Finding Our Life’s Purpose
The great task in life is to find our purpose. One of the gifts of a certain longevity is to learn that purposes change as we grow. When we become too fixed, too sure of ourselves, we go as dormant as daylilies in October.
Sure as rain, life will wake us up, if we aren’t able to do this for ourselves.
A few years ago, life pushed me out of my settled perennial bed and into a thin place. Change flooded my world in ways I wasn’t prepared for. My son had grown to adulthood. My relationships needed a good soil turning. My writing life with its forays into the spiritual realm was running low on fuel. I’d been tending to everyone else’s minutiae, and far less to what mattered to me.
I made some hard choices. I cut back my workshop schedule, simplified my social calendar, cancelled household projects, reduced volunteer work and regular church attendance.
I want to share a bit about this journey with you, because I know that many of you are navigating similar passages. The changing landscape of our post-pandemic common life, illness, aging, and death are forcing your hand. I know this feeling and it can be paralyzing. Or, it can trigger frenetic activity, which is just as bad.
This is what I have learned. The key to reclaiming purpose is not linear, nor deductive. It is not an intelligence test, or a proving ground for that tiresome trope, ambition. It requires a combination of two seemingly contradictory forces: embracing surprise and risking reconnection.
We need a radical change in perspective to break out of old garden beds. At the same time that we need to recover all that in the tumult of our days we have neglected – the vulnerable treasure trove of place, books, and images that once formed us.
The New
Though I’d told myself ad nauseam that I didn’t have time for anything new, I decided to make a little space for Jung’s concepts of synchronicity and serendipity. I began to listen to my heart again (not just my head) as I noticed what passed through my inbox. One day, something caught my eye.
It was an online course offered by an Australian fiber artist, Lorna Crane. Crane, I learned, is a passionate mentor of “outsider” artists, primarily women who are committed to earth-based materials, handmade tools, and art-making practices based in ancient tribal rituals. Before I second-guessed myself, I enrolled.
Crane became my guide into an extraordinary landscape, of breath-taking walks along the shoreline and velds near her home in the far south of NSW Australia. Translating her assignments to my family’s New Hampshire farm, I spent afternoons gathering grasses and feathers and sticks. I built stone cairns, smelled the dank earth after rain, followed the trail of deer “beds” deep into the meadows. Slowing down and becoming newly attuned to the signs of my own earth, the rhythms of the season, bird song and the flower habits (and those of the insect populations) became an unexpected and deeply sacred journey.
Crane introduced me to artists who are forging unique expressions out of the experience of dislocation, migration, and the role of “outsider.” They collect natural materials with which to make their own brushes and inks. They forage to create hand-made papers from barks and local grasses.
The earth and heart-centered creativity that I discovered in these Australian (and Australian/Sri Lankan) women, led me deep into the ecology of my landscape. Crane taught me how to make paint brushes, play with bold splotches and hieroglyphs of natural color on large pieces of brown paper.
In slowing down enough to really look the earth in the eye, so to speak, I was renewed – literally, re-generated. In stones, leaves, trees, paths, curbstones, shop windows, village churches, I unlocked veins of memory and association. These organically led me organically to the next step.
Reconnection
When I wasn’t outdoors doing Lorna’s assignments, I started to pick up books of poetry I hadn’t looked at in year. I took down from my shelves works on spirituality that had made such an impact when I was a much younger woman.
I had written poetry for more than 20 years, but I had regarded it as a marginal activity, hardly valuable enough to submit to literary magazines, much less to consider publishing. Now, I pulled it out and began to read my work for the first time in years. In the early morning hours before the household was awake, I started to revise and write and organize what emerged in time as a coherent collection. (If you visit my home page, you can pre-order a copy.)
Back home I took long walks in the park. I used my newly-recovered time to meditate and to journal. Out of these practices — my own version of the Australian artists’ visual work — I I designed a writing workshop based in earth observation, in poetry and prayer. I have entitled the workshop Plein Air Writing, and have begun to offer it at my retreat house and elsewhere.
Finally, my journey had made it clear that the spiritual life cannot be confined to congregational worship. I have returned to church, but with a difference. My life today is far less about religious routine and more about freedom of choice and the necessity for varied, earth-based practices and ways of connecting to the holy.
I have become more involved at my retreat house, hoping to help bring energy to our work with welcome the many who seek a more intimate, grounded relationship to the sacred.
The indigenous and earth-based Australian artists who have helped midwife my renewed purpose use two words that hold enormous energy for me these days. They speak of Hybridity and Regeneration.
Hybridity is new growth from diverse sources interacting dynamically to become a living whole.
Regeneration is new life from old roots.
My life today feels like a second skin to me – regenerated, hybrid, in the most vibrant of ways, full of color, leaf and light. Free of outlived roles that I can leave to others, and outworn obligations that no longer consume my days. Women on the other side of the globe helped me to rediscover my place here, and return to beloved sources of wisdom. These are the connective tissue I need, to take up my journey of creative growth, and my next steps into purpose.
My wish for you is that you, too, trust yourself. And the moments of serendipity in your life Open to surprise and you will find your path home, feathers or fern fronds in your hands.
https://www.bethanyhousearlington.org
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