Category: General Learning

I love this from poet David Whyte (shared by friend Martin Siesta) that reframes withdrawal. I’ve noticed in myself during the last year a different relationship to withdrawal. I’ve needed quiet space in a way that I have not before. I’ve needed to say no to people and events that have felt important. I’ve felt a reasonable amount of anxiety with this. Confusion. Why am I not say yes? Crazy? The withdrawal, the claiming a new place of center, has been more important.

Refreshing to hear this from David Whyte.

 

WITHDRAWAL
is underestimated in this time of action and engagement. So much of what we are involved with, in even the highest cause, becomes involvement at the busy periphery, where the central conversation has been lost to the outer elaborations of what was to begin with, a very simple invitation. Withdrawal is often not what it looks like – a disappearance – no, to withdraw from entanglement can be to begin the process of renewing the primary, essential invitation again. Though life does seem determined to be a beautiful, constant and often entrancing distraction – just as we ourselves are a distraction to others, testing them as we test ourselves and our mutual sincerity – our participation in this dance of distraction also makes more real, and more necessary, our ability to return to essential ground, to an essential person or an essential work.

We stick to the wrong thing quite often, not because it will come to fruition by further effort,… but because we cannot remove our sticky hands or our feet or our minds from the way we have decided to tell the story and we become further enmeshed even by trying to make sense of what entraps us, when what is needed is a simple, clean breaking away. To remove our selves entirely and absolutely, abruptly and at times uncompromisingly is often the real and radically courageous break for freedom. Unsticking ourselves from the mythical Tar Baby, seemingly set up, just for us, right in the middle of our path, we start the process of losing our false enemies, and even our false friends, and most especially the false sense of self we have manufactured to live with them: we make ourselves available for the simple purification of seeing our selves and our world more elementally and therefore more clearly again. We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different voice, a clear, rested, embodied tonality we can call our own.

Excerpt from WITHDRAWAL taken from the upcoming reader’s circle essay series. ©2013 David Whyte.

Yesterday I worked with board members from the Wasatch Cooperative Market. Ten of us gathered for a potluck dinner of delicious and healthy foods, a glass of wine, friendship, and the setting sun of a warm Utah summer evening.

We shifted our attention into deliberate meeting, a transition from bar-b-que and good social space into another kind of good learning space with each other. Some welcome and concert from Michael Jeppeson, board member, to help frame the need for seeing where this group is in its intent to build a store offering local products, and what I loved, “an evolution of the grocery and food experience.”

We started with a check-in circle. “Where are we in the story?” I wanted to explore the clarity of the current narrative that is making sense for them. Lots of good expressions that represent the complexity of information, emotion, and energy for such an undertaking. Question about the deep why of what they are doing. Good framing of entering a patient second phase of feasibility. Desire to move and name essential departments, location, scope and size.

We continued with a brainstorming list of key issues. I asked if this was shared among them. Of course, some of it was. And, it was helpful to bring it live to all of those present.

Next was a change to look from the belly at what are the smart starts, the most immediate next experiments. This was a tough thing to do. It asks something different from the participants. To move from the list quality of anything and everything to belly quality of intuition on what wants to happen now. Everything from the tangible of naming components of store to key messaging and deeper questions of purpose.

I hope this group succeeds. And I hope they can dwell in the complexity of what they are up to, long enough to get to the natural gold of what can happen. As I said last night in my check in, at a broader level, a cooperative market is about changing consciousness of a people and how we are in relationship with food, community, and localism.