Pondering: on being wholly yourself.
How my noticing of nature is part of being wholly myself, and how when I'm in creative flow and not doing it for anyone else, I'm being wholly myself.
Missed my exploration from last week? I shared my second post in the ‘behind the scenes’ series:
What would it take for you to know the freedom of belonging wholly to yourself? (A prompt from Jeanette LeBlanc).
Today I connect nature, my writing and being wholly myself, because of someone’s post I read, which I will share with you in a moment.
You see the thing is, I can look so closely into nature: recently at the way the raindrops hung like perfect crystal balls in a row off the casuarina fronds, line after line. When I looked closely within each one there was a mini reflection, refracted, of the world around me - road, sidewalk, tree and then me and Millie.
Often when I notice nature, as in fully note it, I breathe it deep into my heart, into my cells, and what’s left is a tingling, an aliveness. I have no words for it, and so I haven’t been writing about her much.
In those moments, no matter if it’s the side of the road, out of a friend’s apartment door or while standing with my face in the striated green leaves of a plum tree, just for a moment’s respite from this crazy world, it’s not so much the detail that hits me. It’s the aliveness. The shining and the endless sharing of this beauty with the world, regardless of who is there to look, who is looking and who isn’t.
She simply shines. The bright vibrant red of the Pohutukawa flowers, only ever in December in New Zealand. With their knobbly grey bark, grey-green leaves, and silvery tips when in bud, they line the highways, the newer ones anyway. They cluster in groups along the coastlines here.
When I see those deep red flowers, essentially a tiny cup filled with nectar that the bees love, and many red stamens stretching from the centre, like a pompom almost, I think of my first summer in New Zealand. Sweet sixteen, on the cusp of seventeen and my last year at school. It was a summer of new experiences. New places. Walking on white sandy beaches, coming across a carpet of red mixing with the white under the Pohutukawa trees. I’d stop and scoop a pile, letting the red and white drift through my fingers back onto the sand. Not just one white sandy beach, one after another after another. And the blue water inviting me in, but still cold at this time of year.
When I dive into the deep presence of the magic nature is offering me, I notice the smallest details, and I also notice the way I breathe deeper into my lungs. My breath suddenly goes all the way down to the bottom lobes and I feel a resting into my feet if I’m standing. I notice how I am aware of my heart space and draw the sites deep into my chest to remind my cells of the beauty at our fingertips.
I’m in awe. I’m in a deep bath of gratitude and so to name what I’m seeing sometimes escapes me. But maybe if I linger a little longer and imagine I’m describing it to someone who has never seen what I’m seeing, I will absorb a different magic yet again. Who says that the trick in life is to see everything as though we’ve never seen it before? Because then we get to notice things each day anew, instead of going numb to everything around us, we become like a young child again!
Right now the wind is dancing in through the doorway on my left and lifting up the loose strands of hair that have escaped my high scrunched up bun. An attempt to get away without washing my hair for one more day. The wind circles around, through the kitchen and a softer edge brushes my right cheek as it goes back out the door.
I’ve just read the post: Do you guys like me? by Ali Griffin Vingiano.
It segues into this question for me today: What would it take for you to know the freedom of belonging wholly to yourself? Ali talks about the fear of posting creations, and how this led her to a realisation that the stronger the fear, the more vulnerable she was being, and the less she was writing for somebody else. At the end she writes:
I must do it for myself. For the child who first looked at a stage and thought: That is what I want to do. Not for the adult that considered, How can I make myself more likable?
This made me think about whether or not I am wholly myself when I write. Sometimes I am, and sometimes it’s more curated, and one definitely feels more alive for me…the real juicy writing.
What if I remembered that I belonged wholly unto myself? This life here is mine to live, without spending this precious energy on who thinks what of me and what I say, create, write, think. I know my little girl needed to belong, fit in and yet I have the capacity to remind myself that now I am an adult.
I’m forty this year.
I notice the crinkles around my eyes, they’re there quite often, because it’s common for me to have a slight smile on my face. I’ve laughed a lot in my life. Even through the deep, dark nights of my soul I’ve found opportunities to laugh. It’s been my medicine. Medicine in a world that has sometimes felt too jarring and discordant for me.
I even have crinkles on the bridge of my nose that I noticed the other day, and I realised they come because sometimes (well obviously quite often), when I smile and laugh it’s so big I scrunch my nose up. My whole face actually!
Anyway, back to the question, what could it look like and feel like if I belonged wholly to myself?
It could look like this very moment, where I’ve moved from the kitchen to the lawn to write. I’m in my friend’s garden, like a secret space in the middle of Auckland city. My laptop rests between buttercups, Millie enjoying the shade with me and the sound of a blackbird, perched high up in a tree that I cannot see, singing his or her song like today is the most important of all days. And isn’t it? This is our moment, our only moment right here.
The sun just brushes my bare feet and what jumps out is the nasturtiums, a burst of orange near the fence. They’ve gone wild while she’s been gone, climbing over the wooden boxes, through the blackberry, even reaching into the kawakawa bush. Their bright orange faces, flecked with red and yellow, are finding a way. Being wholly themselves.
Again, not caring who looks, who notices a bee in one of their cups or the way they shiver, so subtly when the breeze comes past them. They keep flowering, and they keep expanding, stretching into themselves.
Being wholly myself looks like a deeper connection to nature. A more personal connection with now, with this moment. A slowing down on the inside, no matter the pace on the outside. It looks like colours and sounds like laughter. It feels like possibly the million times I’ve planted my face in Millie’s scruff over her nine and a half years on this earth. My nose buried into her wavy fur, with a smell that makes me feel like I’m home. Or the thousands of kisses on her soft silky fur just between her greeny-golden eyes, the ones that see past my own eyes, past the crinkles, past the blemishes and into a part that sometimes I struggle to see for myself.
Being wholly myself looks like creating. In the kitchen, in colour, with words, in relationship, in the way I move through this world. It looks like dancing without caring and singing like no one can hear. It looks like writing as though my life depends on it and it doesn’t matter who reads it or what they think, because it’s real. It’s me. In this moment of who I am.
Belonging wholly to myself will probably have a different texture tomorrow, but today, this is how it moves through me, so this is my current truth.
How does belonging wholly to yourself look, smell, taste? What does the idea of it conjure up for you?
It would make me smile and crinkle up my face in the best possible ways if you were to share a word, a sentence or even a story :)
Much love,
Kali
Some of my faves this week:
Ali Griffin Vingiano - Do you guys like me?
Corey Smith’s trio of pieces about dancing with addiction - starting with Dancing with Demons. I’ve never read anything quite like it on addiction:
I am in awe at the depth of your self-understanding and the beautiful way you verbalise your path!
Thank you 🩵