Gleaning

This life is a wild ride. Everywhere I turn there is a learning. I have always thought of life as a school - that I call the ‘Earth School Collective’. It is the network of learning environments and organisations fueled by the desire to regenerate, and do the work of metamorphosis while ‘hospicing modernity’*. Actually this feels more like the Earth’s desire, and we are responding to it.

I am a member of the Earth School Collective, and so is my new school - more on this later. And I know I am a member because I can feel what is needed from me, I have all of these gifts I am here to bring, and I am giving them as part of my service. And the giving is also the learning.

My clients teach me so much about this human experience. Much of the time we enter into a synergy and new learnings follow.

I have recently been listening to my own inner guidance more - it’s as if the pressure has been turned up and it’s a power shower rather than a normal electric gizmo that does the job but does not soothe the entire being. I turn it on and wisdom gushes out all over me - actually not true - for the shower analogy ends with the pressure - I turn it on, there’s a switch which is a question - What do I need to know in this moment? And the answer comes into my being.

I have taken up the art of rest, which is very simple.

Choose a firm yet yielding surface.

Lay the body down.

Spread out the arms and the legs, support the neck and knees and any other delicate parts.

Allow gravity to pull you down.

I am actually streaming these articles from my inner guidance - can you tell? I am a living learning model of true metamorphosis which is how the earth dreams us inside out.

Come into this life if you desire the most exciting curriculum there is - life experience, and making choices. I have always known which choice to make. There was the one to study Philosophy - a subject deemed by my parents, with their Protestant work ethic, a useless pastime. There was the one to continue on the Guardian dating site (now gone) called Soulmates following a string of weird experiences, resulting in my marriage. There are countless smaller ones - like the choice to spend the whole of this strangely cool and misty day creating things, dreaming things into being that Gaia, my true Mother, is pleased by.

My first teachers were my parents, as is the case for many people. They all did their best these parents - on a sliding scale from dismal to outstanding - teachers of the origin story come with hard lessons very often. They come with ancestral trauma, and familial baggage. Mine were seduced by romantic and sexual attraction towards each other, as is the norm in this modern world, only to wake up one day and find themselves ‘changed’ - imagine my consternation when this occurred. It became a kind of choice I made in that moment of my life to keep them together so that I could continue the lessons in one house, and they managed it and for that I am so grateful to them both.

For you to feel - we have trees and rocks, as well as the shiver of recognition when the sea greets its progeny. We have other minds that whir all day long, hardly ever still. Billions of thoughts being thought, many of them worth expressing.

For you to learn - we have the delicious act of ‘gleaning things from many sources’ as my favourite primary teacher (the one that saw me) praised me for. And so taught me the word ‘gleaning’ - meaning the act of collecting things slowly and patiently (and with intent I would add), gathering them in, harvesting them in, and making something new out of them that did not exist before.

A school, a gathering, an opportunity, a poem…

Yes, this life is a wild ride of gleaning and growing. Of audacious creating , following the guidance of a life force that wills the way.

Today, the Women’s School of Metamorphosis was born.

https://gardenway.lpages.co/wsm-new

*‘Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism’ Vanessa Machado de Oliveira