The Call Into The New Country

I keep feeling for the ground and at times I touch down with my toe but as soon as it starts to feel solid, the land assumes new form and I must return to hovering.

Sometimes I enter seasons that I can’t articulate clearly. Or at least I don’t experience myself having sufficient language for it. People may reflect back to me that they understand but my experience of myself is blurred and I feel wayward or at sea. I get a tightness in the chest. A clutching for containment combined with a calling toward something I cannot name or see. I do not enjoy this experience. I have come to identify strongly with the parts of me that can summarize a feeling with firmness. I buzz and light up at the arrival of a chorus in my song. I chase the landing of an abstract idea through music and rhythm. The feeling of order out of chaos. I find pleasure in words like “revelation”, “insight” or “emergence”. They sing to me of coherence. I feel most useful to the world when I arrive, full of inspiration and clarity.

But there’s a little thread of delusion in here… and I’m reluctant but willing to shine a light of enquiry onto that dog-eared belief.

Disruption, uncertainty and disintegration are serious truths. Objective truths about reality, you could say.

To find myself in a state of unknowing, blurry-eyed and and fragmenting like some computer code gone awol is actually to make me a lot more like reality and closer to a state of sanity than the tightly gripped clinging to perfection and safety as though it were home. Our home is literally floating and orbiting in space. I can acknowledge that I am part of the world around me and connected to everything but the moment I start to actually resemble that same hovering state, I want to go back to the dream please!

The dream of certainty and smallness and fixed-self. That quietly delusional state of static. It’s a best seller. It brings to mind this genius insight in Jerry Seinfeld’s stand up where he talks about the transition from childhood to adulthood in his stand-up comedy “I’m Telling You For The Last Time.”

"Wait up!" That's what kids say. They don't say "wait", they say "Wait up! Hey, wait up!" 'Cause when you're little, your life is up. The future is up. Everything you want is up. "Wait up! Hold up! Shut up! Mom, I'll clean up! Let me stay up!"

Parents of course are just the opposite. Everything is down. "Just calm down. Slow down. Come down here. Sit down. Put that down."

Hovering seems crucial for adventure. Kids get it. But when I sense the pieces of my life entering a hover state, I feel the freak-out begin and turn into the ever-sensible adult training a naughty cosmic dog : Down…. DOWN!

We can’t tame our lives into perfect submission. I’ve always sensed that my most authentic creative output is found right at the edge of my comfort zone. Right at the border of a land I knew so well or the idea of myself that’s longing to be set free and become something else.

It looks and feels like chaos and I guess it sort of is, but that’s also where we came from so there’s no point fearing it. This is a place where ideas want to fly about like mosquitoes and bump into each other to get a sense of their own boundaries and they don’t want to be named yet they just want to make noise like an infant sensing the breadth of its first scream.

When my ideas are landing, I feel invincible. I’m drawing connections at lightning speed and bringing images forth from the ether into being. Lately, my ideas feel more like drills pummeling away at the foundations of my inner peace, greedy to be seen but not ready to be born. So I just have to sit and watch them writhe and not grow anxious at the time it’s all taking or how messy the kitchen is getting with all the food being thrown. I think of how pregnancy probably feels like this too. Something is growing inside you, it doesn’t have a name and it’s hovering in a womb of fluids. The process cannot be rushed and you have no choice but to trust what is happening. Disruption, uncertainty and disintegration. The soil for life.

And so, I’m writing through it, searching for a thread to follow while the tapestry is being woven.

I’m trying to paint a little through it too. As expected, there’s very little sense of arrival here either. But that’s okay. At least my mind has a weird friend who looks like her.

It’s hard to find spaces to hover in the world without feeling aimless or useless. I wish all the churches and temples left their doors open every day at every hour so we could stumble in with all our unresolved questions and be silent in hollow spaces that don’t talk back. To grieve for all the people we don’t know who are dying. And all the ones we did. To grieve for the part of us that is dying and doesn’t belong to language. These transitions refuse to be articulated while they’re happening. But writing through it without forcing an arrival is my attempt to refuse intimidation from the panicked parts of me. To soften the frightened child who sees the new land sprawled ahead but doubts the pilgrimage upon seeing the ominous weather in the sky - forgetting it will change with time!

Henri Nouwen puts it this way in a book of his I cherish called “The Inner Voice of Love” :

You have an idea what the new country looks like. Still, you are very much at home, although not truly at peace, in the old country. You know the ways of the old country, it’s joys and pains, its happy and sad moments. You have spent most of your days there. Even though you know that you have not found there what your heart most desires, you remain quite attached to it. It has become part of your very bones.

Now you have come to realize that you must leave it and enter the new country, where your Beloved dwells. You know that what helped and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by? You are being asked to trust that you will find what you need in the new country. That requires the death of what has become precious to you: influence, success, yes, even affection and praise.

Trust is so hard, since you have nothing to fall back on. Still, trust is what is essential. The new country is where you are called to go, and the only way to go there is naked and vulnerable.

It seems that you keep crossing and recrossing the border. For a while you experience a real joy in the new country. But then you feel afraid and start longing again for all you left behind, so you go back to the old country. To your dismay, you discover that the old country has lost its charm. Risk a few more steps into the new country, trusting that each time you enter it, you will feel more comfortable and be able to stay longer.

-Henri Nouwen

Risk a few more steps. Even if, like Dorothy, your feet float off the ground and Kansas turns into a cyclone and you’re hovering in the eye of the storm.

It’s normal to run back to the old land, but I hope to stay longer in the new country each time I go. Soon it’ll start to feel like home. The frenzy and the panic are welcome, because everything belongs here and those states are still fertile for life. The tension and frustration at my newfound season is a houseguest I’ll accommodate. If I’m hovering that means I’m more like a child — it’s possible I’m on a broomstick to some magical land, or I’m being carried for a moment, or I’m momentarily resembling life at a very intimate level, a small microcosm of a world-wide phenomenon, I don’t know and I don’t have to know to be valuable to others. In fact, I wish we would all turn up more from these spaces of hovering/chaos because then I probably wouldn’t feel so weird or divided when these seasons set in.

If it’s grounding I crave, let me return to the place where two surfaces meet.

Let me breathe in and breathe out knowing that is one thing I can be sure of.

And maybe I only need one thing.

My breath and the reminder that all that is happening in the external world will at some point find its doppelgänger inside me. The bitter tase of transition, just like a sour fermented food, can become an acquired taste. I want to make a habit of softening into seasons of disintegration. Not fighting them but trusting them as a call into the new country. Something wants to die. I can’t say what and I don’t love how it feels but I’m not going to resist what life wants to do through me.

There is no better musical accompaniment for this dance with dying than William Basinski. The Disintegration Loops have been a friend to me through many seasons of transition. Listening to sound decay in real time is surprisingly peaceful. A meditation for letting go… for hovering… and growing comfortable in the new country where we can’t rush what is happening… ideas slowly exit and dissolve gracefully. If I stay with it long enough, I start to feel myself soar.

Till next time,