loosening my fingers around abundance

I’m in a love affair with life right now and she’s giving me an abundance to muse upon.

The Second Cycle

There are embers of fire warming my belly again.

I welcome this fire after giving myself a couple of winter months of rest and patience. When I told my friend Vanessa about feeling the flickers of this fiery potential, she told me, “Of course. We’re arriving to Imbolc.” Imbolc, which takes place on the first of February, is associated with Saint Bridget, a Gaelic goddess who represents spring and fertility. The word Imbolc literally means “in the belly", or “first milk” in the old Irish Neolithic language. “Imbolc marks the Quickening. This is a time of emergence and possibility. New life beckons as sap surges and the first green shoots of Earth awaken" (From the Hedge School).

An Ode to Pleasure

The muse of Pleasure is dancing around me.

There has been precious synchronicity with how it’s been unravelling and reweaving me in this Self-Directed Masters, so I will unpack it slowly and indulgently – allow this pleasure to suffuse my life and relationships, and deepen into an ethos guiding personal and systems transformation. 

The Sympoiesis of Life Life-ing

I’ve been on a documentary kick lately, watching films from “The Symbiotic Earth” about the biologist Lynn Margulis,  “Storytelling for Earthly Survival” about Donna Haraway, Nora Bateson’s “An Ecology of the Mind” about her father, Gregory Bateson, and “Infinite Potential” about David Bohm. They were all beautiful pieces of the same puzzle, telling stories about the way life and reality relate, evolve, and co-produce in deep, warm, vibrating, sympoiesis together.

rebuilding the slave ship

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The Bones

We meet three times.

We were invited to the Bakhita Project. It begins with an invitation from Bakhita, a name for an unnamed young woman from Africa captured as a slave, who arrived at Rio de Janeiro and died at the harbour before she could get to the plantation.  Bayo Akomolafe tells us that he stood at her grave site where she was dumped and buried with thousands of other bodies. At that crack, that fissure in the ground of forgotten slaves, he received the call to “rebuild the slave ship.” 

The Compass of Trembling (Intentions Part 2)

I’ve been using the tool Year Compass to reflect on my 2020. Over the past four years, it’s been a useful container for summarizing, for picking up surprising and resonant threads.

Shaping Change by Leaping (Intentions Part 1)

It’s the New Year™!

Usually, I get very energized about new beginnings. I love the allure of a blank slate: the opportunity to leave behind old patterns and stride adventurously into the open horizon of possibility (behind me, there is slow-motion explosion burning up all my fears and traumas into a fiery inferno, ahead of me, a show-stopping sun-rise). I’ve often been guilty of what X has affectionately termed “resolution porn”: I take a lot of pleasure in abstractly designing all of the ways I will finally leave my limiting beliefs and habits behind – “this is the year that I will finally… [ insert: build my website / do a vipassana retreat / paint more / write more / / learn all my mom’s chinese recipes / move into my wilderness commune and learn how to forage and grow veg to survive] !”. 

a tiny dance in stillness

I’ve been feeling tired, tender and irritable for the last several weeks, which has made it hard for me to write. I wake up every morning with the pressure of intention: Today, I will write in this journal. This and a scripted list of other actions that follow the narrative of  “Good Cheryl” – meditation, physical exercise, outdoor walks and breathing in fresh air, being transformatively present in my meetings, cooking healthy meals, creating meaningful art.

The Arts of Living and Dying in Damaged Bodies

Act 1: Fear and Trembling 

I finished a 6 week course on Gender Equity and Reconciliation (GERI) last week. A group of 25 people, approximately half who identify as men, half women, and some non-binary, were hosted for two hours on a weekly basis to dig deep into the lived traumas of gender dynamics together. The format is simple, but the progression of the time spent together effectively unravels you. 

Carrier bag of gatherings

Happenings weave together in curious gatherings. Today, I unpacked Kenny’s Rom a little further and stumbled upon this essay from Ursula Le Guin called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” It is the kind of writing where you have to read it several times to soak it in, let it penetrate your skin and contaminate down to the deepest core of how we imagine, how we tell stories about ourselves.