New

The sense that I have become most aware of this year has been my sense of touch; the touch of my feelings and where they connect in my body, where they nestle and play, and how they whisper to my mind.

One of my favourite films as a teenager was Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the freedom found in the suggestion that life moves pretty fast and that if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.  This year I set the intention of exploring balance.  For a long time, my counterpoint to my work has been books.   I love my work, there’s a richness and texture to what I do that allows books, the lives and worlds of others, real or imagined, to be the perfect, quiet resting place.  I love books too, I always have done, I don’t remember learning to read, to my husband’s quiet despair I have thousands.  And a Kindle.  What else could I bring to my days that would challenge me, grow me and that I might turn out to be very good at?  This peaceful rhythm of life that I enjoy, what could disrupt it so thoroughly that my brain would begin to count the seconds instead of the days, allowing the days to feel longer, deeper, and my calmness to be a little less calm and a little more… enchanted?

Here are some of my new things for the new year:

·       Alongside the yoga that I have done for a while, I now swim once a week and go to the gym once a week.

·       I have booked to go on a Zentangle weekend in October, and I have accepted the 100 Days of Zentangle challenge.

·       I have joined Stitch Don’t Ditch, and I am currently learning to visibly mend my jeans with embroidery.

·       I have joined the Queenstown Blister Sisters; this term we walked the Routeburn Track together over a weekend.

·       I joined the Art of Flow workshop and experimented with acrylic paints and negative spaces.

·       I have signed up for two courses that will grow what I already offer in my business: the Leadership and Ministry Development Course, that runs for a year through City Impact Church; and the Sharing Circle Facilitators Course, that runs for a term with my friend Sophie whose Moon Circles I have loved being a part of for quite a while.

·       I have been working with Simone Vincenzi to develop and learn how to share a webinar that will help me make visible what I offer in my small business.

I have really enjoyed paying attention to the feelings that all of these new things have generated and to where they show up in my body.  The stretched and expanded pride of being fitter and stronger; the ache of belly laughter with the amazing new group of women with whom I walked the Routeburn on the wettest weekend of the term, alongside the ache of being in a landscape of such beauty it lodges in every part of you; the satisfaction and glow of seeing the exceptionally fine motor skills that I inherited from my cartographer father translated into Zentangles and embroidery, and the twinge of nostalgia and grief as I think of how interested and proud my father would be; the frustration and irritation that my painting eye and painting skills are going to take an awful lot more work; the passion for all that I am learning from church and from Sophie that I am already beginning to use even though I haven’t finished yet, and the gratitude and the slight sense of awe of God co-creating with me that these courses found me at exactly the right time; the pride, excitement and nervousness from stepping out of my comfort zone and collaborating with someone so successful with my still-so-small business, and finding that “big” people are generous and approachable with “smaller” people and enjoy your success as much as you do.

The most enchanting thing of all is knowing that I am not becoming something new or someone not myself.  I am simply becoming.  I am uncovering things that are part of who I am that I just haven’t found before.  After all, perhaps we aren’t ever human beings, rather we are always human becomings. 

All these new things?  The year is moving slowly in its new rhythm, and I am alive.

What about you?  What might you do to stop and look around before the moments fly and you miss them?  What’s one new thing that will be worth the pause?

(By the way, I’m still reading…!)

Stitch Don’t Ditch with Kate and Kathryn at Route 6 in Lumsden