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IN SPITE OF . . .
the feverish energy of the spring season, it is not, in fact, harvest time.
As any farmer knows, the practice of planting seeds requires tremendous energy. But that energy likewise requires patience, resting, and faith. We can plant the seeds, provide the best conditions, maintain their growing environment...but we cannot make them grow. They need time to do their own work.
It seems common enough that the practice of gratitude is a meaningful one to cultivate, whether you do so via blessings over a meal, or jotting down a short list of what you're grateful for at the beginning or end of each day. Yet as I take the seed metaphor into a behavioral practice, what lights up for me is the idea of taking time to write out, not what you already have, but what you most urgently wish for.
I was raised under the superstitious warnings of phrases like 'don't count your chickens before they hatch,' and other such methods of attempting to stave off disappointment. What we lose in such a practice is the cultivation of energy toward what we most want to see, feel, or experience in this lifetime, or a future one.
Often we associate the act of wishing or wanting with being the recipient of something. Your wishes might be impacted by, or directly derived from, noticing what you are lacking, or where you have been slighted by an external benefactor. It's important to me to clarify that where we have been neglected in life, or experienced injustice, is not something to dismiss or 'get over.' As a survivor of complex trauma, I believe in the healing that comes with being heard.
I also became aware, in the last couple of years, that my relationship to wishing had become utterly dependent on external factors. My wishes no longer belonged to me. I was either cutting them off at the root, so I wouldn't have to experience the pain of disappointment, or handing them over to outside forces, thereby transferring the 'blame' if I didn't receive my wish onto someone who failed to give it to me. These were methods that, counterproductively, had been imparted out of a desire to protect me from pain.
To want or to wish is to be in an intensely vulnerable state. To be so vulnerable in a world that doesn't value the creativity of wishing (the hoping, the trying, the ideating) without proof of 'success' (i.e. receiving what you asked for) feels risky. This is how the act of wishing, and its potential outcome, becomes risky instead of nurturing.
When success is defined so narrowly, we can't be surprised that creativity is suppressed. If the beginning of success is a creative idea, so too is the beginning of failure. How do we cultivate a different relationship to what we most deeply and truly wish for?
The balance of springtime's intense, at times frenetic, energy is the call of the warmer temperatures and brighter colors to rest in the sun, take in the sight of new growth, and listen to the sounds of birds and insects. In my corner of the world, I notice the calls of the cardinals growing longer and more urgent. The male cardinal's otherworldly beam of song transitions from a question to an insistence. The female cardinal's fluted invitation lengthens out into the stubborn mournfulness of an I-won't-let-you-forget-me-because-I'm-still-singing kind of energy. They are both expressing their deepest, most ardent wishes, out loud, for all to hear. As I pass by, I have no knowledge of what will result from their wishes. I won't see the nests they build, or the eggs they lay and hatch. I have only the increasing intensity of what they long for in my ears as I go about my day.
Toi Smith wrote recently that, "...every act of refusal, every moment of seeing clearly, every instinct to imagine otherwise, it’s all part of building something beyond this. Something more collective. Something more free."
We can establish a practice of wishing and wanting out loud in any number of ways: journaling, praying, making lists, sharing with trusted cohorts, establishing rituals for continually revisiting our values, writing manifestos, taking action to create a gathering (whether spontaneous or planned ahead)...
The good thing about the intense energy of this season is that when it bursts, it becomes a bloom. What are some ways that you practice imagining what will come forward and show itself?
Wishing and wanting,
Dor + Tay
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