This year's Devoted and Disgruntled run by Improbable was a slightly different experience for me than last year's. Which is perfect, and exactly how it should be.
In fact, I'm getting used to being surprised, and the gorgeous thing about that is this: it means I'm letting go.
Because, you know, being a control freak is fucking exhausting. It's fucking exhausting, and it doesn't do what I had intended it to do in the first place, which was to keep me safe. It just sort of gets in the way of me, which is pointless. Expending a lot of energy getting in my own way. Nuts.
So I didn't feel like calling a session, which was lovely. Then Phelim said something about sitting in the circle feeling passionately enough about something to take responsibility for that thing and call a session on it.
And I thought, shit, responsibility, that's a fucking awful word. That's about being in control... only it's not. I realised a while ago that in order to take responsibility for my writing, I had to hand it over to a bunch of actors and let go of it.
Really, honestly hand it over instead of just, you know, letting them hold it for a minute.
I had to hand it over in order to be able to respond to it. You can't see the big picture unless you take a step back.
I love knowing that. It takes all the heat off me. I get to choose when and where and how I join in. Suddenly, taking responsibility seems like a wonderful freedom.
So we had this great session on Response Ability, and I met some amazing people who taught me amazing things, but also felt like equals. Felt like they discovered something with me, too.
One of my students wrote in her journal that she had started the unit thinking she would be dealing with another demanding teacher, and instead she found an equal. It's the best thing anyone has ever said about my teaching, and it's the first of three things that happened recently that I will never forget.
In a funny way, it meant that she is my elder. Phelim started a conversation about elders, and I sort of half joined in but felt a bit like I was intruding. I didn't know that until now. Just knew that it felt uncomfortable.
I have so longed for guidance, I think, that I've always found the notion of elders to be a bit overwhelming. Something I want but can never quite have. Maybe something I shouldn't want as much as I do.
Did.
It seems a bit different now. I think I used to feel that wanting guidance was a bad thing: I should know it all by myself already, and if I don't then I'm an idiot.
But that's not true, is it? Not anymore. Now there is Response Ability, and there is freedom of choice to join in when you want, when it's right. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have, and if I'm a person who is there, then I am the right person to be there. The reason will present itself in its own good time, because whatever time anything happens is the right time for it to happen.
Suddenly, I am wildly free, creatively free, and open space reminds me of this. Secures this in me. Grounds me and makes me safe. Makes me valuable.
I realised, as I looked around the circle in the open space, that I was privileged to be in the room with those people, and that I was one of those people and therefore privileged to have myself too.
All of these things make me equal. Make me balanced.
So now I see elders as something else. Something equal, but more. Further ahead than me, maybe, but not higher up. Wiser, but not infallible. In fact, probably wiser for their ability to fail.
Ability to Fail! Look what I just found! That sounds like a skill, doesn't it? I love that. I want to work on my ability to fail. That's brilliant. I want to expand my ability to fail, so I can learn more, so I can try more things, so I can be more willing to fall down because I've done it enough that I know it like a friend.
That's an elder: someone who has fallen and survived one more time than me.
The second thing that happened recently that I will never forget was also something written in the journal of one of my students. She wrote: "It will all be alright in the end. And if it isn't, then it isn't the end."
And the third thing that happened recently that I will never forget is my discovery of the Ability to Fail.
I knew there would be three things. There are always three things.
I just didn't know what the third one was until now.
Trusted that it would appear when it was time.
open space = life
