by tashmcgill | Aug 22, 2017 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality
Emotions are like the ocean and pain can be like a tsunami wave. It’s a collective bundle of grief, loss, sadness, hopelessness, frustration, gratitude. You can’t feel pain without knowing something is wrong.
But like all feelings, pain is a messenger. When it comes, I like to lean in.
Sometimes I am a witness, sometimes I am the mess. But I am in it all wholeheartedly.
I don’t want to miss a single lesson pain has to whisper to me. Sometimes learning through loss is like a woman giving birth. The more you resist, the more painful labour can be. You have to open yourself in the very places your body tries to resist to be closer to birth.
Pain is the pathway to growth because it shows us where something is wrong and gives us a chance to reset the bones. And pain is the pathway to healing too. Therefore I do not, cannot regret being wholehearted and willing to engage in the gritty and the great aspects of life.
I have an unfair advantage here – I’m wired to see this as the marrow of life, that authenticity and getting to the heart of any matter whether spiritual, intellectual or emotional will always be the place where truth empowers us to move forward. I go to the depths of the ocean all the time. It’s my playground. But don’t imagine for a minute that means pain is any less painful for me. No, it’s brutal and heart-wrenching and grinds my world to a halt.
But if you get to know me, behind the layers and the writing and really get into my soul – if I let you in, there is a gift there beyond worth. It’s taken me a long time to believe it, but I see it now more clearly. I see things all day long and connect the patterns of the universe. I understand music and magic in ways you long for in your everyday life. I’ve learned to see joy and sorrow in the same breath. I am a seer. A seer of possibilities, a seer of truth and a seer of hopefulness. That’s why I long to help others learn to see. Not necessarily what I see – the depths of the ocean is often dark, but to see in their unique way.
Many times in talking to someone, even strangers at a bar, we will end up in the depths of their dark wounds or the questions they wrestle with. I struggle with small talk, I’d rather peel back your layers and understand the real you. That means being prepared for the gritty. The bad ideas, the messiness of human living and relationships laid bare. Sometimes I am a witness, sometimes I am the mess. But I am in it all wholeheartedly.
For me, there is no other way to be. There is no deep enough until we hit the ocean floors. Me, wholly myself celebrating you, wholly yourself.
We spend so much time pretending to each other, when our healing is so often found in disclosing the vulnerabilities that allow us to see each other whole and hopeful. If we could do away with pretending, how much healing might we find in the world?
But instead, we hide our true selves so often behind our fear of being seen for our messy selves. In our hiding we hurt each other, in our hiding we resist the pain of vulnerability and miss the gift of intimacy that comes from it.
Yesterday I was given a good piece of advice, and because it’s never too soon to share what we learn, I’ll pass it on.
In the midst of the pain, don’t lose your shape. Lean into your shape, the unique vocation of who you are. Your vocation isn’t a job but your calling on the earth. Mine is to bring wisdom and beauty into the world, through my stories and my experiences. So I have to write, share, talk, speak and show you what I see in the depths of the ocean. What I’ve learned looking into the depths of a thousand pairs of eyes, all hoping to found safe and sound so they can come out from their hiding places.
So today, writer, heal thyself.
(speak to yourself firmly and kindly)
Tell the truth of what you see.
Remind yourself of the beauty in the world, the beauty in you.
Remember what you sought in your youth – wisdom, understanding and grace before vanity.
Remind yourself – your natural-born ability to emerge through pain and show beauty to others is your gift, your vocation and offering to the world.
Remind yourself that your heart is bigger than oceans and you fear no feeling.
When waves of unworthiness come, you plant your feet on ocean rocks and bathe until clean.
You rejoice in joy and see that sorrow and joy grow best together.
You are wholehearted like no other, you are a gift for those who need beauty and wisdom in the world.
by tashmcgill | Mar 27, 2017 | Culture & Ideas
My whole life, I have thrived in front of an audience. I am a communicator. I have delivered my best work in front of a microphone, in front of an audience and on the published page.
Ask me to write or speak to a room of thousands and I cannot hide the sparkle in my eye. But there is truth in what a wise person once told me – that we craft the skills to communicate well long before we have anything to say. So I spent the last twenty years learning how to say it.
And now I think I have something to say, at last. Several somethings, actually.
Early in life I was labelled a ‘bossy girl’. My mother tells the story of a family friend dragging me home from a playdate exclaiming ‘I will not be told what to do by a five year old!’.
For most of my teens and twenties, I made a reputation for myself as opinionated. I wanted to change the way people think (still do) and therefore think and live differently. The world has a way of disqualifying the young from being able to lead thought revolution. I think it has to do with the idea you have to earn your stripes and pay your dues, both of which really just mean ‘do the time’. Actually I knew who I wanted to be – a person of insight and wisdom and I was practicing my voice, learning how to say what I thought.
Experience ≠ Wisdom
Experience and the sheer passing of time may lead to observational wisdom, the accrual of shared wisdom, but wisdom and insight stands alone. I set out at a young age, inspired by the ancient thinker Solomon, to pursue wisdom. The ability to perceive and understand situations differently. Thinking differently will always lead to living differently.
Being opinionated has led me to broken-ish relationships, getting fired and lots of meetings where I was expected to apologise. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I did not.
My strength has also been one of my greatest insecurities – a fear that if I speak my mind or say the ‘wrong’ thing, I will inevitably push people away or lose those I love. It has terrible implications for my most precious interpersonal relationships when I want to be vulnerable.
But it has also led me to the greatest learning of my life and some of my very best ‘being’.
Being a person who can tell the truth in love when no one wants to hear it. One who sticks it out on the side of the miserable. The one who tackles tough subjects, suggests alternative perspectives and facilitates conversation, not just lectures. And occasionally still the one who digs her heels in to get her way. I have learned when not to say I told you so and when to say it with grace.
The toughness of it – the sheer bloody hard work of this ‘think differently’ life has taught me to be a better communicator, a better writer and a better thinker. You have to learn over and over again how to say what you think and how to think better and better.*
A good friend of mine recently offered some words of encouragement, in her blunt and direct way. “You’re a bit of a powerhouse of opinion. You have insight.”
She also reassured me that giving thoughtful opinion and insight delivered with love isn’t the same as the bossy, stroppy twenty-something girl I fear being known as.
There’s no need to worry so much about whether my opinion or insight is right or wrong, or whether it’s ready to be said. I need to trust my gut more often and listen to my body. Perhaps it is more important that I say it in such a way, my love is unmistakable regardless of whether I’m talking to my friends, my readers or my clients.
In my opinion, with love.
*I am incredibly blessed to have worked with some of the best thinkers I’ve encountered, who have taught me to refine and practice the art of thinking in a variety of contexts. I’m forever grateful and will continue to learn and practice.
by tashmcgill | Aug 18, 2016 | Bodies, Culture & Ideas
I’ll say it sometimes, dropped into the lull of a conversation about somebody’s graceful movement.
Or somebody might ask, ‘You know, what do you call it, that step?’ and I will answer without thinking, ‘that is the pas de basque’ or I will say, ‘that was a ballonné’ and keep to myself how the hands may have been more precise.
Then to quizzical and bemused faces, I will explain it quietly, ‘I was a dancer, once.‘
When I was a young girl I loved the feeling of my hip flexor stretched to pointed toe in a fluid, long movement. The smell of a new leather ballet shoe and the extension of my torso while my legs shifted into fifth position with hands at two; ready to leap into that old and elegant language of bone and body.
I craved the forward propulsion of movement that came from the pirouette and the barre exercises that dominated my classes. The discipline of dance taught me to prize technique in every aspect of my life. Everything I learn now starts the same way – the movement in completion, then breaking down the steps until I have mastered each technique before bringing it all together. Ballet taught me the strategy of moving artfully from one place to another, step by carefully selected step. Technique will take you places talent alone cannot, so now my fingers move over the keyboard as fast as my thoughts move and my knife can dance across a chopping board. In learning to dance, I learned how to learn and learned how to execute.
Then I learned at 5’2” with curved, wide hips and too busty for my height, I would never be a ballerina. So I turned my attention elsewhere, put my ballet shoes away and took two buses to music lessons instead. For a long time, if left to my own devices on an empty stage, the dance would erupt from within me, my body didn’t know I wasn’t a dancer anymore. I would shut myself in the living room at any chance, turning up the stereo to dance freely. I would commandeer the empty school assembly hall in the brief moments of early morning to practice the steps that were not yet faded from memory.
Last week, I found myself alone in the gym, looking at the open space and remembering I was a dancer, once. I did not resist the urge to cartwheel, leap, lift and spin my extended right leg into a twist and finish in a plié. No one saw or questioned, laughed or scoffed. I just danced, as I am prone to do.
As it turns out, I can still pirouette, precise and straight from east to west across the room, and land a leap with leg extended and toe arched into submission. I can still feel the fibre of muscle and definition that lies underneath the soft curves of my body that will bend when asked, into concave and convex shapes or spread into a split with ease. The difference is that now my body dances alone in the dark, unwatched.
In all my dancing, I danced alone. To dance together requires a shared language, an assented understanding between two parties. Regardless of whether you dance for an audience, if you dance with another, you must dance for them too. That is what I have wanted to learn.
The first time I was taken to the dance floor with a partner – my hips froze and my body found resolution. Resolution to not move, to not engage. I needed language that I had no words for and nothing to take the place of words. Words couldn’t tumble out of my lips to make sense of what I didn’t understand or the questions I couldn’t ask.
Alone in the room, with an empty floor and only my own rhythm to follow, I can effortlessly freestyle and push my body beyond imagined limits. I am unhindered by the thought of who is watching or with me. I can make my own steps and choose the most interesting ways to move across the floor.
When I am not alone in the room, each of my steps is a response and will be responded too. My breath must change to accommodate new rhythms. Patience and bravery is required in new ways. All of a sudden I am aware of my dance space and the space of another. My body is less willing to leap and spin so freely; for the first time I lose confidence in my technique. Technique that has never failed me before.
By now, you should know this is both a true story about dance and a metaphor. I am a paradox of confidence and innocence, sometimes imagining more quickly than I can learn and sometimes learning more than I can practice. But there are a few things I know to be true.
I am changed. Still insecure, wary of misstep, but also brave I step into rhythm; willing to try without the security of technique to guide me. I am intrepidly exploring trust that makes me brave.
In this moment of exploration and discovery, I realise how much I have missed being taught. I have missed instruction and the security of being guided to perfect technique. And my desire is perfection that bears creation, experimentation and re-creation. I want to move more than I ever have, but a new way of dancing.
These old moves have been my safety net, the trusted and known. Suddenly I am inspired to new rhythms. I want new language for my tongue to stumble over and finesse until I speak this language with ease. I find myself wanting to dance for another, to move beyond technique to intuition.
I want to practice as I have never practiced before, bending flesh to my will and making beauty from my sweat, strain and gasping breath.
A long time ago, I wrote a poem about learning to dance. I find myself here, nearly twenty years later still learning and wanting to learn.
there’s a peace coming for a time
we will listen to the air for a while
competing and combining in breath and gasp
from two sets of crimson lips
tarnished hips and bruises
from this dance you teach
teach me how to breathe
and move again
I will not run or hide
I will try a little harder
keep slightly closer,
follow you and watch myself
imitate and learn this rhythm
you already know
and i have yet to learn
but there is peace coming
neither will care who
knew what when we began
this will be our dance for a time
circling, entwined
i will learn the things you speak
and never speak
that from limb and soul
peace does grow
what is new to me
can be new again for you
i will make it so
a gift to another, my other
your gift to me new language
for one who knows a thousand words
a thousand more will rise and descend
in sweet and heavy songs
and the ghosts will go
leaving us to dance
speaking to only each other
by tashmcgill | Apr 20, 2016 | Culture & Ideas
I live according to a few basic guidelines. It’s a way of navigating through life, which is as complex as it is beautiful. More than mottos, these are principles that help guide my decision-making and my responses to what happens around me.
What’s for you will not pass you by.
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. (Henley)
There’s a lesson in everything.
There is something gold and loveable in everyone, even if you have to dig.
Actions speak louder than words, but if you speak let your words be true.
Don’t waste energy or thought on what can’t be changed.
Don’t waste energy or time on negativity.
Assume positive intent always.
Hurt and disappointment are the result of unmet expectations.
You have everything and everyone you need to solve the current problem.
Everything is working together for good.
They are a good way to live, but not perfect. Sometimes you learn a principle no longer works because you outgrew it or your circumstance changed; sometimes it ceases in relevance. Sometimes you add new ones, as you grow and face new challenges.
In 2015, I had a principle: true hair, true feelings. I’d been a redhead (again) for a year or so, but the more time wore on, the more the Ginger had a personality of her own. She helped me try a lot of new things, but I wasn’t entirely myself. I became brunette again, and concentrated on understanding what it is I really felt, really wanted, really desired. Confession: I miss the Ginger.
So here’s another confession: I didn’t just outgrow one of my biggest principles, I was dead wrong about it. There, I said it. I’ve been walking around with a false belief for almost my entire life.
You have to give people your trust first to let them prove it.
So very wrong and now you know I was, too. The map of how I got to that belief is not a story for here, but I have always thought the best way to discover if someone is trustworthy was to trust them first and see if they earn more trust. I always thought it was too much of a tough ask to earn trust from a blank canvas starting point. Call it a fatal weakness of my optimistic outlook, but I have hoped for the best in people. Hoped for the best in workmates, in friends, in people I admire and in relationships too. I was hoping they were trustworthy and hoping I wouldn’t be wrong about it.
I’m an idiot.
I have always taken a certain amount of pride in being to face any circumstance with ease. In business I’m adaptable, a fast and sure-footed decision-maker and as an empath, I can navigate the complexities of many social situations, putting people at ease with a little friendly conversation and banter. (When other people are at the center of my attention.)
I can make easy conversation with a stranger at a bar. I can walk into a variety of situations without fear. I have broken curfew in Haiti to buy rum from a gas station, the only woman within miles. I have used my kickboxing training to wrestle my way free from a late-night carpark attack. (I have the scars to prove it. Concealer is a miraculous thing, when you need it.)
But I have other scars too, ones that require a different kind of cover-up. The ones left behind from getting it wrong when it comes to trust, mistakenly vulnerable with those things I value most.
Sometimes you choose to trust someone and if they let you down, it doesn’t matter at all. There’s no high stakes and no skin in the game. Other times, you choose to trust but you’re not only trusting another person, you are also trusting yourself. Trusting your own intuition, your ability to judge the character of others but also to make your own wise choices and avoid poor assumptions. You trust yourself to hold yourself safely together while giving parts of yourself away at the same time. You have to trust yourself to be vulnerable, but to do so wisely and in safe places.
You can trust yourself until you make a mistake, until your intuition fails you. Until you realise maybe you can’t be trusted to choose wisely who to be vulnerable with. You become very afraid.
Within me the battle goes on; a child-like girl who opens her vulnerable heart to the world over and over against the terrified one who holds herself back at every turn. Most of the time, the child-like girl hopes and the fearful girl hides.
The result is I become a little bit vulnerable with everyone, but I don’t know how to move past fear of being truly vulnerable with those I know I can trust. There are, of course, exceptions – my childhood best friend, my trainer and those that have proven themselves over time.
I must choose to trust others again, but I must also learn to trust. Trust has a shape and a form, a sound and a fingerprint created over time. And this, the hardest thing to learn: trust doesn’t look like hope – hope is an altogether different thing. Hope is the belief that everything will work out in the end, but trust is the platform for vulnerability, the vital connection that helps us get there. Hope sustains us, but vulnerability strengthens us to have real connection.
I have confused hope and trust over and over again, because I am so drawn to hope. But trust is built and proven over time, earned in a series of small actions and intimacies that demonstrate what is safe and good and kind. Best summed up by Charles Feltman, who wrote The Thin Book of Trust, trust is “choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.”
Brené Brown says that without trust there can be no meaningful connection between people. And people are the most important thing in my world, connection the only thing I long for. So in learning to trust myself again, I can trust others, which leads to true vulnerability and connection. Simple!
And this, the hardest thing to learn: trust doesn’t look like hope – hope is an altogether different thing.
Trust looks like unpacking those scars and reversing them. Trust looks like paying attention to the small things, making the calls and knocking on the door. Asking the questions and answering them too. Following through on the gritty conversations, letting your actions speak louder than words, but your words also being true. Trust is not accidental or insecure. Trust is persistent and optimistic.
Do you know what hasn’t changed? I still go looking for the gold in everyone. I still tend towards trusting more than distrusting. I am still an optimistic idealist and there is a lesson in everything, even the most painful mistakes I’ve made. What’s for me will not pass me by, whether by the fates or the winds I choose to sail by. I find myself in the waiting space, because trust takes time. It will take time to trust myself again, now I realise where to begin and I will keep digging up the gold within.
Hopeful, optimistic and willing to trust beyond fear.
by tashmcgill | Mar 2, 2016 | Culture & Ideas
I am a storyteller, of sorts. I see stories in everything – as simple as a precise emotion or sense inspired by a broken fence swaying in the wind, or the exasperated look on a mother’s face leaving her child at the train station. I like to believe there is a story there and often I imagine for myself what the story might be.
I have too many storytelling tools at my disposal. I unpack the inner workings of my mind into words here on this website. I write in columns for other publishers, sometimes I write for radio and tell stories there. And then that Goliath of the modern age; the social internet. I tell stories with pictures and poetry on Instagram, on Facebook, on Twitter. In a word, I am prolific.
And I say that it is storytelling but in fact it is partially storytelling and partially just reflecting what I see and think and feel in a moment. I have never been in love but I can tell you a story about love in a few words. It’s tainted, of course, but it’s still a story about love. And maybe it’s silly but I want to be inspiring and thought-provoking. I want to be funny, oh how I love to make people laugh.
I want to be unexpected and yet reassuringly the same; at the end of the day you can find me telling stories in a whisky bar. It’s a nice piece of mythology for people to grasp hold of. I want to show what is possible in a life, in wringing the marrow out of it, not just in adventure and experience but in feeling and living and breathing these moments. All the neurons buzzing, flying through the mind and currents fizzing, firing through the body. Heady, giddy, dazzlingly alive.
From www.brainpickings.org
I publish these stories prolifically. I am writing for an audience, I am always doing this for ‘you’ and sometimes you are one thousand readers, sometimes you are just the one person I am telling a story too, although I am letting the world watch. I am doing it for myself too. I crave the expression and the art of it. Not a dozen reactions to a self-portrait, but the creating or sharing of a moment. I am a collection of light reflections from a dozen facets in a stone. I am interested in almost everything and passionate about ten things, when two would satisfy most. I have an insatiable curiosity and a need to find wonder in it all. I want magic in the world, as much as I want a pragmatic guidebook to it all.
Sometimes I Make The Magic.
I am a writer and all writers write in code. You see it there, a certain pattern to the words they choose around a subject matter; inspired by or in tribute to the conversation that started the thread of the thought. A phrase that means something more to just one reader, whether the faithful editor or family member. I use it in hashtags and captions always, a story within a story. A story for one within the crowd.
Two words that mean ‘I am thinking of you in this moment, but you are not with me and I would like it to be otherwise.’
A phrase that really means ‘I have been here before.’
And when I am sad or the darkness threatens, either brought upon me or because I have it… the words ‘on the land of birth and burial’ appear again and again. One day, when some poor editor has to work through my collection of poetry they will no doubt cross out those words more than once.
I put magic into the stories I tell, hoping someone will see. In every part of my life, I want people to speak straight and true, but when you read me, how I want for you to read between the lines. But it’s all reflection and external representation, right? What is there to read beneath the text I give you?
All along, I say to myself, that is not the best of me. The best of me is hidden away, the best of me is still a story told face to face, the whisper of my voice, the response of your eyes and hands as I unfold these stories, these observations, these questions into your hands. That is what I tell myself, that there is within me still, a deeper Magic.
I don’t mean the novel; the story of miscast lovers that is really an allegory for everything I’ve seen and learned about taking responsibility for your own life. It’s not the other novel; about what it takes to forgive beyond reason. It’s not a work, that’s hidden within me – those works are in plain sight just biding their time.
I mean, the Magic I hope is there. Some substance to me that is more than the ability to mirror the world in snapshots and morsels. Some Magic that causes people to be as curious about me as I am about them. Some Magic that is the mystery of a tree with roots deep down into the earth that reaches to the sky and somehow lives whether the river runs wide or dry.
It has occurred to me, perhaps there is no intangible root or sweet, ripened fruit. Perhaps, between the lines there is simply nothing more. I tried to put it into words, who I am, the magic I hope is within me and fell flat. I stumbled for a phrase when I should have sparkled, at last given chance to reveal myself and say here, look and see – this is my something more, this is my magic. So I have been searching for it. I have been trying to find the words I should have used and to describe to myself…what more there is beyond this story I have created. All night I have searched and I have not found it.
So, perhaps there is no magic. Maybe I have told all the stories there are to tell. Perhaps I am just a mirror, driven by curiosity and exploration. Perhaps I should stop, before I run out of interesting things to say.
But I want to believe. Don’t you want to believe, that there is always something more?
I want to show what is possible in a life, in wringing the marrow out of it, not just in adventure and experience but in feeling and living and breathing these moments. All the neurons buzzing, flying through the mind and currents fizzing, firing through the body. Heady, giddy, dazzlingly alive.
Like a Second-Hand Book
I love second-hand books, the kind that are hard to find – collections of poetry by mid-century New York writers (Frank O’Hara comes to mind) and of course, Neruda and Cummings. You can’t leave them behind. I like to pick up them up tenderly, gently coaxing the spine open and seeing where the pages fall. Where have readers before left a trail for me to follow? Those pages falling open by habit to the favourite poem, or where soft pencil scratchings have left a marker in the margins.
‘Go here, follow this path, find what I found.’
You see where the writer and the audience met and laid out their secrets to one another. In some volumes, you see the reader was obsessed with sonnets, in others you see the reader was battling sadness. You see the magic of the author and the reader.
So I wonder now, is it the same with me and with you? Can we not see our own magic unless someone shows it to us? Perhaps the magic is there, but I’m in it and surrounded by it and therefore hidden in plain sight, the ‘something more’ escapes me because the Magic isn’t crafted like a piece of poetry, it isn’t thought out to be funny or wise or kind; perhaps the Magic is just what tumbles out when I am no longer thinking about the audience at all. When I step back from the microphone instead of into it, when I stop reflecting like a mirror and have the chance to see what is reflected back to me.
Yes, that I can believe. That I can take silence in, rest and believe the Magic in me.
What is secret, what is hidden, what is yet to be revealed? Yes.. there is something there. I felt creep up on me in the quiet just then, so I am content. It is not for here. It is simply enough to tell you there is more than this.
