The Winter of Listening

“All those years

forgetting

how easily

you can belong

to everything

simply by listening

And the slow

difficulty

of remembering

how everything

is born from

an opposite

and miraculous

otherness

Silence and winter

has lead me to that otherness

So let this winter

of listening

be enough

for the new life

I must call my own.”

David Whyte

I am preparing a home retreat for this upcoming winter and spring. The home retreat is going against my need for conditioned security and constructed independence (what will be left of what I have build the last years when I loosen my grip?), and external validation (who knows what will be created and however this will or will not be welcomed). It is also going against some of our collective rhythms, namely to be busy, busy, busy, and to avoid deeper awareness of ourselves and our (interconnectedness with the) environment.

My creative heart yearns spaciousness, and for now I am still dependent upon external conditions to practice this art of being. I know there is a deep seeded tendency to think there is always something to be done, fixed, and focused on. And even though the appearance and materialization of this conviction can be quite subtle, and even though I can facilitate a space for others to expand emotionally and exhale their processes beyond the confinement of daily and old demanding conditionings, there is still this subtle yet fierce grasp for control over subtle sensitivities of my emotional world. And, ironically, it is from that same place of sensitivity that a deep seeded longing for liberation, a desire for unconditional love, emerges. It is an existential quest fully embodied and empowered by emotional sensitivity, an organic consequence of being in this body, of being of these wires, if you will, and of being lived by the totality of experiential processes that life affords me.

To feel freely and fully is at the core of what I call my own calling, and even if I would let go of such deft names such as calling, I would still be carried towards surrender to the calling’s power over my experience of reality. That is why, this winter, without knowing what and where this will bring me, it will be a winter of listening. A rocky and delicate research into the lived space I might start to call home someday.