If you’re holding big emotions for the world with climate change at the moment, come along to the workshop this Wednesday onEco-Anxiety. We’ll be using a mix of somatics & storytelling practices to help you make sense of this time, and find your most meaningful response. You can still joinhere.
This week I want to share an excerpt from John O’Donohue’s. book, To Bless the Space Between Us. He writes, “At any time you can ask yourself: At which threshold am I now standing? At this time in my life, what am I leaving? Where am I about to enter? What is preventing me from crossing my next threshold? What gift would enable me to do it?
A threshold is not a simple boundary; it is a frontier that divides two different territories, rhythms, and atmospheres. Indeed, it is a lovely testimony to the fullness and integrity of an experience or a stage of life that it intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.
At this threshold a great complexity of emotion comes alive: confusion, fear, excitement, sadness, hope. This is one of the reasons such vital crossings were always clothed in ritual. It is wise in your own life to be able to recognise and acknowledge the key thresholds: to take your time; to feel all the varieties of presence that accrue there; to listen inward with complete attention until you hear the inner voice calling you forward. The time has come to cross.”
We collectively stand on a threshold. What lies on the other side, I believe is still up to our choosing. Our collective response to this time, our desires, our values, our decisions and how we find meaning are all part of this choice. Whatever this threshold holds though, I know I am not alone in hearing the call that the time has come to cross.
This crossing requires – at least in our imagination – rejecting the boundaries, limitations, binaries & impossibilities that lay within our current world. It asks that we allow “our heart to be passionately engaged & woken up”.
So I want to ask, where does your heart lie right now? Can you feel what it asks of you in this time?
if you’re wanting to explore our thresholds more deeply, join me on Wednesday for the eco-anxiety & climate grief workshop, and let’s see what threshold we can collectively cross together.
I haven’t written very much the last few years, not for someone who would call themselves a writer. I haven’t written because the words that would come out felt forced and contrite. They felt like words that I was supposed to say, stories and advice that belonged to someone else, not what was actually true. And so, with some exception, I held my voice back.
Crisis may be too strong a word, but I have been on a reckoning of sorts. A questioning of where my life has been, where it stands and where I want it to go. Questioning my career, my values, my sexuality, my truth; trying to answer the question that has been a predominant theme in my experiences: what if life doesn’t turn out like I thought it would?
While I’ve been on this reckoning of sorts, stepping back from areas I thought I was meant to serve, I’ve been discovering new paths and trails ahead of me. The ecological crisis, with its companion fear and grief, has fuelled my activism, allowing me to step forward in a way that perhaps I would not have without. There’s this voice that beckons to me, the time is now; there is nothing more to wait for. The world is unravelling like that thread you pulled on your sweater, and it’s too far gone to remain the same. So, what do you want to make of it?
On culture
Our culture has this wonderful myth of the linear life. That you finish school, start a career, get married, have children etc, and eventually you reach the place you’re meant to be. And even when you know this not to be true, or maybe not true for you, this myth pervades our consciousness with its idea of the upward trajectory. Life is always in the next place, and the next place is always better than here. The goal is always to be reaching somewhere else, because that is where your happiness will lie. It’s mimicked in the cultural beliefs we hold of eternal growth, of cities and economies that never come down, and in our ideas of “I’ll be happy when…”. It’s an alluring story, if only it were true; that life is this simple line, and if we follow the steps we’ll eventually arrive.
I remember a video with Stephen Jenkinson; he spoke about how in the western world growth is a precondition of happiness, but that growth in and of itself is not a good thing. A tumour grows itself to death, he said. It proceeds absolutely undisturbed by the consequences of the actions it takes. The myth of eternal growth, our continual seeking of the next place: this is our tumour. The symptoms are screaming at us through soaring rates of depression, inequalityon unfathomable scales, and now mass extinction. The systems that run our world are, without a doubt, dying.
