Grace

I've been kind of obsessed with the idea of grace lately. I have this very high consciousness that I am not very graceful. Not physically -- I trip, spill, break wineglasses, I'm always finding mysterious bruises on my body -- and not emotionally. I feel things strongly and I squall, I overflow my sides, I confront, I agitate. I never just quietly muse on why I'm feeling something so strongly, it bursts out in a big Ruth Fisher-type blurt, and then I get more insight into it and am able to calm down. Because of this, I've become a good repairer -- and I need to be in relationships with people who are willing to withstand the moments of agitation and then to repair.

I hate this in myself. I don't use this word lightly. I put a lot of energy into wanting to be more graceful, to have more poise, to not show reaction in every line. In some ways, I've learned this in work -- but maybe I'm just much more familiar with the things that come up in most of my work situations, can tuck them into meaningful contexts more readily. I have a fair bit of poise when I'm in front of a group, and I have a certain kind of amused self-deprecation for the moments when it's not smooth. But I've certainly been triggered a lot in the early part of this year in some work situations, some places where the detachment I usually practice has been shifted.

This all feels particularly poignant right now, because my own personal avatar of grace -- my mentor and guide, bp -- is ill. He's like a constellation of grace, a complex, familiar, trustworthy enabler of presence and poise. I was talking about this with Pamela the other day -- we talk about grace a lot, and she said something that gave me pause. She thinks that I am graceful, in that I keep "showing up" to what's there. It's an interesting reframing -- grace as presence and openness, not perfect poise. The conversation really entwined for me with the work I've been doing with the nurses in one of the toronto hospitals -- where one of the things they surfaced is that the best of nursing is "staying when you want to go."

I haven't always stayed when I wanted to go -- not even last week when I got so upset with my not-listening friends for reasons that I can't even really explain now. But it's really resonating for me as a frame, as a way to hold grace as a possibility for myself.

I was meditating on this while I was hiking yesterday. I had been warned that the trail that I was going to do might have snow on it, but I'd decided to try it anyway, to just be careful. I've hiked mountain trails that had lurking snow before, and mostly it's just wet.



Yesterday was a bit different -- it was a pretty short trail -- about 3.5 km each way, switchbacks up a short mountain -- but it started out very steep, and the snow became deep quickly. For the most part I could hover on top without sinking in, so I kept going.



I was really conscious of my thought process as I slogged along. First, the usual resentment when a trail starts so steeply -- remembering the much more gradual long entries to the Cuillin on Skye, where your body adjusts to the pack and the movement before there's real climbing. And a bit of a nagging question about whether it really was safe to hike alone in the snow, especially in grumpy bear late spring time. And then a big tension about whether turning around would be because it truly wasn't safe, and should I waste this opportunity, or was I being stupid and eastern and ignoring genuine danger, or was I being stupid and eastern to even think it was real danger, or would I be turning around just because it was unpleasant?

As I stepped into the wet snow, the phrase "staying when you want to go" clicked in for me. And I realized that it IS in the doing of the difficult that I find the grace in myself. One thing that F recognized and valued in me -- that I do things that I find hard -- and thinking about how this frame had created "affordances," to use the annoying theoretical term. That because he did witness this about me, it freed me to imagine things like moving west without a real plan, and learning to fix my bike so I can ride alone through iceland. For a few minutes, as I felt this, I experienced deep grief. Panting with the effort of moving upward through the snow, suffused with sadness about losing someone who saw this and fostered this in me. And then, for a moment, watching myself stumbling, falling, post-holing and getting wet, sliding on my butt to get my stuck leg out, I saw this as grace. This sprawling kitten-on-the-ice upward hike *was* grace, it was finding in myself the meaning and drive for it. Upward because I wanted to be above the trees, wanted to see a peak, wanted to feel the air. Upward for that moment that made the drive across the plains, the agita of leaving behind community, the misshapen fear worth it. Where I am going, the sense that there is always something more ahead.

This is another thing P and I talked about -- the mid-life waves of deflation when you think you might have had your bursts of creativity, of new love, of creating possibilities, when you worry that there might not be more. I have had a lot of... deflated anxiety about this, particularly around Romance. Thinking that it might be "too late" to co-create life with someone. Not exactly because of age, but because of an awareness of the fullness of what's been lived, and not being sure how this can mesh with someone else's fullness. The smaller pool of available people when the ones ahead are sliding into assured old age together and the ones behind are still really looking for that "this is it" relationship.

As I stumbled up the hill, I felt real exhilaration. Rhythm in the arrhythmia, trust that my feet would hold me. And, I knew the moment where I needed to turn around, an open swell with snow at least 4 feet deep, where I post-holed up to my thighs 4 steps in a row. The moment where I knew, yeah, even enthusiasm isn't going to carry me forward here, and I really could end up with a broken leg and become bear bait.

So I went down, noted what I'm sure was a bear print in the snow, skipped and tripped down the part where the snow thinned. Went up the little extra trail to the gorgeous view, where I had 15 minutes alone on a platform looking at the lake. Grace.