If yesterday’s walk were a song, it would start by singing to you of memories. It would tell you there was a very slight breeze that blew up the valley that surprised you with its warmth, and how there was just enough heat in the sun to make the sugar’s rush to the top ends of the grass.
With it came the smells of two different kinds. The first: soil that’s just met rain. The second: newly cut grass from the recently tended to verges.
Now: You stop to pick blackberries and notice as you do so that the paddock just beyond the hedge is the home of horses, five in total. That makes you smile, and you close your eyes for a moment and imagine, one by one, decade by decade, century by century, the hooves that have moved over the landscape. First without humans, and then with, cutting paths we see now as roads.
Then: You draw the energy back, now, move down, down, down. Your mind penetrating layers of earth that fit together like sponge cake, imagining, capturing the seasons of people, animals, communities whose essence still lives in the clay of the soil. You acknowledge them and thank them.
You consider the walk that you almost didn’t take, that you are taking now, and feel grateful that you had enough about you to follow the messages of your body that it was time to go outside.
This is half an hour from my yesterday. The half an hour that I almost didn’t take.
One of the things I promised myself before I boarded the plane for the UK was that I wasn’t going to continue the way I had been living the last few months. Which is to say, things had been hectic. Untenably so. I think we all go through those periods. Where life feels so full that you wonder how sustainable it is.
Actually– no, that’s wrong. You *know* it’s not sustainable, you just wonder how it is you can get off the train. It’s hard to jump when the outside’s rushing by so fast there doesn’t appear to be moment you can leap.
So yesterday, when I felt this very particular feeling in my body- the feeling as though energy is attempting to find her way through the edges of my skin but can’t quite see an opening- I listened to her. I put down my laptop with the emails yet to answer and the things yet to write and I took myself off for a walk.
I wanted to say that this was counter-intuitive—counter to the work I needed to get done and the very real tasks yet to do, but when writing this, I realized it was the opposite.
It was pro-intuitive. I don’t know if that’s a phrase but I’m making it one. ‘Pro’: to act in accordance with, in this case, intuition.
At the end of the summit on the weekend, I heard lots of questions from people they weren’t sure how to answer. Realisations they’d had that, in the same way I have shared with you now, made them understand something needed to change but they weren’t sure what or how.
And in return, I offered something that I hold dearly in my heart that I also wanted to share with you.
What if, when we find ourselves at a transition, the point is not to immediately know the answer, but to be able to ask of yourself a more beautiful question? And then, as the poet Rilke says, to live your way to the answers?
To live your way to the answers I believe, in part, means creating the conditions to allow yourself to be found.
Allowing yourself to be found means allowing for space.
It means being pro-intuitive and moving away from all the things that call you when your body tells you you need to go for a walk. It’s pro-intuitive living.
And so, in the spirit of such delights, I will leave you with this:
What is a more beautiful question to ask of yourself right now?
And how might you create the conditions to allow the answers to find you?
Onwards,
JaneThis photo is not from yesterday (I make a point of leaving the house without my phone) but Merc is my favourite pro-intuitive ally in any case so it’s fitting that he join us here.
