Setting up the conditions to wander.

When you get a glimpse of a vision, and not the entire plan, it can be hard to trust it’s for real. The best response might be to become the wise fool and jump.

I was talking to a friend today about what happens when you’re a control enthusiast, and life begins to ask you to hold things loosely. These past few years, nearly every time I find myself in the middle of a compelling vision, I experience doubt.

You’d think after my partner’s near-death experience, and a recent health crisis for me, that I’d have learned to let go. But some surrenders are trickier than others. I’m a woman living in her imagination who is married to a partner with few preferences. I wrote about the traumatic stages of being with a man whose identity disappeared in a surgical accident, but I haven’t written much about what it’s like on the other side of accepting the losses, and in truth, treasuring the relationship that emerged.

After his brain injury, Richard was childlike, and couldn’t make his own choices. But then, he matured and could decide, but he wasn’t much interested in declaring preferences. One of the strange effects of living with a person without preferences is how unsettling it can be. The Great Way is not difficult for those without preferences, the Zen saying goes, but it is trying for those needing some participation on what to make for dinner. At the beginning of this preference-less partner (a stark contrast to the assertive one before his surgery,) there was confusion. But I learned that I had a chance to design life in the ways I wanted. I never lied to him about pursuing what I wanted. But I was slow to understand that he needed to find a solid boundary before I could feel comfortable making choices that involved him. We hired someone to get him to no, and in the years since, he’s developed a clarity about what he wishes and doesn’t. Still, he doesn’t often declare a preference, and when asked, he doesn’t actually have one.

We went south to Joshua Tree for my birthday last month, a mystical place with spike-haired trees that leave long shadows across igneous forms that began life as magma into metamorphic rock, and then eroded into giant marvels. The trip left me with so many of the choices to make regarding what happens next—the rental arrangements, the hikes, the dinners, the films, the conversations, the laundry, the stargazing. But this time, while we were out in that place where the Mojave and the Colorado deserts meet, something shifted. I started to see that I didn’t need to make choices. Things were kind of.... happening? I left more space in between sentences. We sat for longer periods in the silences. Dinner happened or it didn’t.

One twilight, we sat in the quiet at the back of Jumbo Rocks and located together a sound at such a distinct frequency that we expected it might be the thrum of the world. Wandering out there, it was easy for me to drop the insistence on needing a plan, and also to recognize that just because my partner doesn’t have a preference doesn’t mean he’s missing an intention.  Experience is simply arising in him.

This time, I’d gone out to the wild with a question. I’d been musing on a decision that would change the trajectory of our lives. (I’ll say more of this in future newsletters as I get language for this.) While I was out there, as often happens when I wander, a vision for what I want to do became evident. Neither of us had clarity about how we were going to step into this, or when it was going to happen, much less what the consequences would be. There was no Plan A, or Plans B, C, D, E, as is usual for this managerial mind. Instead, there was a message—you’ll know what’s next when it’s time.

In the wake of this new reality, so much doubt set in. I thought What if this choice causes harm to others? What if this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done? I mean, it might be, and I’d likely still have to take the risk that this particular vision is real.

I talked with my therapist about the ways that I nearly mourned when my vision didn’t include a strategy for how I was going to accomplish it. My body felt YES to making this change, and then every strategic action I posed thereafter resulted in maybe. Nothing I proposed stuck. A month later, I still can’t get no satisfaction.

“Doubt the doubt,” my therapist said, sounding like Jedi Master Yaddle.

Huh.

One of the ways that I heard this direction was—What if I get to be free?

What if the consciousness that’s moving in all things is also a part of this vision? What if the best I can do is to be with what happens when I roll out my vision? What if I’m not the chooser but the thing being moved? What if disrupting the doubt is the thing that’s trying to be learned? What if not knowing is the most authentic part of me?

I hardly know. But what I am feeling is the openness that arrives when I resist trying to know everything that might happen in the wake of making this choice. I think too that potentially more opportunity (more options, an orienting view, collective ideas) can arrive through holding open rather than shutting down through overuse of my strategic mind. Consensus reality tells me how to get along with the world, but it also isn’t the place where I’m living at the edge of creative expression, where I’m making good work, where I’m challenging myself to live full out in relationships.

What I’m tracking now are the experiences I get to have because I follow this vision. Not just outcomes, but the living inside of the state of suspended knowing. I think this is what I go looking for when I wander. It’s why Wanderland speaks of a state of mind, not just a destination.

Retreat!

Hey, if you’re looking to get yourself into this state so you can write and retreat from the chaos of existence, check out the Writing in the Wild Retreat the brilliant Suzanne Morrison and I are offering in Banff this spring.

At this time, I’m offering all the same benefits to paid subscribers as I do to those choosing free.

Next up,

Writing Prompts.

1.     Write about a habit that’s limiting you. Write about what happens when you suspend the use of this habit. (Even if you’re making up this experience, it’s your imaginative seeing that you’re tracking.)

2.     How would you adorn yourself if you were living your vision?

3.     Write about a time you stepped out of consensus reality. If you haven’t yet, write about a time that you didn’t need to know.

Let’s Write Together

Venus goes into Aries on February 20^th at midday PST. It’s a season for writers, a good time to publish boldly, to challenge authority, to support strikes, to ask for more, to hold the door open for folks on the margins. How about we meet on Zoom to write together and see what wants to be heard? Write me for details.

Feasts

We don’t celebrate what my adult kids call the “Hallmark holidays,” so we don’t gift or cook for events like Valentines, but we do like to celebrate the honoring of love with chocolate. I make something like Nik Sharma’s Chilli Chocolate Bark with fruit and nuts, adding raw almonds, freeze-dried strawberries, dried cherries, pepitas, Icelandic salts, and lots of spicy chili peppers. If we do a rocky road version, I’ll add smashed gingersnaps, candied ginger and little gems of fresh marshmallows. You can make this bark a day ahead of time, and it stores for up to a month. These make great gifts wrapped in parchment, or in a tin. I eat them at teatime after my writing is finished about midafternoon when as my dear grandmother Mimoo said in her sweetsoft Southern, “I lack a boost.”

More Wanderlusts

I’m singing this music in the shower.

And listening to this lecture about quantum theory, The Universe Within.

And reading about this discombobulating wandering inside capitalism. [New Yorker]

See you in two weeks,

Sonya