Status Updates From Belonging: Remembering Ours...

Need to work in a way that is respectful of gifts and abilities.

There was an answer to the what do you do question. But the things of deeper consequence to my soul, my own music, relationships and spiritual life, fell into a state of despair.

There are times when the mind and the body must be made to stop. The unruly is made to feel safe by limits. Limits to our productivity, limits to our activity, and limits to our directedness are what allow the imagination to wander, to perceive greater goals, to invite rather than lead.

In the practice of belonging, we are not seeking prowess or dominion over anyone else, but the ability to live in conversation between things. This is a deepening movement into conversation with self and others. As we make ourselves, keepers of ourselves and the world around us, so too we are kept. When we invite others into the landscape of our lives, we are better held in our own becoming.

If we sit silently, with the absence of magic, the miraculous will reveal itself

Worthiness is not some state of attainment but the ongoing willingness to meet life squarely. Worthiness is the ability to say, “I am up for this. I am equal to life.”

How can you draw on the nutrients and support of the womb, so you don’t have to do it all alone?

You can’t just create. You need to receive.

We need pleasure, contentment and feelings of grace.

Though it may seem counter intuitive, pulling back our energy is like drawing the bow to find the aim before releasing an arrow with precision.

Active receptivity is the cessation of all striving, even for an hour everyday. This might look like pulling out a yoga mat…

To receive well is to know the wisdom of surrender. Yin chooses to yield even when everyone else is getting ahead. Like an inner earth, Yin is the soil in which we gestate our dreams, refine our intuition, listen to our bodies and come into the stillness of our centre.

Being able to receive is associated with waiting, listening, accepting and magnetising to the things that reverberate with our wellbeing. In times of scarcity and doubt we are taught to get organised, launch agendas, plot directions and build agendas. But first we need to get into contact with the sincerity of solitude.

How maudlin we seem then, grabbing onto the banks of security while the sea of plenty flows by.

Destiny is not to be confused with fate, where one has no influence upon its outcome. Destiny requires us to take the steps towards it, to parent its growth, especially in times of doubt or weakness. And if we often move toward it, we’re often met with confirmation that we were hoping for all along.

Doubts are traitors. “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. -> try before you doubt

When we tune into our belonging with all things, there is a similarly combined urge to both succeed in life and to make our life an offering unto the commons.

Home is the place where your gifts are received. Indeed for those who had never had their gifts acknowledged, a true sense of belonging is rarely felt. After all, how can you belong if you are partially appreciated?

Have a place of origin in your home. This can even be a small corner of your home which is dedicated to knowing all the origins in it. By origins not just where it came from but also who made it, with what skills, and at what costs to its roots.

By waking up the competency of hand making, we are becoming the future ancestors we wish we had. It can feel mountainous to approach these heights from nothing; with such slow rewards, it can feel like no progress is being made.

Shoshin is a state of openness, when studying a subject, even at an advanced level.

The short way always falls apart. Then one returns to the handmade life. One has to pick it up painfully, and piece it back together, holding the overall pattern in one’s mind but working patiently, piece by piece.

Hand making teaches us about slowness. It shows us, through the patience and skilfulness of our hands, what goes into a thing.

When you learn to make things with your hands, you begin to awaken the awareness of the beauty and value of things in your life.

We know belonging is a process, requiring periods of togetherness and aloneness to remain vital

Can I, in living with absence become the presence that I am hungry for?

Can I be with my longing? Can I allow the emptiness of what is missing from me to remain without attempting to fill it? We rarely listen to what the longing has to say