A pendulum, swinging

Holding and feeling it all

Mar 03, 2024

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A song I’m loving:

1. I feel like a pendulum, swinging. I move to one side, a co-mingling of hope in my bones and rejuvenation, a profoundly shifting interior and travels into new realms, longer hugs from my child and swirls of possibility. I move to the other side, a smattering of fear and rage, horrific news images and cruel messages from strangers, desperation and grief. One side, then the other. One side, then the other, sometimes seemingly endless times in a single day. If I’m not careful, I can stay stuck on one side for far too long, clinging to the rejuvenation or drowning in the grief. In over-swinging, I forget about the other side entirely, my world feeling like a shrinking and inescapable thing. So I practice pivoting back and forth, sometimes forcefully and other times – more and more lately – surprisingly naturally. I feel the delightful ease when it visits. I sink into the gutting horror when it shows itself. I let each side be proof of the other, knowing without the other it – I – wouldn’t be much at all. I let myself swing.

I remember days where I sought a steadying, a stillness. I wanted to be a pendulum at rest, staying put in the center of things, unmoved. I thought neutrality was worth striving for, that it was the mature way of being in the world. I looked to healers and writers and elders that seemed to possess an unshakable nature, always appearing calm and grounded in the face of anything and everything, permanently gleaming with wisdom as though they were entirely unphased by both the harshness and the astonishment of the world.

I long wanted to be the buoy in the wave. Now, I want to be the fucking wave. I want it all.

Give me the goosebumps and the heaving cries. Give me the bubbling rage and the wide-eyed stare at a double rainbow arching over the valley. Give me grief one second and love right behind it. Give me a burnt batch of brownies and then forgotten-about ice cream in the freezer. Give me the willingness to see the truth. Give me moments of doubt bound with moments of total self-belief. Give me all of it. Give me the capacity to really feel it all, to really experience it all. Give me the courage to not turn away from any of it. Give me the trust to face it like a painting in a museum, to stare at it long enough to understand myself and the world just a little bit more. Give me the patience to not rush to an answer or a solution. Give me the conviction to know there’s wisdom in letting go of being the buoy always. Give me permission to lose control sometimes, to loosen the grip. Give me aliveness, and the remembrance that with it comes an ever-evolving learning to truly meet it all with not just my brain but my heart, my body, my guts. Give me the gift of feeling every single morsel, the gift of letting myself be changed by each swing from one side to the other.

2. Speaking of pendulum-swinging, I haven’t been writing much outside of my own journal (& my journal is filling faster than usual). In other seasons, I’d be alarmed: not “working on writing” is usually a sign something is wrong, that I’m slipping into a dark hole, that I’m far from myself. In this season, though, not writing much publicly has felt not only necessary, but relieving. It feels like staying closer to myself. My desire to live my experiences without immediately processing them in words has led to a sense of embodiment that has often felt lightyears away as someone who’s lingered in depression’s grip for much of my life.

I am constantly making meaning of things, seeking the purpose or reason, asking myself big questions. I have since I was a small child. This quality of mine is beloved in many ways; it makes me who I am. Yet it can also pull me out of my life. It can become a way of not feeling what needs to be felt and instead trying to think, process, and write away from it, or into something entirely different.

In some ways, I love this. I need this! Writing is a crystallizer, a magnifying glass, an amplifier. Yet I’ve been noticing how much I want to just experience my experiences, my learnings and unlearnings, the inner shifts I’m moving through… I want to give them time to marinate and become, before putting them under a magnifying glass or on the page for anyone but myself (or maybe even never putting them on the page at all). I want to feel them up close and witness their evolution in my small, day-to-day life, rather than in the big or profound ways we often expect in writing. I want to forget about myself more – self-obsess less. I want to retain the privacy I’ve built over the last few years. I want to stay curious about what I write publicly and what I keep for myself. I think noticing these desires in ourselves and our work is important and potent. I think letting it all be fluid and open to movement is powerful. And reflecting on all of this, regularly, feels like kindness.

3. And again, on pendulum-swinging… I’ve been engaging in quiet, private, deep personal work behind the scenes for the last many months. It feels like I’m just now starting to understand any of it, let alone figure out who exactly I am on the other side of it – it feels like a beginning, and I am scared of beginnings. I don’t feel ready to write about it, but I do want to share about the process of being in limbo.

Something new is brewing and I don’t quite know what it is yet. Change is taking root underneath the ground in places I can’t see but can feel. I sense some big shifts in my life ahead and part of me wants to turn back toward what I know, to what is familiar, to where I’ve long been comfortable. Part of me doesn’t want to come out of the turtle shell and embrace newness, not because it’s bad but because it’s unfamiliar. Yet New and Unfamiliar is where I am being called, and I am trying to listen.

It takes so much grace and trust to go in new directions, to let go of what we’ve known in favor of what’s more true, to explore and try and experiment, to become more of ourselves. It takes even more grace and trust to do this in the midst of the world we live in, the chaos and uncertainty and pain we witness around us daily. But each time I move closer toward myself, I find I can see outside of me more clearly.

The more I build and grow my internal world, the more willing I really am to look at what’s happening in the external world – to bear witness in ways that go beyond my tiny life and into our collective, our inherent connection to one another. Letting some of the long-standing walls fall amplifies the grief, yes, but it also strips the aloneness away. In bearing witness, especially the last five months while I’ve been undergoing my own depth of inner change and the violence in Gaza has been blazing, I feel less alone than I ever have. I saw images of those with my shared values marching across the world yesterday. I see the invisible string linking all of us, our human family, to one another. I see the pain and trauma and fear stopping so many from seeing the link. My eyes are open. All of this has made stepping into the unknown a little less scary, a little more doable. I turn toward those with courage and clarity guiding them and I remember I can do that, too.

4. I just looked out my window and saw the storm clouds turning into salmon pink puffs, a group of crows gathering on the street lamp, the sun starting to peek through the gray, a blast of light. March is the month Spring comes. Change is brewing beyond my own circumstances – it’s beginning to take shape in the new daffodils in my yard, in the magnolia tree spilling its petals onto the grass at our favorite park. I take such comfort in seeing my own process being mirrored around me, in the continual reminder that I am never the only one.

If you find yourself moving through change, or seeking change, or feeling a bit scared of all that is being watered and soon bloomed… know you’re not the only one. I keep asking myself how I want to be amid the change, amid the metamorphosis both within me and in the world. What I keep coming to: I want to be compassionate. I want to be honest. I want to be willing to be wrong. I want to be tethered to the hearts of those who differ from me as much as I am to those who are similar. I want to have more conviction in what I know. I want to stay open to the mystery. I want to do my small part and not constantly wonder if it’s enough. I want to be of service. I want to feel my own feelings before throwing them at someone else. I want to be kind beyond niceness. I want to stay rooted to what’s possible not as a measure of fake positivity, but as a measure of practiced hope. I want to tend to what’s around me and start close in. I want to believe in my own desires and needs as much as I believe in that of others. I want to try. I want to allow. I want to let my aliveness guide me.

Here’s an invitation to make your own list, if it would feel good – to take stock of how you want to be. And maybe to notice all the ways you already are… it’s often closer than we think.

Thank you, as always, for being here.