Misted

“It’s a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you’ve been to all the places you don’t need to be.”

Misted evenings bring me home.

Even on the most obscured days, it’s easy enough to find the bridge by the tree. Well trodden paths and clear boundaries show the way when more distant landmarks are lost in the gloom. As the tree emerges in the mist, I feel settled; the bridge will surely appear too. My place and the spaces around me are confirmed, I’m (re)located and I know the way from here.

I love this time of year.

Yesterday, for the first time in months, I noticed the cold. My skin stroked and scratched by a cooling breeze as my northerly, European sensibilities appreciated the protection and warmth in the weight of my clothes. Jacket zipped up, hands gloved: there is familiarity, security and resilience in these sensations.

As days shorten and the brilliance of summer fades so do my aspirations for the year. Released from expectation and achievement, striving and ambition, I can relax into stillness and calm. Rather than struggling towards a distant goal, a place ‘out there’ where I am not, my gaze turns inwards to the curious gift of vocation and selfhood.

Parker Palmer tells us that ‘we arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands.’ He says that this is akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage; full of hardships, darkness and peril. When we finally stumble into the light, ‘it is tempting to tell others that our hope never flagged, to deny those long nights we spent cowering in fear.’

As I stand on the bridge, between worlds, entranced by the gently moving mists, I realise that the landmarks I need are no longer externalised but held within my own sense of place and connection. But this never feels easy; the possibility of disorientation is always present, the breeze can feel pervasive and exhausting, the mist might gather and darkness always falls.

But as we each walk towards places where we deeply know we need to be, finding community in the mists, we will make the paths and find the bridges.

Notes:

I recall meeting Chellie Spiller, the Māori scholar and leader, when she visited us at Global Generation. In the book, Wayfinding Leadership, Chellie and her co-authors, Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr and John Panoho, note that, ‘A wayfinder leader is motivated by curiosity and steeped in wonder. Wayfinder leaders look to develop everyone’s potential and have an abiding belief that ‘we are in the waka (canoe) together’.

It’s not the first time the I’ve referenced Parker J. Palmer’s extraordinary ‘Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation’. It’s a book that never rests on the shelf for very long.

Finally, I’ve just received a copy of Sophie Howarth’s latest book, ‘The Mindful Photographer.’ I’ve always been somewhat sceptical of the over-use of mindfulness as a panacea to almost every ill, but Sophie’s book is a beautiful, well-researched resource for the creative practitioner.