A very good Monday morning to you wherever you are! This morning I am in the North on a farm that fronts the Northumberland Strait in Nova Scotia. There are many beings here; humans, horses, dogs, cats, chickens, starlings and the myriad of unseen ones that comprise this ecosystem. And this morning, we are experiencing strong winds and lots of rain, a big invitation to change. These winds feel pushy, almost relentless at times.
I hate to be pushed. My first instinct is to resist, to move away. I get a headache just thinking about having to move before I am ready. In fact, I’d say when that headache shows up, I am not ready. But then, the question is how to be ready, when you don’t feel ready? How is the now of being not ready when the wind is blowing and not so gently, an invitation I can accept? The push is real. Change is on.
The Autumn winds almost always bring a big and insistent kind of invitation. Insistent because the seasons won’t wait, the weather won’t stop and basically we humans have to respond accordingly or suffer the consequences. Big as the energy shifts from the harvest season with lots of work to the Winter rest time with the elements hemming us in to our indoor spaces.
Here in the house I hunker down. The insulation is good. The wood stove is cranking. I have my comfortable seat. I am, to some extent at least, buffering this big environmental invitation. Yet, I cannot deny that I don’t feel quite right about that. I feel the desire to let in the bigness somehow, to know more about it. And most often, I love the bigness, the opportunity to feel the moment large beyond myself.
Here by the ocean things feel very big a lot of the time. The sky is big. The ocean is big. The animals are big. And I am quite literally small in comparison to what is happening here. I am small to the winds. I am small to the animals and even to the other people around here. But more importantly, I am small in the sense of my capacity to resist. For so much of my life I have operated with resistance to this kind of big invitation. I have defended my smallness, my human limits you might say. But now, I am seeing my own bigness, a bigness of spirit rather than form. Big spirit wants to run with the wind. Big spirit meets small body in all of us humans in the larger scheme of things. Big spirit. Small body. Now what. Especially now when the invitation to change is so big.
Without taking sides, I can say very practically that big isn’t better. Neither is small. Big and small are just facts, just the stuff we are working with. So when there is big and small meeting how does benefit come to both? How does the small open to the big, the big tend to the small? I am watching the horses.
Horses embody the big with their substance, literally their bodies. They embody the small with their exquisitely sensitive noses, feet and skin. They move like the wind. Dragonfly, the youngest horse here, is dancing her way through this moment. Watching her move, it seems one can only say yes, yes to this kind of strong movement, yes to the changes. Dragonfly is instigating joy and possibility as she dances around the rising water in the pasture, around the somewhat older mare, Caraway, who might be slightly more circumspect about how to manage. Watching them I am motivated to walk out into the wind, into the day, into whatever awaits, feeling both big and small with it all.
How do you find the big and small conversation? How do you move with the wind?