... and I am ruining my coat by walking in the rain. These were the sad thoughts I was having as I schlumped home across the border to France last week after drinks with new friends.
I'd been feeling fairly lost and wondering what it IS exactly that I am doing here, across the pond, away from my friends and connections and everything that allows me to acknowledge that I am ME? Intuition drove my move here. Even though my goals has never been humanitarian aid on a huge scale. I have this calm part in my center that feels I am taking a right path. But it is undefined right now. It feels like fragmented bits of the entire world are swirling around me constantly... mostly whipping around my head.
The concept of power comes up again and again. My whole life I've been diving in, running like crazy, trying to wrangle, to catch, to immerse. These past few years, and especially now, I am attempting not doing that. I am trying hard (or as my mentor, Phyllis Ward used to say 'try softer') to receive the experience rather than make the experience happen or take the experience. This is hard. The receiving part takes faith. It takes trust. I just have to sit here and wait. Yeeesh. That's not anything I've been trained to do or that gives me quick ego boosts.
In my yoga class today my instructor Daniel said that our breath is power. Our breath. I've been feeling fairly small and not-so-very powerful. After spending most of the yoga class breathing I realized the breathing changed my perception just a little. I walked back to UNHCR still quiet and small, breathing... and receptive... maybe beginning in a tiny, tiny way to accept this quieter, smaller person as also being... me. And also quite powerful.
I had a really interesting dialogue with the Universe two summers ago. I was demanding that fear and weakness go away - I thought that was of course my reward for working so hard all of these years.
The Universe just shrugged her shoulders and said that I can wish all I want, but the Universe and all of its realities are just going to keep on doing what they do. My uncertainties and weakness are an integral part of me. Especially as a filmmaker. It is these qualities that keep me from settling in to a place where I would not be observant, where I could not be a witness, a weaver, a rummager, a researchist. These things are tools for me, they are paths that lead me to new insight.
If I have a reluctance, perhaps I am supposed to just be quiet. If I have a weakness, that is a moment to take notice; is there a better path? I have noticed that when I park my ego, when I listen, when I am quiet, receiving images and life - invariably there is reward.
Just before I left for Switzerland I came across some morning pages I wrote last summer. I was stunned to find one line which I pasted across the bottom of panels of my art project that was the foundation for my practicum proposal. The line said, "One day you wake up and you've stopped demanding of the Universe. Now, we begin the relationship." I don't even remember writing that. But now it seems that line could be the foundation of what I might be able to learn here. And a shift in my understanding of intuition, home, connection, vision... and power.
photographs of art by Andy Goldsworthy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Goldsworthy
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