing while I worked, were some of my forms of play! Now that my work is mainly writing, I find moments of play in dancing in the kitchen while I wait for the kettle to boil; making funny faces at myself in a mirror when nobody is watching; cooking colourful, flavourful meals with fresh, organic ingredients; doing a handstand in my yoga practice, or engaging in fun, creative dialogues or projects with friends.

Because we just started a new year, I have been reflecting over the last few days on some kind of playful, fun, and creative project that I could start working on that would be a collaborative effort with some of the amazing women that are constantly encouraging me in my own work and inspiring me with their creative endeavours. What I came up with is a year-long journal, divided into twelve months, and shared with eleven other women scattered across the world, each of whom fills a month's worth of pages with inspiring, colourful, fragrant poems, stories, free-writes, drawings, sketches, photographs, and anything else that we feel like including. The topic of the entries is: "what inspires you, gives you passion, energy, courage, grace, and any and all other positive vibes that fuel your creative process?" I sent out an invitation to some of my closest friends around the world to see if they would join me on this collective creation of beauty and inspiration. The resounding "YES" of their response has made me laugh out loud. Their creative juices are already churning, and I cannot wait to see what we create!

My initial idea was that once the book has traveled around the world gathering all of the amazing inspiration that these incredible women are certain to fill it with, we may digitize its contents and share it with other women around the world to inspire them on their journeys. Once we have done this, we will probably auction off our original book, to raise money for a organization that empowers young women. Sound like fun? I am telling you, I am excited. And so are my friends, it would seem. The playing began this afternoon, when, while listening to my friend Ahava's radio show (Mondays, 1-2pm, Pacific time), Love in the Afternoon, I had the pleasant surprise to hear her share the story of our year-long creative journal project with her listeners. Sometimes just sharing creative ideas generates dialogue that is playful! I promise to share more on the journey of our book in future entries!

My idea for the journal came as a result of a number of different inspiring ideas and projects that I have come across lately. One was The Diary of Frida Kahlo, which I actually read a couple of years ago. Another was a recent blog entry by Karen Walrond on journal writing, which reminded me how inspired I had been by The Diary of Frida Kahlo (thank you, Karen!!), and was just so colourful and upbeat, that it made me think about how important journal writing has been to my own process. Karen has also written a book, which I unfortunately do not yet have a copy of, but am hoping to get my hands on soon, that sounds exceptionally playful as well. It is called The Beauty of Different: Observations of a Confident Misfit.  Another project that inspired me is one that an incredible artist, and dear friend of mine, Louise Mould, shared with me (because she is one of the artists taking part in it), and which I wrote about in my blog entry Sparks of inspiration at 2a.m., called the Sketchbook Project. I have also been greatly inspired over the years by an amazing woman living in northern Italy who has this truly unique passion: she lends books out to people all over the world for free (for 6 weeks at a time), with the only condition being that the reader returns the book they are reading to her with something added to it that tells her a little bit about the experience that the reader had while they were reading the book (a dried flower pressed between the pages, notes in the margin, a poem in the margin, etc). So in other words, the book becomes two stories -- the one on the pages, and the story of the many people who have read the story in the book. If you are thinking this sounds incredible (and I assure you, it is), and feel like contributing, she offers this amazing service for free, and is always looking for sponsors. Her website (in Italian), is Libri in Prestito. One of the interesting things about being playful is that you never know how your playfulness will inspire others!

I went to a poetry reading tonight with my mother. One of the poets read a poem about a woman who "everyone said" was not quite right in the head because she went outside to check the furnace, noticed the moon playing on the frozen surface of the lake, and was so transfixed that she stayed out too long, caught pneumonia, and ended up dying. In the poem, which of course was far better than my description of it, the woman's family tell her that she allowed the moon's playfulness to take away her life. The woman's response, on the contrary, was that she could think of no better way to die than feeling as completely alive as she felt witnessing the reflection of playfulness in the moon's face against the pearly ice.

There are so many creative ways to play in our daily lives. What are some of the ways that you plan to play in your life in 2011?