Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration

Photo by Youcef Chenzer

Amateurs sit and wait for

inspiration, the rest of us just

get up and go to work

(Stephen King)

Welcome! Thank you for turning up for yourself! Today let us re-awaken our rituals of practice that keep us on track so that we can open safely into the unknown. Right now we have the means of inviting creativity, conversations, and adventure into our lives.

To begin here is a quote from Mark Buchanan in his book God Walk. He writes:

Some of us walk because it’s magic and beautiful and mysterious and sometimes dangerous.

We walk because we see things sdifferntly when we walk.

We feel more deeply, think more clearly.

We walk to figure things out.

We walk to sort ourselves out.

We walk to get in shape.

We walk to get a sense of the scale of things: the bigness of trees, the smallness of beetles, the real distance between places.

We walk because we experience land and sky and light in fresh ways, in ways, I am tempted to say, closer to reality.

We walk because if we go much faster for much longer we’ll start to lose ourselves: our bodies will atrophy, our thinking will jumble, our very souls will wither (Buchanan, 2020).

We walk because three miles an hour (as the writer Rebecca Solnit says) is about the speed of thought and maybe the speed of our souls (in Wanderlust, 2000).

Today could be a day of wonder if we let it.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for (Hopi Elder)

Something to ponder as we eat our breakfast. Are we the ones we’ve been waiting for? Is it up to us to help turn around climate change, sexism, patriarchy, neo-liberalism, and our health crisis and if so how do we do this? And if not, who will?

As we journey together over the next few months, let’s work together as a team, learning from each other, and knowing that we are ‘perfect’ in this moment (with all our ups and downs and ins and outs) for it is how we are in this very minute that is the building block for the next.

Let’s get out of the driver’s seat for a while and enjoy the scenery. Let our little patches of nature take us where they will, along the roads and tracks and through the bush and the parks, revealing their magic to us one step at a time.

I invite you to enter “time out of time”. See this as a gift to yourself. The more you turn up for yourself, the more you will flourish through these next months.

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves; banish the word ‘struggle’ from your attitude and vocabularly. All that we do now mucst be done in a sacred way and in celebreation. we are the ones we’ve been waiting for (Rolf Gates and Katrina Kenison, Meditations from the Mat, 2002).