My slow unravelling
I have been slowly unravelling over the past few weeks. Unravelling in a good way. I am wearing my emotions just under the surface and at times they flood out of me like a raging spring creek, bulging at it banks from snowmelt and heavy rains. I blame it on acupuncture, old family patterns finally being spoken about and the pressure of developing a reading list to be examined on as my next step towards my PhD.
The journey back
I have realized what a long journey it can be just to come back to where I started, where I was meant to be in the first place.
Meltdown
Yesterday I had a complete meltdown, one of several over the past week. I had just spoken with my advisors after giving them my latest reading list. The list I have been struggling with (I wish I could say dancing with) since January. I have three topics of focus with a brief description and a list of readings that will inform me on those topics. I discovered in my discussions with my advisors that perhaps my topics are not that focused after all, or maybe they are a bit too focused. Life is so contradictory at times or perhaps always.
Let it flow
Once I got off the call with my advisors, the floodgates opened and I cried. My body heaved with tears. When that subsided I went for a walk (as advised by my advisors). I had intended to go to a conservation area just east of where I live. However, the highway entrance ramps are closed in that direction due to construction. I thought I had a route to get around it but no, I was forced to go west. I ended up at a conservation area with a stream running through it. Usually, a trickle of water meanders by. Yesterday it was a torrent.
Quiet reflection
I walked to a place that I could put my feet in the water. I had just walked barefoot in the mud so I needed to rinse them. There was a lot of muck being flushed through the torrent. As I sat by the water, gazing at the fast running, murky water; I felt part of that; part of the flush of muck from an overflowing ecosystem and then I remembered.
I remembered
I remembered this beautiful paper I had read late last fall. It was an Indigenous perspective of place and space. It was written from the perspective of the land. It described ‘place’ as connected, experiencing together, of co-becoming, and an emergence of being. I remember the affect that paper had on me. It made me want to learn more, read more and have the same foundation of understanding that these writers had about space and place. In that moment I found clarity. I found a place of opening, a place of inspiration, a place of knowing that I had forgotten.
Allowing, letting go, being
It was in the space of allowing, of letting go, of being in the moment with nature that clarity came and I found myself back where I had started after a long journey of exploration I had rediscovered my beginning. I had found my flow.
I invite you to explore:
- What may you have forgotten in your striving to achieve?
- What supports you to move through your emotional meltdowns?
- What grounds you in the moment, opens you from the prison of your mind and helps you connect to your inner knowing?
- Where are you meant to begin from?
Remember, sometimes we know exactly what we need, it is just a matter of remembering.
Alison
For those who may be interested in the paper that inspired me so profoundly is:
Bawaka Country, B., Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S,, Lloyd, K., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., and Sweeney, J. (2016). Co-becoming Bawaka: Towards a relational understanding of place/space. Progress in Human Geography,40(4), 455-475.