On internal weather, attention, and finding our way back to what we already know.
Post Crumble
Solutions, clarity, answers, insights, realizations, inspirations, revelations often come in the soft moments post crumble.
Post dropping.
All the hardness of trying, pushing, pressuring the sweet organism to-do, to-know, to-succeed in accordance to someone else’s ideas of what is right living.
There is a funny thing that happens when we really really want an answer. We tighten around the question. Think harder, search farther, ask more people, collect more information. Try to squeeze clarity out of ourselves as though it is hiding somewhere inside and will eventually surrender if enough pressure is applied.
But so often the opposite happens.
More thinking becomes more noise. More searching becomes more things to sift through. More pressure to know becomes another layer between us and the thing we already internally know within the cells of our intelligent being.
Sometimes we must crumble.
Just drop all the trying. Drop to the earth and let her take off the unnecessary collected layers. All the shoulda, coulda, ought to’s, wouldas that we are sculpted into believing as truth.
Once they are allowed to drop, and the creature is allowed to be Free. To Be, then the inner will, so wise and so beautiful, organically comes through like a slow warm soak, drenching from the inside out.
And underneath all those collected layers, there is space again. Something wide, uncomplicated, unobstructed. A place inside that knows without having to explain how it knows.
The Wide Open Sky Blue YES
I like to remind myself of that space – the wide open sky blue YES inside of us.
It’s the compass pulling us lovingly to our truest north, not through or for anyone else. It’s all blue and only yes.
When there is a decision to be made and this space cannot be felt – perhaps that doesn’t mean the answer has disappeared. It can simply mean that the open sky is temporarily occupied with creatures and clouds.
Other energies in motion on the canvas of Blue.
Fear. Old stories. Other people’s voices, expectations, tiredness, or the thing that happened yesterday. The thing we’re afraid might happen tomorrow. All sorts of internal weather moving around up there. We can mistake the clouds for the whole sky. And then try very hard to clear them.
We go searching again, thinking harder, asking farther outside of ourselves, adding more pressure to the very space we are trying to clear. But a cloudy sky does not need to remember how to be blue. The blue is still there.
Sometimes it is simply a matter of letting the weather weather – letting the storm move, change shape, empty itself, until the air smells fresh again and the answer becomes easy.
But when we don’t let it move, when we grip the weather and keep feeding it with our attention, something temporary can begin to feel much more solid.
Dust Into Rock
We calcify and materialize what we communicate to ourselves.
We can forget to see that thoughts are subtle forms of matter which densify like dust into rock, building the architecture of our experience.
The breeze of our attention can either stabilize and harden these formations or mobilize and clear them, depending on the quality and ingredients of our chosen thought recipes.
Maybe this is why trying so hard to find clarity can sometimes take us farther away from it.
We keep touching the same thought. Turning it around. Repeating the question. Building another story on top of the story. Dust collecting upon dust until something that began as a passing uncertainty starts to feel like an enormous immovable boulder.
But even rock is movable over time. To see the patterns is to begin to dissolve them, layer by layer, like the ocean carves away at the rocks, like clouds moving across a sky until the blue becomes visible again.
Maybe finding clarity is not always an act of figuring something out, but more an act of making space.
Mother Nature’s Many Hands
I know you know this like I know this and get busy and forget a million times and remember a million times, but whenever things feel foggy and I’m searching too hard for clarity, there is one place that clears the cobwebs for me more than anything else. And each time I remember, it’s a “wow I needed this” connection.
Mother Nature. Simple. It’s just her nature.
She always can reconnect us to the centre, to clarity. She clears the cobwebs we’ve temporarily collected with the slightest touch of any of her many hands. Wind. Ocean. Dirt. The creatures’ chirps.
I think she’s always ever so patiently waiting for us to remember to come home and get loved up.
There is something so ingeniously orchestrated about placing a body back inside of something much bigger than its thoughts that changes the scale of the question. Nature doesn’t necessarily give me the answer, but she clears enough space around all my searching that I can feel the answer that was already trying to come through.
Feet in dirt. Skin in wind. Salt water. Rain. Looking at a tree that has absolutely no opinion about the decision we have been trying to make for three days.
Attention moves out of the looping landscapes of the mind and back into something so intelligent, we can’t help but simply feel nothing but awe. Sensation. Breath. Sound. Earth. The logical mind loosens its grip, the accumulated matter gets some air through it, and slowly the internal weather begins to move again.
The clouds don’t need to be pushed anywhere, somehow the wind knows what to do with them. And underneath, that wide open sky blue YES has been there the whole time.
Clear The Cobwebs
So maybe clarity isn’t something we have to manufacture.
Maybe underneath the layers of shoulda, coulda, ought to, the old recipes and hardened thought formations, there is already something softly communicating.
And perhaps the practice is less about demanding that it speak louder, and more about clearing enough space to hear it.
Drop some luggage. Clear out the old junk drawers. Air out your heart. Ride breath. Let nature tune you up.
Let the storm move through the enormous blue canvas without needing to chase every cloud away.
Because clouds move. Storms spend themselves. The ocean keeps carving rock. And that wide open sky blue YES inside of us was never actually gone.
So if you happen to be struggling for clarity, this little message comes through today to reassure you: You can relax.
Enjoy your beautiful storm.
I love you,
Meghan xx