Ninety Minutes.

It was ninety minutes yesterday, before we all settled into nature, coherence, co-operation and collaboration. After weeks of knowing that we should be collecting wood for Winter we had the opportunity to take a drive in the afternoon.

Everyone was a little off, we all have been. We’ve all been sick at some point in the last three weeks, we’ve all been needing extra rest and downtime, we’ve all been inside a lot and bumping against our edges and each other a lot.

We got in the car and I listened to everyone’s different versions of ‘this feels uncomfortable and unfair’ bounce around the confined space. An old part of me was running a story about how we can never do anything as a family without whining and complaining. A story about someone ruining something or everything and needing to be quiet and get on with it. Alongside that was another part saying ‘What if you just stay steady, just stay present and curious here, just watch?’ and so I did my best to do that.

I stayed quiet, I listened and got on with it, I allowed it all to feel imperfect and chaotic. I stood amongst the trees and let my energy calibrate with theirs and then I noticed that with time everyone else’s did too. After they whinged and resisted, after they stomped, after they pushed each other’s buttons and let out the heavy, gritty, uncomfortable things they didn’t even know they had been holding.  

Once it was all out, there was room for peace.

Ninety minutes seemed a long time. Ninety minutes tells me how far we have strayed but it also shows me how we can come back and the conditions we need to do it. It shows me what I can and need to do to help.

Go quietly along with them into their wilderness and be ok with what is there, so that whatever is there can shift.

It happened to be day seventeen of the moon’s cycle. We happened to be collecting, chopping and splitting wood under a full moon we couldn’t see. We happened to be surrounded by equally invisible energy that had been urging each of us to pick up the layers, building for days and bubbling up to the top, in each of our inner worlds, hold them up to the light and feel them fully so they could be released.

Five of us in that forest with the opportunity to hand something unnecessarily heavy back to the sky, the Earth, the trees. And all I had to do was be there with them and not be scared of how it looked or sounded so that it could all be released.

In ninety minutes we all found relief, came back to ourselves and aligned with each other. Ninety minutes seems worth it now.