Cultivate
“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
In a recent podcast by one of my many mentors from afar, Emily P. Freeman, she shared this quote by Parker J. Palmer, “Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
The quote struck and shook me. Sometimes, life feels like I am holding it so tight that it is seeping between my fingers and spilling all over the floor - leaving another mess needing to be tended to. I am demanding my life take a shape I am not sure it was ever meant to. A hurried life. A life with an abundance that feels like a burden. A life lacking purposeful cultivation.
I yearn for a simpler rhythm to life, but I have yet to tend to my current reality - so instead, I begin to push simplicity down the throat of a life already so full. In these last few days, the word cultivation has continued to come forward. Nothing can grow in dirt, unkempt and neglected.
Over the next few weeks, I am going to be practicing an intentional and loving practice of loosening and breaking up the soil of my life to make room for whatever this life brings forward next. Some of this practice will be straightforward and, as my husband says, just "good adulting." Actually open the three months of mail sitting on my office's floor. Update our family budget. Clear out the kids' clothes that are too small.
Other practices are deeper. Call my friends. Return to my journaling to ground myself. Find a quiet time in the day to return to prayer. Take a few minutes to walk alongside the river.
In my head, everyone reading this has already taken stalk of their lives and cares for it in the responsible way folks nearly reaching mid-life should. Maybe that is true. But, likely, I am not alone. So, if you, too, feel exhausted by holding it all together, you are not walking this walk by yourself. I am the hot mess next to you, just trying to catch my breath.
Godspeed, mama. You got this shit.
Alex
