Steps to Renewal

A photo of a page from the e-book Grandma’s on the Camino: Reflections on a 48-Day Walking Pilgrimage to Santiago by Mary O’Hara Wyman. I was very drawn to Mary Oliver’s Instructions for Living a Life

It has been a few months of ‘doing’, and the thing that has stood out for me is the idea, and the importance of renewal once the doing is done.

We have entered Spring-Down-Under, and have been gifted an enormous amount of rain that is creating havoc in many parts of the country. When I came across the excerpt (see photo above) from Mary Oliver (“Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it”) I thought: yes, that seems to say it. We must pay attention to the worsening climate patterns, our health landscape, and the slow decay of what we so valued on our beautiful planet. We must pay attention to the still present beauty that we can see every day if we allow ourselves to (right now the magpies are singing, the dog is snoring, the dishwasher is humming, a plane is preparing to land not too far away…it’s a noisy but somewhat beautiful soundscape).

Spring always reminds me of the many rhythms we move through. We are emerging from Winter, a perfect time to indwell, to focus inward, a time of stillness and deep contemplation. Yet do we allow ourselves to do this?

Spring is a time of renewal. New growth, new ideas, new relationships and new ways of seeing the world.

This year I missed the season of Autumn, having spent Australia’s Autumn working in rural Finland with artists who wanted to re-learn and renew their creative practice and how they turned up in the world. Ironically, despite the frameworks used in the program, I feel now as though I need to do it all over again, this time as a student so that I can understand the concept of my own renewal. I have not given myself permission to stop. I am still carrying some of the obstacles that rose for me while I tried to do “Business as Usual” despite there being a world pandemic, a war in Europe, devastating Climate Change and a visible shift of community values.

Many of you would have read Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone’s Active Hope. They refer to the three ways we turn up in the world.

Business as Usual (which is what we are witnessing throughout the western world…nothing to see here).

The Great Unravelling (everything is going to shite and we can’t do anything about it), and

The Great Turning (an opportunity to move from gratitude to acceptance and then towards hope).

So I have decided to stop. For the next six months, I will cease all social media, even What’s App. No more Twitter, (although I absolutely love Twitter and its wonderful conversations, not to mention political and science-based facts, crazy arguments and huge support). No more Facebook. No more Instagram.

I made the decision yesterday, and for the entire day, I felt ungrounded. Every time I wanted to share something I realised I couldn’t. But of course, I can. Just differently.

So the next six months is a time of reinventing who I am becoming, and I am offering you similar processes so that if you choose, you can journey alongside. How important it is to reinvent ourselves in our fast-changing world. I think most of us would agree. But to actually do it, well, that’s where it gets sticky. So rather than ‘me’, let us think of ‘us’.

As promised, I will post steps towards our much-needed Spring renewal