Wide Arcs

Dear Friends and Fellow Guardians,

Thank you for the rich harvest from the 2nd Guardians gathering. I am sorry my cell phone could not connect in to the phone circle. It has been an interesting period of silences for me over these last few weeks as my computers at home and work went out of service, and my work phone for a while, too. So a clear message for take time for reflection and do not over-reach seems to be making sure it is heard!

I'd like first to answer the question of the call - what trembles - by sharing a couple stories. A few days before the call I was driving through territory in Wyoming I had never been in before. Prior to my trip I had a vision of a large herd of buffalo, densely packed, moving across the highway being "driven" by dark raven spirits moving them in a great migration. It was a vision I wondered if it was a romanticized wish of the West and while I held it close to my heart and believe something significant was going to happen on my way there, I also chided myself some for perhaps wanting to force something "meaningful" to happen.

Well, on the drive I was caught in a severe hail storm and had to exit the highway to wait it out. I could not see more than a few feet in front of me while driving yet also felt safe as long as I took precautions. I waited it out, resumed driving the several hours to my friend's home, where I learned a large/wide tornado had crossed the highway just north of me. The images clicking in as that dark dense herd of buffalo. The trembling of hooves and wind.

I am still getting used to how to listen to these intuitions that present themselves. A life-long learning I am sure. And more for another time. What I most want to share through this story here is how literal the trembling was around me during the time of the call, as the storms continued through my whole visit. I drove through stretches of mountain range, spotted with antelope and meadowlarks, and layered the images of that land with my memory of the hills that cradle Axladitsa-Avatakia.

I did not feel the trembling as local, but as part of a series of waves that stretched far across our world.

It is a strange reach of listening across the miles, lovely in many ways, and miraculous how the resonances travel, yet often strange, too, in the way that I'm not certain always what I am hearing or how to check in with each other about that.

Before that trip I was part of an Art of Hosting team near my childhood home of Tampa Bay, Florida. The whole weekend trembled, and my drive down through the state of Florida to get there was a ripping experience of ancient grief, which in reflection I believe came from descending down the trails of colonization that moved up the state centuries ago. When I arrived at the retreat I was greeted with such love and the sense of being seen. Much as I felt arriving in Greece around the same time last year.

On one of our walks Chris Corrigan shared with me a metaphor that really clicked about "this work" and those of us who find ourselves called in our own ways to it: the song of the humpback whales. There were many gifts of that conversation I am still processing and unfolding, but as soon as I got home I began reading about humpbacks, how little we know of their calls, the great distances they send them out across, and, how often these whales travel "alone."

As a Guardian I often feel like I am a humpback whale in my own quadrant of ocean listening to and sending these calls...some days I feel it in my body and it is a clean sound - like the crystal bowl I remember Sarah sounding at the first guardians' gathering...and sometimes I feel I strain through some interference and/or my own uncertainty how to hear this way, this language.

It is ALL trembling. What falls away and what emerges, what longs to be greeted, and what tears across in a fear or rage that must be left to pass.

In this way I feel this year, as Maria says in an earlier post, has been a transition, yes, yet a different transition than the last several years which too have been massively transitional for me. The kind of transition that is like a change of home-language.

I recall a question I voiced as we came out of our last World Cafe in an Art of Hosting at Essex, Mass. in 2006, where I met Maria and Sarah. Tenneson and I recently spoke of how we still think about this question. That AoH was pattern around the 4 elements...the question for me became - how do we go from breathing air to breathing in water?

It feels like that quality of shift.

I feel comfortable with it. I like it. While I also must recalibrate my whole system, particularly, as it strikes me right now, the part that evaluates how things are going.

So sometimes I am confused about how trusting the flow of my life, of our community of practice, meets (actively) presencing the work. I find myself sending out and listening for these humpback calls if you will and I'm not always sure where to send them, if it's appropriate to send them, or how to find the songs I know must be circulating all around.

Again many days I trust that I hear/voice what I need to. But I want to be conscious of that and inquisitive about how that is working on any given day. I want to fully show up.

One of the harvest questions of the circle: how do we support each other? seems especially powerful for me, from both ends.

I think this is a question that has been making its way through our Gardeners of Peace conversations as well. It is a good one to keep asking.

Closing for now,

hope that speaks some of my arc of the year in,

and continuing to hold the question of best practices for support and connection,

Holly