May 6, 2020
Today’s idea – If hours were the bricks that built a life and moments were the mortar, then no wall would be straight nor angle true. Every day is shaped by our thoughts and moods, by the meteorology of mind and the seismology emotion. Maybe bricks aren’t the right metaphor; I could shift to one more incrementally pertinent, like the mud pellets used by cliff swallows to build their nest. A season opens for brooding babies, and swallows make a thousand swoops to a river bank, load their beaks, then back to the cliff face to tuck a BB sized mud and saliva ball into its place. The nest grows from the cliff face like days grow around us, breath by breath. In the end, a clay basket emerges as if out of thin air, the babies fill it, and then it empties. I think I am making a point about how we live the outcomes that build a history and also create a normal.
We have been trying to imagine a new rhythm and rhyme to our lives,
a set of reflective standards from which come our daily decisions. Some
implicit agreement the carries our revelations from the last few months. It is
at the hub of consideration these days. How do we emerge from this interruption
and great inconvenience as if we had learned something? How do we display the
new wisdom and compassion we found? What will the Great Realization
embrace? “There is no try,” as Yoda said, “do or do not.” The new
normal does not try either. It is already forming, a coalescence out
of a billion tiny things we do to accommodate the imperatives before
us. The new normal shapes itself along the lines of the cliff wall
from which it grows. It might form with radial symmetry, blooming from a seed
of queries we have pushed out in ripples around us. It is accreting like habits, often beautiful and unplanned, as we struggle with days full of questions, especially the ones
that tug at our arms and feel mysterious and unsafe. We complain
when the days demand a trust walk, but we have learned to swim hard through them
because, as exasperating as they feel, they strengthen us and sometimes are the
only path to clarity. Then there are the days of surrender when even the
smallest sacrifice splits us open and fills us with unexpected treasure and shine.
The normal we cobble together doesn’t even know how it will turn out. Organic growth
is not a worrier. We only have to look outside to see how nature allows normal to enter as in the Spring manifesting about us. The new normal isn’t waiting for
us to decide how it should be, it is busy building itself mud pellet by mud
pellet. Our return will be its own departure from the life we left behind. And
like any magnificent building or stunning collaboration or chorus, it won’t arrive from a solitary realization and plan, but rise up like a forest of dreams
synthesized with the spot of its becoming. It is the sum of all of
our hope and fear moments, an expression that thrives in reciprocity more than
expectations.
I pray that our new normal is quite alive and well and full of
volition; that it is a moment by moment living thing. Big and broad
and diverse as every healthy and resilient community comes to be when built upon the multiplicity of shared experiences and lessons and aspirations. It is
what will creates the durable next steps; the walk through the dark and light
moments, the wonderful dappling and intimidating depths. The music of the new
normal will be the noise of our disagreements, discordant and powerful as a
Shostakovich symphony, where all the empty spaces can fill and make new empty space.
The shape of the new normal is defined more with the meteorology of mind, the seismology of emotion than any proud architectural plan.
I say, we’d do well to keep those mud
pellets malleable and keep them coming as we lean into what’s ahead.
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