by tashmcgill | Apr 7, 2016 | Culture & Ideas
I’m trying to make space in my life right now – space to have moments with people and in places, to have moments at home, because space demands to be filled. And I’ve learned where there is space demanding to be filled, something will come along to fill it. Space is what allows us to be open and to encounter the new in the everyday.
People. Ideas. Thoughts. Perceptions and patterns. Stories. Characters. Relationship and connection.
And this is why I always find new ideas or new perspectives while travelling. I’m open because travelling strips away the responsibility and burdens of everyday life, creating vast openness. I don’t have to decide anything but what to watch or when to sleep or where to explore in my rental car. The same principle works in retreating: an escape from the noise and clutter. A filtering and rebirth into wide open spaces.
It is universal; the artist will tell you without space, creativity cannot happen. And by creativity, I don’t mean the abstract state or the manner of being – I mean the gritty, raw practice of making. Making of words and songs, poems, ideas, new intentions, new ways of thinking and seeing the world. All of that is the product of making.
When I travel, the space clears for me. I am one of those clichéd writers that can produce great work on a plane or a train. I think and then I write, and thinking happens well in those metal tubes. I dictate story lines and sing melody lines into my phone, saving every drop of making that is in me. I have a habit of falling in love with fascinating ideas (and occasionally people) right before I travel anywhere. There’s something about leaving a place that makes me want to hold on to it, even if my return is imminent. A fragment of home that I can carry with me. What I’ve learned is that every journey leaves a mark on me this way, it carries its own theme and everything I see or touch or taste while I am travelling carries that mark on it.
So space happens in the movement, in the between, in the transitions between train stations on the way, on highways or in airport lounges. It is peace, to a busy mind. I retreat inward and while my smiles remain gracious, my words become few. The interior dialogue between alter-egos dominates all and ideas pour forth. Space happens on the long, twisting back roads of a foreign land and in days spent in silence because you do not have the language of the place.
Space, because the clutter of what you are used to seeing is stripped away. Your mind can wander freely and your eyes see things – new.
For example, there is a man in a well-cut suit drinking coffee at the cheap café in the center court of the transit lounge. He has status privileges but he hasn’t taken advantage of them. I can tell why. He has the look of a man who is thinking of home, his eyes fastened on the handbag store across the hall. He is thinking about how his wife, whose blue eyes look particularly weary and love-worn lately, might like the one in peach. It’s a practical but fashionable design and it would go with the dress she was wearing the last time he was home; which might have been last week or maybe last month. Maybe it was the second to last time he was home.
Either way, I wish I could tell him, yes – she would love the handbag but he should just send her a letter. A letter to tell her he is sitting in an airport on his way home and he is not thinking about how the meeting went or whether he thinks Rob will close the deal. No, he is simply thinking of her and whether he has done enough to keep her love this month, because he worries so that his absence is too much and too often. He fears becoming one of those men whose love fades away before his eyes because of inattention. He could simply write that and send it to her. Sign it ‘much love from Changi Airport, Singapore.’ And he could do it from the next airport too.
‘Dear Grace, I am thinking of you and that orange dress you were wearing. I like how you wear that dress and I am coming home soon. Please be there, because you are home to me. I am doing my best and I think you are doing yours; let’s carry on.’
There’s a story in that and some truth about how we relate to one another, how we long for one another. How we try and how we fear failure even in the midst of circumstances that should provide us with security and hope.
Or the young man in well-worn denim and faded t-shirt but brand new shoes. Shoes so pristine they must still be giving him blisters. He looks nervously at his travel wallet for the third time, lifting his phone to the horizon a couple of times and checking his watch. He is all coiled energy, anticipation and anxiety. His eyes are unable to stay in one place too long because his thoughts are stretched between here and there, wherever he’s headed to. His carry-on looks uncomfortably full and he has not one, but two hoodies wrapped around his waist. Ah, I see it now. He is travelling from home for the first time and doesn’t intend to return home anytime soon. He’s not just travelling, he’s planning on landing somewhere for a while. These shoes were one last splurge before he has to face the challenge of finding a job or making new friends and becoming accustomed to life away. Sure as the sun rising, he’s wondering if it’s too soon to let his parents know he’s made it this far.
The man sitting in the café, thinking about his wife.
The young man moving to a new country, alone for the first time.
The girl travelling to her sister’s wedding, feeling alone.
The child gazing out the airport window, beginning the first inkling of a dream to be a pilot.
The woman who hosts travellers every day, but has never left her island home.
Without distraction, the mind falls to thought more intentionally than you realise. If you pay attention, it is a wonderful way to discover what matters to you. First your happy thoughts will come to you, followed by your fears and then whatever is making you hopeful. Once you have worked through all of those things, then you might discover what sadness you are carrying. Go even further and you will find yourself at the deep, deep happiness, where you are completely yourself.
I discover myself, at the end of the silent-not silence and the travelling spaces; still myself. A storyteller. A poetry-lover, wanderer and mystical romantic. A hopeful idealist, pragmatic optimist. I am home; in my skin and my places. I have space now; I have made space for the new and whatever stories that will give me to tell. You live with yourself at the end of the day, no matter where you are. So be brave enough to be yourself – complex, simple, passionate, chilled out … Whoever you are, be unapologetically yourself. Be yourself as a friend, yourself as a lover. Be a fighter for that which you care about. Be a giver of whatever you have. Be you. Please. The world is better that way.
I have travelled all the way to here – home where I began, to begin again. Life is after all, beginning after beginning overlapping and colliding with each other.
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.
by tashmcgill | Dec 16, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality, Strategy
I watched a crane put together a 10-metre tall Christmas Tree in the city a week or so ago. Piece by piece it was lifted into place while a group of 5 or 6 workmen in high visibility vests perfected the placement of shiny glass baubles. What a sight.
Bright neon vests screaming ‘pay attention’ to what is going on here, while traffic trundled past below and pedestrians marched quickly, bracing against the wind.
That’s the Advent season these days. A race against the clock, constructed by the most unlikely people while everyone else races around completing their business. But Advent, deconstructed or otherwise, still matters regardless of your religious beliefs. It screams out, ‘Notice me – I have something to remind you of.’
Advent is a story about leaning in, expecting and waiting. It’s a story about how we hope for better days, the kind of story our humanity needs to hear at least once a year.
You see, I’m beginning to think that a dream alone is not enough to keep us going. In fact, I have been convinced that a dream isn’t powerful at all. The only power a dream has is the focus and motivation it gives you to take the steps required to achieve it.
If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, save money, shake a habit or create a new one – then you’ve tasted a tiny piece of what it’s like. The dream requires lots of action, but they are mostly very human actions. They are based in the natural world.
I’ve become more convinced that dreams need action and longing. Longing and desire are what keeps a dream alive, when hope seems lost. Hope is a supernatural kind of thing. Action comes from within us, but hope is something external and internal that we hold on to. Longing taps into the spiritual within us and dreams need both. Without longing, the dream can become dry and our motivation can ebb away. We lose both our internal and external power.
I’ve got a dream that feels out of reach and almost impossible to realise. So over the last few years, I’ve stopped praying for it, hoping for it and believing in it. I’ve stopped letting the longing for it dwell anywhere but in my deepest secret heart. Slowly, I’ve been starving my dream so that it’s easier to live in the Not-Yet reality, but it’s having an impact on what actions I’m prepared to take to achieve the dream. I’ve leaned back out of my dream, I’ve stopped hoping and expecting.
I’ve got to long for it again, letting the longing bubble up into my conversations with others. I can’t hide it away and pretend like it has no hold on me. I’ve got to seek it, praying and asking others to believe alongside me is crucial to help me lean in and get stronger in pursuit of it. Sharing my longing so that the dream stays strong and alive within me is necessary.
Advent is a season of expectancy and waiting. We eagerly await holidays, Christmas parties, gift-giving, time with family and friends. We await the New Year with expectation of what will come and what we have the chance to leave behind. And in the ancient story the Advent comes from, there’s an extraordinary example of what it means to lean into a dream – something so out of the ordinary and hard to understand that Mary’s only option is to lean forward and say, ‘Ok, let it be with me as you have said’.
Regardless of whether you believe the story to be myth or truth, this story has had a remarkable impact on our human history. Nobody questions the courage of a young teenage Jewish girl under Roman rule to lean in and say ‘Ok, I’m in it for the ride’.
Look, sometimes I feel afraid to share that longing and pursue my dreams because I’m scared that I’m asking for the wrong things. But there is no Plan B – so by sharing my longing and seeking ways for my dream to become reality, I am inspired to steps I should be taking along the way or to realign my heart to alternate pathways. At the very least, by praying and meditating more regularly on my dreams – I am comforted in the Not-Yet season.
Pursuing a dream out of nothing but our own strength is sure to wear you down. No matter the dream, we are spiritual beings and we need to integrate that into every part of our lives. So a dream by itself is not powerful and human actions alone are also not enough. Deep resonant dream-pursuing requires our whole self… spirit, mind and body.
I’m re-aligning my dream-chasing muscles with longing, expectation and leaning in to hope. What are you dreaming for? How are you leaning into it? There are 15 days left until the New Year begins. What will you enter it dreaming of and longing for?
This post was originally written for World Vision USA and adapted here for tashmcgill.com.
by tashmcgill | May 27, 2014 | Culture & Ideas
Sometime last week, I heard a dollar coin hit the hardwood floor. Later I stood on it so picked it up and put it on the dresser. Then I swept up a pile of junk mail and threw it away. I heard that dollar clink into the trash can.
I thought to myself.. “Oh, it’s just a dollar, not such a big deal.”
Was that dollar worth getting into the bin? The value of a dollar changes depending on how many you have right, and I can earn one pretty quickly.
But it’s nagging at me that money could be becomes valuable only when you have enough of it to do something significant. Too little and it doesn’t matter? It’s a little selfish, right?
Generosity uses different language though. It redeems this idea of “more and enough” by making it communal. Giving of ourselves, sharing what we have makes many things/experiences worth more than face value.
When we share the Lent experience (or any experience of common sacrifice) it increases in value. And it’s not the scale of what we choose to sacrifice that matters – there’s no need for more or enough, because a little goes a long way.
(more…)
by tashmcgill | Apr 23, 2014 | Culture & Ideas
I’m staring at a powerline, watching a hundred birds in silhouette sit and preen, sing and patiently watch the sun go down. The scene is both hopeful and full of gravity. Hope changes as you get older. In the beginning, possibilities and opportunities seem strung out in front of us, like birds on a powerline, too many to count.
As the years pass; some birds fly away while others stick around, some we pass by and others still, seem to fade from view. But there are always birds on a wire, somewhere in front of us, keeping our eye on what’s to come. Always look up, I say – speaking to the hopeful wanderer within me.
Trouble is, the more birds that fly away, the more important the ones on the wire become. In fact, those little birds start to carry a mighty weight. The weight of expectation, anticipation and trepidation. Even now, looking out my window, I can see the powerlines starting to sag under the pressure. Who ever guessed that hope could be so heavy?
The burden of my hope, once spread on the shoulders of a hundred sparrows, cripples the few now left to carry them.
The longer we live seeking out the opportunities that will fulfill our hopes, the more important each one becomes on the journey of contentment. Being hopeful isn’t just about blind belief – hope is stirred within us once there is a possibility in sight, once there’s a bird on the wire.
Hope isn’t always what you need though. Sometimes hope is a red herring and a distraction. Hope spends all it’s time asking for you to cast your eyes up, to watch and wait, expecting and looking for something to pass into the shape of your dreams on the horizon.
I’ve watched a few birds fly off recently – projects that didn’t work out the way I dreamed, relationships that haven’t turned out to be smooth sailing, things that used to excite me that just don’t have the same energy to them anymore.
Long hoped for places of belonging have become reminders of my alienation, my distinctness and, at times, my isolation. Hope doesn’t have much for me right now – but being grounded does.
Being grounded and looking at the world through eye-level for a while, might just save me.
Be careful where you promote hopefulness as a cure-all to the disease of loneliness and sorrow, to the mother recently miscarried or the lover recently betrayed. Some birds need to fall before they can learn to fly. Carrying on is what we need to learn.
Carrying on for a moment can be enough. One foot after the other on the ground. Taking our eyes off those little birds and grasping what’s in our hands. Right now, in the present.
You can cast your eyes up to the sky some other day, but first maybe you need not to drown in the longing or the waiting. There is a time to mourn and a time to dance. When you’re drowning, it’s not the time to be distracted by thoughts of the birds overhead. It’s time to swim to the other side.
It is universal; the artist will tell you without space, creativity cannot happen. And by creativity, I don’t mean the abstract state or the manner of being – I mean the gritty, raw practice of making. Making of words and songs, poems, ideas, new intentions, new ways of thinking and seeing the world. All of that is the product of making. 
