Offerings, Gifts, & Invitations
It's a time of ripening
It's a time of waiting, she said. It's a bit like watching fruit grow on the tree, we see its potential, but we don't know how it will ripen. Or what shape it will take, I added.
We both sat back in our chairs. The left side of her face was lit with bright winter sunlight. The right was covered in a few shadows. Looking at the Zoom screen before me, I noticed my face was lit with early summer light that was shining down through the skylight above me.
Even though we were in different seasons, we seemed to be at a similar stage in our journey. She spoke directly to how I'd been feeling; something was growing, but I couldn't yet see what exactly it was. As she continued talking, a peach and then an apple flashed through my mind. Visualising these fruits gave me imagery that helped me understand where I was and relate differently to what was happening within me.
As I thought of fruits, and the time it takes for any sentient being to grow, waiting felt less passive than it had yesterday or even a week ago. The space of pause now felt full of life and potential. Life was growing. I imagined tending to the tree where this fruit was growing, I thought about how it represented part of the future. The truth was the fruit was beyond anything I could imagine, and still, it invited me to dream into what was possible and participate in creating new life.
For weeks, I'd been waiting to get a sense of what was ahead of me both personally and professionally. I'd submitted proposals, gone back and forth with colleagues developing offerings and spent time dreaming into different trajectories the next few months could take and how these could flow into the rest of the year.
Then just this morning, several hours before this call, I woke up feeling slightly different. The tension I tend to hold around my ribcage had dissipated and I was more aware of my bones. With a new awareness of the structure within my body, I felt lighter and more open.
At first, I found myself disoriented. Why do I feel so different? I asked myself as I headed out for my morning run. As I walked out our front door, made my way down the elevator and through the door of our building and out onto the sidewalk, I noticed how these sensations influenced how I saw the city around me. My sense of self had changed, allowing me to notice things I had not noticed before and imagine futures that only existed at the periphery of my awareness days before.
Running down the sidewalk, I felt particularly warm; I noticed all the contrasting qualities between my inner context and my environment. The light was brighter, the sky was a deeper blue than the day before, and the wind was particularly cold for a day late in May.
Today, it felt as though the future was already here, not just as a probability but as a reality. I have thought about my own death; this is one future. I have thought about the political challenges and wars around the world and tried to imagine what could happen. But today, at a visceral level, I felt the possibility of the future. I saw how my inner landscape could change drastically between one day and the next, opening up new opportunities, questions and challenges, each leading toward a slightly different future.
These kinds of future-bending shifts likely happen every day, yet often, they are so subtle or close to my immediate experience that I don't even notice they're there. Each day, new cells form, and we breathe in life and exhale what no longer serves us. Moment by moment, there are countless births and deaths, even in the moments when we feel like we are waiting for something to happen.
A few months ago, a research participant spoke about our 'creator-ness' and how, as humans, we have an inherent ability and drive to create. This notion of not only being 'creative' but a 'creator' left me thinking about how I can fall in and out of touch with this faculty, even though it’s a human birthright.
We can generate ideas, see things that have yet to materialise, and sense possible futures years before they've transpired. It all happens so quickly; it can be taken for granted, yet there is a vital power in this ability. We are not just consumers or actors going through the motions; we are directors, conductors, and vehicles for a much larger potential.
The potential is beyond doing. The creative space is liminal, so when we lean into it, many futures open up. The poet Keats spoke about this space as Negative Capability, a core faculty in meeting uncertainty and allowing ourselves to listen deeply and receive the subtle information of the moment rather than reverting to anxious reaching or a bias toward action.
This space between can feel like waiting, and sometimes it can feel passive; however, often, something is growing within these moments.
It's evening now, and I am walking home from my co-working space here in Victoria. As I turn a corner and enter Chinatown, I look up, I see a string of lanterns hanging above the street. Like a row of colourful fruits, they sway ever so slightly in the wind.
I think to myself, it is a time of ripening.
What I’m Reading
In this article, Robert Chia, one of my favourite scholars, explores the ‘ultimate ground of knowing’ by examining the contrast between Eastern and Western attitudes toward business, leadership, and, more broadly, engaging with the world. He brings attention to the dimension of metaphysics to consider how the Western worldview dating back to Aristotle tends to focus on knowledge that is universal and about knowing the identity of things and their underlying causes rather than acknowledging the invisible, tacit, relational and ever-shifting nature of reality. He draws upon the work of Dreyfus, Heidegger and Ruskin to describe different ways pure or ultimate knowing can manifest. I recommend this article to anyone interested in understanding ‘process’ and process philosophy more deeply.
July 13th, 9:00-11:00 am AEST - Space limited
During my studies in process-oriented psychology, I learned so much from watching my teachers work with people in front of the group. Maybe it was the mirror neurons or the sense of immediacy, but I always integrated the learning in an embodied way different from the learning I experienced when reading books.
Works in the Centre is a 2-hour session that includes inner work, a demo of me working with someone in the centre, a discussion during which we look at the process structure, and time to practice. When I work with someone, I also learn a great deal. Each time, the work is different and invites me to think on my feet. In the session, I will share my thoughts with all of you, and together we will explore different directions the work could take together. Learn more and register here.