Venturing Out

Sometimes saving our own lives isn’t what matters most. Sometimes we are drawn out from safety by a deeper instinct to experience and serve, and find we are stronger than we believed.

Enjoy this 7-minute read or click the title to access the audio recording at the top of the webpage. 

The time of Solstice brings to mind cycles and the creative tension between opposites: hibernation and procreation, masculine and feminine, generosity and withholding, love and fear. As the longest day approaches, pulling creatures outward from their burrows and plants upward from their roots, I similarly feel pulled from self-reflection into the realm of experience.

There is a safety to lying underground, digesting the previous harvest and dreaming of what can be gathered. But stay too long and we decay. At some point a longing to feel the sun and taste what it offers overpowers the instinct toward protection and we step from the imaginal cocoon into the chaos of interconnection.

Here, we cannot control the flow. We cannot pause, rewind, or rerecord. Everything done by us and to us registers in the collective, like the vibration of each droplet rippling out and back across the water. This is no simulation. This is reality. And what we believe ourselves to be and hope (and fear) about the world can quickly evaporate in the light of the moment. Instead of figuring it out and planning it all to preference and perfection, we are thrust back into our primal reactivity where what we give and what we withhold generate unexpected outcomes that can both terrify and redeem us, sometimes simultaneously.

Partly by necessity, partly by choice – if such a thing really exists beyond instinct – this season has drawn me out into deeper waters of relating: staff members and romantic prospects who – like spring buds – evoke more care and require a subtler, gentler hand. I’m being invited to become a different kind of animal – or perhaps resurrect one that was endangered by my past. Sometimes the thick skin that protected us from the most violent storms can harbor abscesses unable to fully heal.  This type of extraction, especially on a feral creature, is a delicate operation. It helps to get a little encouragement and a lot of reassurance.

Last Solstice, on my first medicine journey, I was shown how strong my body and psyche had become. The year since has been a practice in what a dear friend of mine refers to as the true spiritual journey – not one of transcendent bliss, but one that pulls us deeper and further into the world. I returned to my former home in Portland to reconnect with the land and a dear friend with terminal cancer. I withstood the profound physical and energetic purging of Kambo. I held my ground as sponsees battled their cravings and compulsions, while relationships old and new challenged me to show up no matter what and ask for what I need with kindness, despite my fear of what would happen next.

What’s happened is that my world has gotten bigger, and I’ve realized I’m capable of inhabiting it despite the tenderness of a few new stretch marks. I worked a daylong event and went clubbing in the city without a fatigue crash. I’m breathing through dating anxiety, transmuting old and feral wounds to allow the cartilage of connection to knit together in new ways. I’m releasing more control and oversight to allow coworkers space to take on ownership and stretch their wings. I’m welcoming more spontaneous conversations with strangers and acts of service for neighbors. In these ways, a bit of willingness is expanding into greater faith that I can do my piece and let the rest go. And that means I can access a lot more people, ideas, and experiences.

Some might say this is all about attitude – that if we believe good things will happen or that we are strong and capable, we’ll be resilient and rewarded. But I’m still too close to the darkness for such a simple conclusion. I know that when we engage with life, we don’t know how we will be received or how we will respond. We can do our best and hope for a good outcome, but we cannot deny the vulnerability inherent in venturing out to forage. We let ourselves serve both the hunger and the fear. We allow them to draw us out and send us back to safety – for a few minutes, a full season, or years. The cycles of when and how long are as much a mystery to me as ever. I wonder why the courage and resourcefulness is present one moment and not the next. But I suspect that if I understood, there would be no need to listen deeply. I would remain a solo contributor focused on my needs instead of learning to become a more interconnected responder, which every biome depends upon.

I’m more responsive and giving when I feel safe. And it’s difficult to feel safe when sating hunger while keeping an eye out for predators. It reminds me of what feels like a crisis of masculine and feminine archetypes. The masculine protector has desecrated its role for so many generations of raping and violence and destruction that the feminine can no longer rest open to creativity and nurturing. Without being held within the protective confines of the village, it must both mother and battle, and these can be difficult energies to transition between. The Warrior becomes hesitant and the Mother too rigid. The masculine in our world is poisoned with shame or aggression, the feminine with helplessness or bitterness.

Where can we find the strength to defend with kindness, to nurture with compassion, to risk the unknown wilds of interrelatedness? We must surrender our fantasies of enlightened humans and idyllic communities. We must reach deep within ourselves to summon those archetypes that long to present to and through us for personal and communal healing. We must continue to inquire into the delicate balance between accepting and loving what is and releasing what our deepest wisdom knows lacks the capacity to support what’s being called forth.

In the end, it’s not what we achieve or attain that provides safety, but the simple, courageous act of serving – protecting and nurturing – what is longing to be born through us. As parents of myriad species know, sometimes saving our own lives isn’t what matters most. Sometimes we must sacrifice our safety for the sake of what we’ve nurtured inside, for a higher truth to be born through us and have a chance to live.

Nancy

A bow of deep gratitude to all the friends – old and new – whose invitations, reflections, and vulnerability brought these insights to life.