Innocence, pause and the power to choose

What almost kills you with delight?

Yesterday was even busier than usual. It was my turn to cook dinner for 20 people (part of a larger village experiment my family and I have embarked on). I had someone pop over for an anchoring conversation about their life path, as well as the usual toddler care, washing up, work emails and school pick-ups. Oh plus I was hosting some friends for a wildcrafting circle that evening. On a day like that it’s easy to feel I don’t have time to attend to life outside these compelling tasks. I remembered the Mahatma Gandhi quote that always makes me smile “I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.”

And so catching myself in the garden in a moment of rush, I stopped, took my almost two year old River’s hand, and stepped away from the to-do list and out into the ‘back paddock’. River took to the adventure with obvious delight, exclaiming as we saw our regular family of kangaroos grazing in the sun. The joey we’ve been watching grow all year was positively spilling out of poor mama’s pouch, all gangly legs and tail. We both laughed out loud. River reached down to pick a flower stem of ‘sour grass’ and started grazing too as he watched the roos. And then something shifted, whether it was because of the intensity of the shift of pace, or some other magic, the whole scene took on breathtaking beauty, as if infused from the inside out with the life giving warmth of the winter sun, pulsing through with deep peace. For some minutes everything glowed within an animate sacred silence. A moment of grace.

another magical moment up north last month

We all have access to the ‘back paddock.’ It’s not a place, but a way of encountering the world, a way of allowing life in. In one of the medicine wheels I work with, this experience sits in the East, in the place of the ‘Innocent Sage’ archetype, who can truly be present to the moment and experience Spirit threaded through all life. This capacity is one of our facets of wholeness and so simple, but also so easy to miss. It’s captured best by poets like Mary Oliver, such as in these lines from ‘Mindful’:

Every day,

I see or hear

Something

that more or less

kills me with delight,

that leaves me

like a needle

in the haystack

of light.

It is what I was born for -

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world...

Perhaps you might consider ‘losing yourself’ to the soft beauty of the world during the Wild Threshold Crossing that four talented guides within Nature’s Apprentice are offering at the end of the year. Step out of Christmas craziness and instead into a 48 hour reverie with self and other. What a gift to yourself!

You may be drawn to explore the Earth-based practice of hand drill, with Emily Coats this Spring. Fire never fails to ignite a dull space with its pulsing life force, and the act of creating it through rubbing two sticks together might be the ultimate example of magic.

Or maybe it can happen right now, a choice to step into the 'back paddock' and attend a little closer to life, bathing in its beauty.

With love and wildness

Claire

P.S I’m about to head out to my women’s circle tonight, another core part of my Village life. Seasoned circle holder and keeper of women’s mysteries, Siobhan Delaney, who I share circle with, has invited me to speak on ‘Earth Based Facilitation’ as part of her upcoming online offering - Holding Space - Women’s Circle and Spaceholder Facilitation Course. There’s over 50 women signed up so far. I’m looking forward to it. Places still available.