2023 Mycelium #10 Joining the dots

Joining the dots is the above ground equivalent of mycelium at work, then there is the potential of going deeper and the warp and the weft of weaving starts to become visible.

It has been that kind of a week, a dot here and there and then a pattern starts to emerge. It is not always one you want to see. I became curious about where the word pattern came from and discovered its origins in the word patron. According to the Oxford languages, via Google:

Middle English patron ‘something serving as a model’, from Old French. The change in sense is from the idea of a patron giving an example to be copied. Metathesis in the second syllable occurred in the 16th century. By 1700 patron ceased to be used of things, and the two forms became differentiated in sense.

The pattern was perhaps the origins of an algorithm. Maybe the early dots to join and be followed as desired by the patron setting stepping stones out in front for followers?

The algorithms at play following me and trying to entice me, as Mayor, to respond on platforms, are plentiful this week. The use of the tag function to connect me to stories, places or to coax me into conversations are not always dots I will be joining. This practice is designed to co-opt at best, but shame and/or blame is high on the agenda. As we all know the algorithms thrive and grow and were designed by their patron for the market where the currency is hate.  Like patrons before in other dot joining platforms like the tabloids of the UK, hate and fear are big sellers.

The challenge is to work out how to counteract, ignore, help people to fact check, suggest alternative views, offer hope, love, safety. Some of the opposites of fear are acceptance, tolerance, endurance, peace, calmness, tranquillity, confidence, assurance, boldness.  Conjuring up these dots and infusing them into the mycelium seems to require that old adage of eternal vigilance. It is so easy to lapse from the practice of hope and fall down the proverbial rabbit hole into fear. I notice my own wobbly voice and find a deep breath helps get back on track. I also notice the need for beauty, rest and good humour as excellent antidotes.  The negativity and mean-ness and the desire to fuel hate is very real, and while I know it is not personal, it does wear me down sometimes.

It is very unpleasant to be accused of grooming, when reading stories to children in the library. And this is nothing, compared to those who were part of last week’s Pride March being accused of so much worse and being denigrated foully on line.

Patronage of hate and fear is what we enable and encourage, when we get caught up in online rants, scoll and read the seeds of terror embedded in the nasty posts. Resist.

This is how it begins, we need to be watchful, prepared and ready. It is not just to balance these assaults with goodness, it is also necessary to create the safe places, new systems and have an abundance of joy to draw from a deep well of love.

Keeping the tank topped up and making sure I am not running on empty is my best strategy. Find the joy coloured dots and join them together. Before we know it our patronage of joy will create patterns of hope as the mycelium for justice and equity bear fruit.

Sparks will fly #45 #satisfied

Happiness comes from the root word for lucky and satisfaction from the root word for being content.  Being satisfied in a deep and knowing way is not about luck, it is usually not random, it is planned, thought through, intentional. It comes from effort and often at some cost personally, professionally, physically. While happiness is more likely to be accidental, occasional and difficult to sustain. I have been in several conversations of late about these two feelings. There is an old Japanese saying I used to have on a mini-poster as a teen in my bedroom “Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it eludes you, but if you sit quietly, it will come and rest on your shoulder.” Chasing happiness seems to be a past time for many. Coming to a deeper awareness about what is satisfying requires a different kind of effort. It is not haphazard. Fascinatingly it seems the earliest meaning around satisfaction was with a confessor hearing the contrition of  observing the fulfilment of the sinner’s penance.  The contrast being satisfying the other rather than yourself and I think this is quite close to the difference between the two states of satisfaction and happiness. Satisfaction seems to have deeper roots.

Getting to the bottom of things can be quite satisfying and sustaining a state of satisfaction begins with the seeds of knowing your purpose and passions and often distilling the difference between needs and wants. Some people talk about needs as work and wants as pleasures – this too might be a clue to the difference between happiness and satisfaction.  Meeting wants is probably the icing on the cake, while meeting needs holds the seeds for satisfaction.  Having a big enough worldview to capture your why above and beyond the quick rush of happy I think can put down satisfaction roots. This is how value is created in our life, the deeper the roots, the more sustenance from our source where-ever that well is we draw from. There is some kind of focus from those roots to follow the water course that offers life.  I often think of the expression “go with the flow” as really being carried along that river, when you are in it and authentically turning up, you experience being held over the rocks, and around the bends, through the cascades. Maybe after the journey you arrive to the mouth, where you are emptied into the ocean, maybe you are opened into the ocean and join with something bigger than yourself?

Rumi says: If I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without any pain”. I am not so sure about the lack of pain, but I am sure satisfying needs takes patience, flow or perhaps alignment. Wants though have more of an insatiable nature and require being fed. Only when there is some kind of emptiness, lacking even perhaps a vacuum can the need become fully visible. The homeless one knows what shelter means, the hungry know the taste of bread. I think Mick Jagger and Keith Richards might have been onto something where they moaned about lack of satisfaction because people are filling up with useless information and constant trying. Filling and chasing and constant trying, isn’t going to lead to satisfaction. It is both more gentle and more tenacious, there is plumbing to depths requiring integrity and gratitude for the stones and rocks along the way to reveal what might is needed to go deeper.

Little sparks of water dance in the light and fly in the face of the danger in the cascades, flamed by high winds in the mountains and gentle breezes on the coast.  There are times you can even see the light and water form a rainbow – that universal expression of hope. It is not always a happy journey, but there are signs of it being a satisfying one.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

 

 

 

 

 

Year of Self Compassion #31 #scarcity

Having an experience of scarcity seems like an indulgent first world problem to me and yet I go tripping down that rabbit warren more than I have for a long time. Having downsized my life in most ways in the last year, not all at my own hand, I often catch myself wanting.  I recall my economics classes where the lesson that resources are finite, and an insatiable appetite for growth featured regularly.  This economic equation keeps revisiting me at so many levels, practical, spiritual, meta physical.  I want more – one last conversation, one last kiss, one last meal. I want less – one less speeding fine, one less demand, one less choice.

The invitation to simplicity is one giant mathematical computation of complexity that results in an overwhelming sense of a sum zero game that I never asked to play.  This see-saw of being grateful for what I have and feeling a paucity of intimacy is quite exhausting. The ups and downs of the see-saw are grief on her ride through me and the interior landscapes I traverse. Many of these lands are new to me, and some I keep revisiting looking for meaning and magic to unlock and hold memories, hoping the voyage of this Dawn Treader will come to shore soon to rest and find me in a safe habour.   I know I am in a safe habour all the time and I do have enough of all that I need. Yet …

There are triggers all around that sneak up and remind me of scarcity. I see couples making plans for a life together and I want to warn them how it will all end. I hear the dog barking next door, wearing himself out waiting for his family to come home and his loneliness grows and then dissipates giving up just before they arrive. I feel the ash, and am infused with the smell of the fire from the broken limbs fallen from the wild winds the night before, that I have made into a little hearth in the back yard, and I think about the differences between being buried and cremated. (How does carbon get stored and released?) That leads me to think about land, the scarcity of it, my carbon footprint, the legacy I leave by all my actions. This is not living abundantly, my scarcity lens is keeping me from fullness and it refuses to leave me and contributing to a feeling of self-indulgence.

Theologians and economists have always found abundance and scarcity a point of difference. I think the root of the challenge to get this balance right, lies somewhere in gratitude, generosity and hope. Being generous is a sign of abundance, my biggest currency has always been time and now I realise how finite time is and I am making more choices with me at the middle of the equation, again a new landscape and one where I am yet to master. Being grateful is a practice and I am trying to be agnostic about what I am grateful for, everything can be appreciated and received with kindness. This practice seems to be woven with respect and recognition, actually being able to notice the gift however unseemly wrapped it comes to me. Hope offers potential to shape what will come next and to be an actor in that future without letting the scarcity filter, is a daily exercise in my inner life gym.

In this year of self-compassion, I am struggling to replace scarcity with abundance which has been my default for so long. Privileges I took for granted or worse, hadn’t even noticed I had. These privileges are now inviting me to pivot, flipping abundance for  scarcity, There are invitations waiting for me to find the wealth within, the freedom of less and joy of simplicity.  I will try not to shame myself too much for defining this feeling of scarcity as a first world problem, as it is teaching me to be more mindful, more conscious of my consumption of all kinds of things from air time to fossil fuels. To be more gentle on myself and grateful for all the times I have been generous and how that disposition is one of the key reasons for the depth of the wound. After all something that is scarce is also rare and therefore usually incredibly precious and perhaps that is the clue to the relationship between abundance and scarcity – the rare space that one creates for the other.

Photo by Sam Soffes on Unsplash