Leaving Home and Homecoming

Dear BraveHearts

I think I can be fairly confident when I say that I will not, in this lifetime, plant a flag at the top of Mt Everest, or any other high up mountain for that matter.

Having said that, I have a funny feeling I might be experiencing at least a smidgen of the feelings that such an accomplishment would produce in me if I were to do so. Elation, satisfaction, peace of mind.

I’ve had my own mountain range to deal with – in the form of cardboard boxes, and I am experiencing something akin to awe when I tell you that there is only one small box left to deal with……..all the others have either settled in their for-now resting place, or have been unpacked into our tiny new home.

It’s been a tumultuous time. Leaving the home in which I raised my two boys, saying goodbye to one of my closest friends who left South Africa, driving across the country to deliver my youngest son to a new city, and his new life, choosing to let go of dearly loved heirlooms.

And, in the way of life, all of the letting go has been met with an equal and opposite experience of rich blessings coming my way.

I have had the joy of teaching the Thinking Environment, from the deep dive of the Thinking Session, to the wide embrace of the group applications. Again and again I have had the joy of witnessing the invitation to reclaim one’s Self taken up by each participant in my courses, and the quantum magic of what happens when a room is filled with human beings all choosing to be authentic, vulnerable and true to themselves.

I will never be able to express fully enough how lucky I am to know, in my bones, the truth of Kahlil Gibran’s words: “work is love made visible.”

And I have been called to support partnerships where conflict is stretching the seams of the relationship and yet, despite hurt and its commensurate companion emotion – anger – the members of the partnerships have known to reach out and ask for assistance. I have been humbled to bear witness to how tender yet powerful is the impulse for love in the face of fear.

And in my thinking partnerships I have heard myself and those to whom I have listened generate liberation. I am enraptured by our ability to use words to build ladders out of darkness and despair into the light of hopefulness.

So, yes, there has been quite a bit of letting go. And, on the day before I left my home, there was a chasm of aching that felt as if it would swallow me up. And yet, on the other side of that gape has come the softest of landings, the succour of human connection, the suppleness of which transcends all things material, and the luminosity of which is lighting my new path as I walk it.