Chaos

I am in the woods collecting sticks and leaves. It is a form of contemplation…I hold the sticks in my hands, turning them over as I wait attentively for feelings or thoughts to emerge. The woodland meets me halfway, and the sticks arrange themselves slowly on the ground. I dig my fingers in the soil, drawing it this way and that. Soon enough, a pattern emerges, and I allow my body to do what it wants, almost stepping out of the way while watching what appears before my eyes.

Snarls of roots and sticks and leaves in the center. My life is chaotic. Dissertation, travelling, changes, relationships, responsibility. Anxiety and uncertainty reign, demands weigh heavy. I am in the midst of the creative process, and it is all tangled up and I don’t know what to do other than trust and surrender to it. I make a moat to create some space between me and the chaos, then decide to step outside and look at it.

Existence is chaotic, roots grow in response to water and space and nutrients. They grow…they don’t know beforehand if that water will be there the next day, or if they will hit a dead end of hard rock. They grow and they adapt and they become a big bundle of gnarly roots tracing their history of responses over the lifetime of the tree. What if that’s what our lives are meant to be? Just a response

now. now. now.

a being and becoming, a living only for that water of life, those emotions that nourish and sustain us and keep us alive and growing. We have misunderstood; our life, then, is not simply at the surface where we enjoy and produce and bear fruit.

It is also, if not firstly, underground
in the deep and dark well of our soul
our primordial beginning
that space of infinite possibility and potential
the core of the Earth.

My symbolic act; to sit outside and accept my messiness, the messiness of Life, of Earth, of humanity, and to transform it with my love.