An Invitation...

There are endless ways I could describe the internal and world-wide challenges of this last 3 years, but it wasn’t until I was introduced to Katherine May’s book, Enchantment, this month that I realized the most profound loss of all was my own enchantment.

I lost my enchantment with the world, with creativity, with words, images, and ideas.

For the first time in decades, both my passport and my writer’s journal lay dormant, while my inbox overflowed with more purchased and free content than I could hope to consume in a lifetime.

I lost my enchantment with people. Human spirit seemed irreparably wounded- or in May’s words, “though we’ve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.”

I lost my enchantment with personal growth and development. There is a bittersweet irony of living in a time when the nervous system and its epic impact on every single aspect of our individual and collective lives is being understood as never before, while it is being taxed, overwhelmed, and abused as never before. In May’s words, “For years now we’ve been running like rabbits. We glimpse a flash of white tail, read the danger signal, and run, flashing our own white tail behind us. It’s a chain reaction, a river of terror surging incoherently onwards, gathering up other wild, alert bodies who in turn signal their own danger. There is no one predator from which to escape, there are many.”

Covid-19 has driven a stake through the center of most of my husband and I’s relationships with family, friends, and the world at large. Perhaps it was giving birth a few short days before the world locked down, or perhaps it’s my “advanced maternal age”, and having waited a life time for the love of my life and a child and being unwilling to risk even one less hour with them in my lifetime if I can help it, or having multiple risk factors for negative outcomes from Covid-19, or our inability to lose sight of the endless numbers of people being forgotten and left to isolate or face unthinkable outcomes, but we continue to maintain our personal and multi-layered mitigations for C-19.

As a result of this decision, we have had to devote a significant portion of our energy and efforts toward learning how to best limit risk for our children and ourselves, while still attending school and working safely, in the absence of any real data or policies designed to increase both health- span and life-span. Enter endless amounts of content into all the screens we use to learn and stay informed - and none of it is lighthearted, it’s an unprecedented time, after all.

My 13-year-old stepson is autistic and has ADHD, and our 3-year-old son was a late talker who was diagnosed with Sensory Processing Disorder. Navigating the multiple layers of support, starting with our own understanding and mindset as parents, learning how to manage the day-to-day realities of life while providing interventions at home and advocating for services for our oldest son has summoned us to consume an inestimable amount of new knowledge and learning. Along the way we have found the most incredible virtual support from a multitude of individuals and organizations. We are eternally grateful. But again, enter endless amounts of content into all the screens we use each day (and our brains and hearts). Gratefully, we are using a play-based, relationship based approach that is aligned with seeing everyone fully and using their individual differences as strengths- but still, it’s serious learning we’ve made it our business to consume.

As an input-fanatic, or so says my Strength Finders, this whole saturation in learning new content and developing new skills to support our children and ourselves has been thrilling in some ways. All I’ve had to do to learn something (many new things actually) is open my Instagram and the amount of free content the algorithm has sent hurtling directly to my feed day in and day out is staggering. I have been highly selective about investing in the knowledge building and have mostly chosen to pay for learning within a couple of narrow bands that are most relevant to our needs as a family in the present moment.

This past weekend I realized I had almost double booked myself with virtual courses (both paid, one was a writer’s workshop and the other was more content relating to our children’s needs.) I haven’t taken any creative classes in longer than I can remember, nor have I had any dedicated time or support as a writer in longer than I can remember. I almost didn't attend as it would have meant my husband had the kids by himself for the entire day and evening. But BLESS this husband of mine who said you can’t do that. You are constantly “ON”- always consuming, learning, integrating new knowledge developing new skills. When do you get to just “BE”, to reflect, to create something with your own creativity? To be with others who are creating? Well, attending that writing experience live turned out to be incredibly cathartic for me, and I accepted the invitation of the group to “write myself alive”. Graciously, the first place that came alive for me through writing was my parenting, and it caused me to realize something critically important- particularly for parents of children with high support needs - which is that we need to CREATE as much as we need to LEARN and CONSUME the endless expertise, methodology, advocacy methods, etc. to provide the most effective support for our children.

So the words that follow have grown out of my own cathartic realization and they are, in short, an invitation to return to your heart. Yes- that heart- the one that feels like it’s been taken over by the pain and challenges of navigating a world that all too often doesn’t see and appreciate your child for who they are, that compels you to be vigilant, ready to fight for them, win for them- whatever it takes. Your heart needs you to accept the invitation to return to your longings, to your truths, to your fears, to yourself, to take some precious moments to stand on the balcony of your life- past, present, and future, and look out over it all just as it is in gratitude and awe. This is an invitation to suspend the clarion call of the ubiquitous marketing that loops on endless repeat saying something like, “without this you don’t even want to imagine what life will become if you don’t do this course, learn this skill, sell this thing, master that challenge, climb that next mountain.” This is an invitation to put yourself on center stage for a few moments and take the endless experts and the new skills, master classes, and content they have prepared with YOU in mind out into the lobby of your life. Don’t worry, there will be endless replays- remember that promise? And I’ll be right behind you with my Air Pods and notebooks in hand because I am a fangirl for growth and expanding horizons now and forevermore.

But the truth is that there aren’t endless replays of your chance to create, reflect, rejoice, marvel, celebrate, and be with others just as you are in this moment. So this is an invitation to put aside the seriousness with which we seem to approach every single facet of life and experience the gift of laughing your ass off at nothing and everything all at once. Let’s get drunk on humor and elevate our spirits without the aftertaste of an “upsell” to “unlock” the next level of our learning. Let’s get into a big circle and forget what time it is or whatever problems are knocking on our doors and help each other find ways to see the miracles hiding in plain sight of the mundane and sometimes monotonous and painful moments of our lives. Let’s throw caution to the wind and make our own damn meaning for the first time in a long time. The stories are ours for the telling, the poems are ours for the writing, the songs are ours for the singing, the films are ours for the watching, the metaphors are ours for the shaping… the jokes are ours for the telling, the dances are ours for the dancing. We are the leaders. We are the teachers. We are the students. We are the writers. We are the dancers. We are the sculptors. We are the painters. We are the lovers. We are the healers. We are the bridge between what has been and what is to be. We are inhabiting a space where content is King and Queen and our art and meaning making and our cultivation and celebration of human spirit and creativity has taken a back seat. Yes, I’m going to say it- we have ceded the enchantment of the human experience over to knowledge and never-ending growth when they both deserve to be enthroned in our hearts and lives.

I believe that re-throning enchantment in our hearts is a horizon so many of us are facing at the same time. The confluence of situations I described seem to have coalesced into some common horizons, and this gives us an opportunity to join and support each other on the journey. So if any part of this resonates with you and what you are feeling in your own heart right now, please connect with me using the form below and I will be in touch about opportunities we are developing as we speak to do traverse this horizon together. As you might expect, if you’ve read this far (thank you), I don’t have it all figured out- but if I’ve learned one thing in my life about traversing new horizons, it’s that the WHY comes way before the WHAT and the HOW… so I’m stepping fully into my faith that there are others feeling this tug on their heart as well, and we can figure it out together. There will be a structure to this invitation coming soon, but it won’t be the same content, offerings , and formats we have all grown used to (other than it will be on a virtual platform). I am excited to connect with you and hopefully support each other in rethroning enchantment in our hearts and lives.

Love,

Rebekah