I am on virtual retreat this week, and what a week it has been! Only Day Four and a lifetime has been lived, inside and out: from rainstorm to windstorm to snowstorm (and up to 11 C by Saturday again), and inside, a tempest of energy surges, resistance, and sheer exhaustion. But I have never felt more alive, more real.  Here’s a glimpse of my day today:

It started with homework: sit with the phrase ‘consciousness choosing’ and write about what comes up. Last night after our conversation ended for the day, I didn’t have the strength to pick up a pen. So I slept on it and awoke this morning with it atop my mental agenda. I turned on the fireplace in my bedroom, snuggled under the covers with my journal … and nothing happened. No words. None.

I skipped to ‘choice rewiring’ that I had scrawled on another page. Words started to come:

We are born with clarity of knowledge, existence,  limitless energy to attract, love, create and the wisdom to know when to have, when to do, when to be. Then we are extruded through a fleshy constricted canal into a harsh world that is cold, glaring, demanding: Cry, Nurse, Open your eyes, Close your eyes, Poop, Pee, Eat, Sleep … We are expected to do all of these things on time and on schedule, delivering for others the ideal infant experience with little thought to whether we are actually hungry, lonely or simply curious when we wail and lie wide awake at 3 am, our tiny nervous systems bursting with capacity our caregivers have long forgotten. But we are born with compassion for them and a passion for ourselves to reclaim, choose and rewire our shorted-out nervous systems, to tap our capacity, live in the brilliance and warmth of a thousand suns rather than the single bulb of tradition. Rewired for choice, our light is limitless. 

The homework was done, but I was miserable. My head was heavy, my body cold. I read what I wrote and felt queasy. It didn’t land, it wasn’t right, I didn’t feel it. I didn’t even use first person, hid behind the royal We.  What crap.

I glance back at ‘consciousness choosing. ‘  Suddenly, there were words.

Consciousness choosing … is too great, too vast, too much, to amorphous, a cliche. Yet I want it, I have it. I need to allow it. No, I WANT to allow it. Wait, I CHOOSE to allow it. Dammit, sneaking up on the word choice as if it is a wild animal needing to be caught, when it is just standing there, waiting for me to invite it in. 

What a mess. I am tempted to rip out the pages and shred them in the compost, but I am too tired. Tired of being cold and heavy and dizzy. Tired of trying to write what I can’t seem to touch. Tired of longing to love … someone, something, but unable to touch the passion, to feel anything but the grey pall of indifference, turn the longing into life. A wave of tears. Now cold, heavy, dizzy, weepy and snotty. Two more symptoms and I can have the seven dwarfs of misery. But no more time. The day’s virtual call is about to begin. I pull up to my desk, wrap in blankets, and pull a card from my Mana deck.

And burst into tears again. The card is Lei, Cherish, an image of an adult and child in a loving embrace. The card appears when it is time to cherish with affection, to trust and unload cares, to give and receive. I stare at the card and think: have I given the love and passion I seek? Have I cherished? Will I choose to cherish?

My abdomen cramps and my uterus begins to shed. Safety, stories within it, celebrate the cherished and discard the rest.

The card told of a Native American tradition of ‘take the shawl.’ The shawl symbolizes coming home and being wrapped in a loving embrace. I become aware that under all of my layers of clothing and blankets, my back is cold. There is nothing but the chair to keep it warm. So I rearrange my largest blanket to go behind me and wrap over my back and shoulders. Like a shawl.

I created this blanket, an afghan, actually, that I knit for my father. After he died, my mother offered it back to me. it is the warmest blanket I own, wrapped around me now because I created it all – the yarn on the needles forming each stitch and connecting to the next, the relationships that inspired me to make it and that returned it to me to keep me warm like a shawl embracing one coming home when my father moved on to where there is no cold, and all is held in eternal embrace.  Choice has me here, cold, bleeding and carsick, inviting the rewiring of my nervous system from scarcity to abundance, blame to choice,  ‘we’ to ‘I’ and I alone. Choice has me wrapped in blankets and surrounded by women with whom to celebrate, to cherish and to discard. I am choice rewiring and in this moment, I am feeling it all.

Mahalo, my fellow travellers.