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 15, 2017 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality
Every so often a window blows open in the wind and rain lands in unwelcome places – the fresh laundry pile, the pile of books beside the bed, the pot plant. We shield ourselves from rain in the construction of wood, concrete and glass over our daily lives, but sometimes a crack appears in the ceiling, our umbrellas turn inside out or we get caught by surprise.
We hustle to open our umbrellas while clambering out of cars on our way to the office or the grocery store. We try to avoid the rain, to escape the wet. Why this aversion of skin to rain? Why do we run from it?
There was no shelter on the path I walked home from school and I hated the plastic rain coats we used to wear. Hated them with a passion so during winter and spring, it was nothing to arrive home soaked to the bone. Under the trees of Great South Road I would surrender to the forgone conclusion but I didn’t mind it as much. Damp, uncomfortable wool and polyester of my school uniform clinging to my body, hair at maximum frizz and curl or relented to the weight of the water. Drenched in the rain, I’d strip off and take a warm shower.
Why is water so cleansing and good, so welcome when it flows from pipes and faucets but when water falls from the sky, raw and uncontrolled it makes our skin jump, our shoulders hunch and our faces fall inwards with new wrinkles around the nose and eyes? How can I leap into oceans, rivers and lakes and climb to waterfalls gleefully when I choose to do so but when the water chases me, pouring out of the sky, I flinch?
When I began wearing glasses, I started to flinch from the rain in ways I hadn’t before. Rain can be like tears, hard to see through. Exposes the weakness of my sight. Reveals that clothes are just fabric, susceptible to the elements as we are. I am exposed in the rain.
Is it the control I resist relinquishing? The rain falls without invitation. The intimacy of the raindrop that falls, catching on the skin of my neck, coursing a stream into places unseen? Exposing my vulnerability with the abruptness of the touch that comes without invitation? These questions lead me to ask what I must do to recapture the delight of the child that jumps in puddles.
When I was even younger, a large cyclone bore down on my city and we watched from our classrooms as great grey clouds rolled across the sun. We lost the light into greyness for a week, only knowing the dampness of our toes inside our shoes from the moment we left home. Across puddles and in those uncomfortable jackets, drips escaping down sleeves and soaking into socks we never feared the rain. Even the discomfort of the squelch… it was a joyous delight. I watched the floodwaters in the playground and at intersections on the way home like swimming lakes to be conquered. Rain was an adventure, to see what the weather might do.
One summer camp, we were flooded out by a summer storm. Buses evacuating one thousand teenagers into a local high school and I found myself forming a group of volunteers to load and unload trucks in the storm. Hair plastered against cheek, I felt brave and strong to stand in the rain so, doing what I could to help out.
What changed between then and now? Was it when I started to wear expensive shoes and carry an iPhone in my pocket or when I exchanged my polyester and cotton for finer fabrics? When did I learn to love the sound of rain on the roof and against the window pane, feeling secure and under shelter more than the cool splash of the elements and wind against my skin?
I used to be so raw and unashamed to be exposed. At least, I think that’s how it was. Maybe it’s just I’ve become used to being dry. Maybe I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be exposed to the elements. Maybe you have to? We get so used to waking up in the morning, jumping into routine and the clothes we wear, the roles we play that we need a reminder. We need to be pulled back into the elements from which we come.
We are 90 percent water, after all. Shouldn’t the rain feel like coming home? We spend so much time in our lives looking up and out to find meaning and connection that when the universe comes falling on our sacred skin, comes reaching towards us – we flinch. It’s a touch we’ve forgotten but somewhere, it feels familiar. A memory of the kids we used to be – curious, shameless and delighting in the sensation and freedom of being drenched. Fearless in our vulnerability.
This weekend I spent a lot of time in the rain and let myself relax into it. I didn’t rush out of the falling water. I stood above a waterfall in the rain and let my glasses get misty. I didn’t want to get back in the car. Watching the water cascade over the falls and touch me at the same time, I wanted to be raw and vulnerable again. I wanted to be exposed. Inside, I felt the storm was inside me and the best I could do was surrender to the storm that was falling down on me.
It was gentle. It was momentary. It was happening all around me and I simply had the invitation to be in the midst of it or to run back to shelter. I felt the raindrops that landed on my neck and the dampness of my cheek. I resisted the urge to flinch. I welcomed the rain and it felt like a caress I had been waiting for a long time.
Floodwaters will rage from time to time. Storms will come and rain will fall then sometimes not fall. It’s a rhythm and cycle of how the earth works. Despite our best intentions, our storm water systems, drainage and strong buildings – rain still falls. Sometimes it creeps in through the cracks and sometimes it will be torrent. We build and construct our plans to control the impact of the rain but we cannot make the weather. “Rain, after all, is only rain; it is not bad weather.”
“Rain, after all, is only rain; it is not bad weather. So also, pain is only pain, unless we resist it, when it becomes torment.” – The I Ching
We cry out when dry, thirsty and stricken with drought for the rain to come – when we are ready. We turn and run from floodwaters that expose our weakness and threaten our security. But I would rather be rain-soaked and taken by surprise by the proximity of God, than ever to be dry again. Let it rain.
If theology is a conversation about our ideas of God, then talking about rain is a good place to start. What if we could learn to live in rhythm with the rain? We are meant to live in communion with our environment and each other. To nurture it more than we do and in return, be nurtured by it. The rain is our life-source, after all. We could learn to live around the rain and in the rain, rather than build our palaces to hide us from it.
I have never felt so close to the Universe as under the raw sky in a canvas tent, smelling the rain and dirt as the Earth goes about the business of replenishing and withdrawing from itself. I have had moments of profound aliveness walking through the bush soaked in rain to bathe at the bottom of a waterfall; listening to the birds and forest sing with the life-giving refreshment the rain brings after the heat of a summer day.
If you watch and wait, the clouds will gather and cover the sun. The rain will fall and the earth opens, releasing her fragrance again. Green appears from the dust and the crickets, birds and trees rustle into their songs again as the light emerges from the passing storm. The earth breathes, the water cools and refreshes the land.
That’s the thing about God. Ain’t no bully, despite what some say and demonstrate. God is gracious and gentle. When we flinch, God rarely pushes. I believe it is in the nature of the Universe to be so, allowing us the wilful fortitude of closing the door on unwelcome invasion and waiting for the beauty of invitation. We, yearning for control in a world that seems spinning, so often say no. The universe gently persists and reminds us with a raindrop or two, that our vulnerability is welcome with God.
by tashmcgill | Nov 25, 2016 | Mind, Spirituality
Not done yet: but instead always onwards, upwards and downwards on the journey of life.
This is harder than it sounds. But if there is within you some ache, frustration or desire that will not rest – you are not done yet. Fight for your life, through the pain not against it.
If it hurts, if you cannot numb it with distraction then you are in the graft. The part where your existing roots are weaving with, growing into and assimilating the new, organic life ahead of you.
In a greenhouse, the master gardener painstakingly grafts one plant to another. One stem to a stronger stem, one variety to another. Shaping and bending organic matter to stronger, newer and previously unseen beauty. To do it, there must be wounds, in order to splice new life onto old.
The wounds bring new beauty eventually. Your job is to show up to the bittersweet pain every day for as long as it takes to be made new.
If it’s important, someone – you – will need to bleed for it. Whatever your life looks like. Sometimes your fight to get there will actually look like surrender. Not to futility or hopelessness, but the ache that so often accompanies Hope.
Often, we fight our greatest battles by choosing to relax and embrace the hardest moments until we learn what we need to from them. Nothing is wasted.
Do not fight the pain in your life but don’t magnify it either. Let pain do it’s work in you; a sign of life to come. A message of reminder: you are not done yet.
My dreams, desires and hopes are sometimes so large the corresponding wound feels too deep. But it only lasts a moment, like stepping with bare feet onto a gravel path. I learn to walk, limping, on paths I otherwise would not traverse. I strengthen muscles and stretch new ligaments. Pain accompanies growth.
Do not give up; dear ones. Let your courage rise and fight for your life, found on the gravelly, ascending hill paths. When shaken, find your footing again. Deflated, breathe deep into your lungs and keep walking.
Do not give up, do not fight against the pain; fight with it and through it for your life. Hold onto your graft.
Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawanui (be strong, courageous, be steadfast and willing).
In times of grafting, I often to return to texts and books that have helped me accept and journey with pain in healthy ways. They may be helpful to you.
Henri Nouwen: the Inner Voice of Love
Richard Rohr: Falling Upward
Hannah Hurnard: Hind’s Feet On High Places
by tashmcgill | Nov 1, 2016 | Culture & Ideas, Health, Mind, Spirituality
“But what if, this time?”, the question echoes in my mind.
The silence in response is the same echoing kind.
I can ask the same question in half a dozen repetitive ways. “Why not, this time, this love, this job, this circumstance?”
I’ve given up on trying to get the question right because I’ve figured out it’s the wrong question to get an answer for. I’m beginning to accept the Universe doesn’t need for me to understand why not, at least not yet. And the day may never come, as so many of us who live with unanswered questions know. If there was an answer to be understood or learned for why my ‘What-Ifs’ have not become ‘What-Is’, I would have found it by now.
I’m not mad about it, just sad about it. It’s Anticipation Sickness, the same illness the ancient prophets and poets wrote of. Hope deferred makes the heart sick but unavoidably, Hope rises and the question, this time just a whisper, echoes again.
“What if, this time?”
An Optimistic Idealist.
We are our own worst enemies at times. A consumption generation collecting toys and experiences, living in a near-constant state of ‘What-Next?’ I, a Futurist and optimistic idealist, am guilty of living always with one eye on the future. It means hope and anticipation of What-Next is constantly simmering away within me, because I wonder if each step is taking me closer to this time, being the exact time my dreams fall within my grasp.
There is a lot of terrible, unhelpful advice available on the subject of dreams.
You have to be bold and grab hold of them.
You have to be patient and let them go.
You have to make them happen for yourself.
Network with people and influencers who will help you.
You need pray harder/meditate more / visualise more.
Do everything you can do and then do more.
If it’s meant to be, it will happen.
When you stop trying, that’s when it will happen.
Just relax and let it be.
Just accept yourself / your circumstance and then you’ll find peace.
I have done all of these things – bought plane tickets and chased my dreams halfway around the world. I’ve done it over and over again. I’ve let it go and let it go again, burning candles and memorabilia. Not just one dream, but several of them. But I’m still left sitting with the question and with that unbearable feeling of Anticipation Sickness welling up within me.
What if, this time? What if I’ve finally learned the lesson that would make me ready, climbed the obstacle that kept me stuck or I’ve become good enough or strong enough or pretty enough. Maybe, finally this mysterious timing and God’s good will has finally caught up with me.
Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’
A friend said sometimes we are presented with our hope over and over again because in our despair, loss and heartbreak, we learn something we needed to know. She’s right and yes, I have learned deep and good lesson from the heartbreak of hope lost. I know there is truth in that statement but I struggle to accept it as the entire truth – because it doesn’t ring true with my experience. Sometimes all I have learned in the losing is to persevere. But how many times do you need to learn that lesson, before it turns bitter? Surely the Universe has gentler, kinder and more creative ways to teach us that destroying us over and over?
Still, we teach resilience and embrace courage to be vulnerable and to try again, despite our heart-pounding and questions. I am facing my own heart-pounding What-If questions again. Hope comes racing back to the surface and emerges in my late-night sub-conscious, as if the day-dreams weren’t unmanageable enough.
This combination of hope and anxiety can be crippling. And that’s anticipation sickness. Knowing the risk you take to hope at all, knowing what losing hope will feel like, how our way of seeing the world will be again challenged. It’s the fear and anxiety that overshadows joy. Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’
It’s anxiety in disguise, the kind only known by those who have experienced loss and disappointment. If you have lost hope and yet hoped again, you know what anticipation sickness is. You know the dread feeling of all you might lose again. So it’s hope and heartache all over again and the world clamours at us, with bad advice and little empathy.
It’s lonely, because everyday hopeful circumstances for everyone else , are not that simple or black-and-white for us.
Montaigne sings “Heartbreak / Feels like an old dream / Feels like a demon / I cannot shake him / I’m not afraid to fall / I am still standing here after all / I didn’t die / That’s my consolation prize / I am alive / That’s my consolation prize.”
At times in my life, I have found myself unable to live in my current reality because it felt hollow and empty in comparison to the dream. But the dream is just a possibility. No matter how I reach for it, I cannot touch it or make it a real thing. No matter how I have tried. In my darkest moments, life has felt like a consolation prize, a next-best-option while I wait for the real thing.
Ask A Better Question.
Replace ‘what if?’ with ‘what now?’ and you’ll find a pathway to living in What-Is, the Present.
‘Whatever you have in your hands, that’s your responsibility.’
Nothing more, nothing less. What you have in your hands is now. You cannot hold the past, you only carry the lessons with you today. You cannot hold tomorrow either. What you have is ‘now’. And that is all you need, it’s all you actually have capacity for. Just today. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s what is in your hands.
What-Is stands exacting when What-If is hard to define. My heart, sick yes, with hope deferred and endless wondering of “what if?”, is not so inclined to trust. My disappointed heart is coaxed back to trust again by the experience of the present. I fiercely drag myself back to that brightly-lit day. What now, today?
How To Move Forward
The best strategy is just a plan, with a little understanding behind it. I’ve learned a strategy for being present today while moving towards the future is to break everything down into the tiniest steps. Most dreams will take months, years, even decades to eventuate. So when living day to day, it’s easy to feel dejected and that you’re not moving forward at all. But you can take a tiny step in a day. Today, you can do one thing to move you closer to where you want to be. A piece of research, downloading an application form, reaching out to the one you’ve been waiting to hear from. Making the call you don’t want to make.
The Creative Spirit does not jest with us, not once, and understands the fragile human heart. The Universe does not crush our hopes nor tease us without mercy, nor hide themselves from us. We just go looking in the wrong place for God in the future, when God is present in the Now, in the What Is. Present is the only place to find peace in the wake of Anticipation Sickness caused by what we hope for, what we long for, what may yet be.
What-Is is I Am, I Was, is Ever Will Be
What-Is the moment and the day, present
pressing us closer to the Light revealing masterwork
still barely seen, the ripples in each day
but at a distance of some What-Was,
the vast, expansive movement of Love is bright.
What-Now becomes again joyful, no consolation prize.
by tashmcgill | Oct 18, 2016 | Speaking, Spirituality
Here’s some audio from my recent message at Edge Kingsland, in Auckland NZ on October 16th, 2016.
I’ve included some slides that I used, that may be helpful visual aids. Listen to the end and you’ll get to hear a rough snippet of a beautiful song called Come to the Water. I did double-duty on Sunday and it was beautiful to sing this after sharing my thoughts.
The Beatitudes are found in Matthew 5, where Jesus is sharing what becomes known as his Sermon on the Mount.
This beatitude stands out because of the verbs. The others talk about states of being but in this verse, it’s our action of hungering and thirsting that brings about satisfaction or fulfilment. Thinking this verse is simply about pursuing justice or righteous living is a shallow reading of the Scripture and forgets the broader context: Jesus is reframing the way the Israelites see and understand the Law as a way of living.
We are left with questions and I believe, this verse is about what we do with questions. Questions like what is it to hunger or to thirst. Most importantly, what is justice? What is the right way to live?
Why does this matter? Because we are people who were ripped from the Garden, where we used to have the freedom to ask God any question we had. The Beatitudes are a garden moment for us – momentarily we are returned to communion with God.
We began in the garden, our birth and creation story. Before our way of living in the world was defined by the morality we encountered eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our understanding of right and wrong became the system that gets in the way of our intimacy and communion with God. When we had questions, we used to ask God. Now when we have questions, we look to the Law.
As human beings we are drawn to systems. We love structure and how easy systems make it to navigate through the vast amount of data we live with in the world. So we classify and categorise. We define things as good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or not beautiful. Worthy or unworthy.
This is ok, this isn’t. You’re that kind of person, we’re this kind of church, we are those kind of people. On and on it goes. But the more the world changes the more classification is required to understand which categories fit what.
The Israelites had a way of dealing with this – they created laws around the law so there was no risking of not getting it right. But when we live in this way, it’s easy to see how quickly our categorisation gets in the way of our intimacy with God. And this is shallow living because the system of categorisation and classification is doing the work. We end up trusting our system of right and wrong instead of trusting God with the big questions we have.
And they are big questions about a world that is changing faster and more dramatically than what we can imagine. It’s no longer safe to ask some of the questions we’re facing because our system won’t cope.
As a youth worker and minister, people have frequently told me how far they feel from God. I am often asked what I think about a situation and what I think God thinks. And my response is that I have only one job: to get out of the way and gently push you back into deep waters. In deep waters, there is no constraint on the questions you might ask. You can swim deeply and learn again the ease and trust of intimacy with God. The fulfilment and satisfaction is found in being able to ask the questions.
If you find yourself holding on the answers more than embracing the questions, it’s time to turn around and head back out to deep waters.
It’s important we become people who are brave enough to ask questions and a place that is safe enough to ask questions in. We are defined by the questions we ask and the manner in which we ask them.
Have thoughts or want to talk? Reach out.
by tashmcgill | Dec 2, 2015 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality
The Advent season starts for each of us, alone. No matter that by Christmas Day, most of us will find our way to be connected with some others – family, friends or communities. But it starts with people alone.
Elizabeth, the cousin of Mary, is carrying a child in her old age while her husband is struck silent. Elizabeth is very much alone.
Mary, the teenage girl engaged to Joseph is visited by the angel Gabriel while she sleeps. She is alone, left to wonder if she is going mad and what will become of her.
Joseph is also alone when visited by the angel, who assures him he should still take Mary as his wife. Joseph had been secretly planning to break off their betrothal; in secret and alone.
Eventually Mary gives birth alone in a stable, no mention of midwives, mothers or sisters to accompany her on this journey. Mary, the mother of God spends much of the Christmas story alone, if not lonely.
Although the traditional Christmas story ends with Mary, Joseph, Jesus and a motley crew of shepherds, wise men and innkeepers gathered together in a stable; for each person the journey starts alone. Nativity scenes paint a picture of otherworldly peace and calm, but the story itself is actually full of human anguish, anxiety, fear, rejection, anger and loneliness.
It is the same for us. Whatever our thoughts or beliefs around the Christmas season or story are; we begin the season alone.
This aloneness is an extraordinary opportunity.
When we are alone, we are left with no choice but to be confronted with ourselves. Our fears, hopes. Our sense of hopelessness. Whether it’s the pressure of unreasonable expectations created by us or other; perhaps it is the secret list of disappointments, perhaps it is our aloneness that confronts us when we are alone. But the story starts in Alone.
That’s where Hope emerges from too.
Why remember Advent?
It’s healthy and good to give pause at this time of year. No matter where you are, the season is changing from hot to cold or cold to warm. Business calendars roll over and many of us find ourselves pondering family, lovers, friends and community. We ponder our sense of togetherness and our sense of aloneness. We wonder what the New Year will bring. We try and navigate a season that is increasingly complex – multiple families, multiple faiths.
The Advent season follows four themes – Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. These eternal ideas are human ideas, not restricted to religion alone. Yet, Advent seems a useful time to refocus on them. Hope emerges from our sense of frailty and our imagination. Peace is a life-long human pursuit and we are living in times of highly publicised civil wars. There is much to be said for meditating on these themes and bringing deeper meaning to our day-to-day existence.
So this week, take a moment and be alone.
What do you see in the mirror?
What are you pregnant with? What rumbles inside you and will not let you go?
What are you reaching into – what newness?
What are you afraid of? What is lonely? What is crowded? What is finished?
Advent is about expectation. The expectation of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love arriving. Interrupting, expanding and challenging the day-to-day human experience.
