On Descent and Presence

I built my practice in somewhat of a nomadic fashion. For a few reasons, I spent many years on the road across western Canada, building a reputation as a consultant for equestrian athletes and offering educational talks at agricultural events. My clinical practice was spread out over a few locations in the early days too, meaning that even when I was at home, I was nearly always in transit.

A lot has changed in the past few years. Post-pandemic life offered a different priority list, and life had shifted in a way that didn’t have me craving constant motion. Over the past couple years specifically I’ve sensed that transition feeling once again. New priorities, new interests, more stability and less inclination to seek new horizons. So much so that when opportunity does take me away from my happy little space at SNAC, I feel a little rebellious resistance to the idea.

And yet, I still follow the call. This week I am west, once again, visiting some of my old familiar haunts. Once that helped launch my career as it is today, and yet in many ways are feeling like they don’t quite fit the same way either. As I sat with the lead up to this week away, I was attuned to a very specific theme of endings and beginnings. Perhaps not so obvious as closing one door and opening another, but more-so that the doors themselves had begun to shape-shift.. and if I was to fit through them, I must also open myself to the idea of shedding some skin and growing some wings at the same time.

A few years ago, on my last trip through this neck of the woods, I remember stopping a couple hours into a four hour drive through eastern AB at a four way stop, at sunrise. Ahead of me, the sun was cresting. Behind me, it was just that liminal space before dawn. To either side there was a merging of two worlds. I found myself mesmerized in the metaphor.. a recognition of how much had changed, how much I was moving towards and how much laid behind me.

This time, near to the same four way stop - which serves as a threshold before a descent into the badlands that border AB and SK, I began to enter a spring snow-storm. The wind began to pick up, icy patches began to unfold as I carried on down the highway and finally, as I descended into the valley and came upon the HooDoos, I faced white-out conditions, 60km/hr winds and slush covered roads. Much less peaceful than the liminal space of sunrise, and yet.. full of just as many metaphors.

It was quite clear at this point that regardless of I turned back, to the old me, to the appeasements and ill-fitting circumstances, or if I carried on forwards - into the next version, the next evolution the next unfurling of my being — I would be driving through this mess. The only way out would be through it, and in order to get through it I would need to be perfectly and absolutely present.

What I found, through that precarious drive on desolate highways, was a strong feeling of acceptance and surrender. An acknowledgement of all the things that built my foundation, and a willingness to honour those things as exactly that.. as well as a strong, if sometimes feral and incoherent, knowing on how to walk myself forwards into the next. I found a safety in softening to that feral part of myself. The part that’s matured in ways I’m still understanding, because of all the things she’s moved through, fit into taken off and neatly folded or outright ripped off.

There are times in life where we find ourselves descending or arriving at a threshold completely unknowingly and often unprepared. This, for me, has not been that. Quite the opposite, actually. It’s been a time of arriving, and or knowing I am moving towards things.. prepped, ready and completely open to even the uncertainty involved.

In some ways, this version is just as disconcerting as the alternative, jarring version of chaos.

Snow-storms, like fog, have a beautifully intense way of ushering us into the immediate present moment. We can’t see too far ahead. Focus must be kept on not blowing away or losing the trail we are following. Direction ceases to matter, so don’t bother thinking about turning around or changing course. There is a point of no return, and you crossed it miles ago. Either accept the idea of hunkering down, or go onwards with appropriate caution and prayer.

When the weather turned in a way I knew I wasn’t going to get ahead of.. I invited my late grandfather in to help me with the drive. I read Perdita Finn’s Take Back the Magic a couple years ago, and her way of ancestor work really appealed to me. I’ve been dabbling with it here and there, as opportunities arise. Her invitation is this: call in the dead. Ask them to help you, assist you, guide you.. in the every day. And so, with a few key childhood memories of being in the backseat while my grandparents got us through a storm or two, I asked Grandpa Leonard to help me on my drive. Routinely, over the next few hours, I was graced with the memory and feeling of dancing with my grandfather at a wedding some time ago. As if, he was right along with me, and we were dancing through the storm together.

Through the wind and snow and building layers of ice, I began to see hawks. Now - there’s nothing necessarily serendipitous about this, this part of the country is generally full of hawks.. and yet.. to see hawks, mile after mile, soaring through the storm and hunting like it was just another Thursday.. was something quite special. They weren’t fighting the wind, nor were they concerned about the snow (in late April). They were simply using every advantage found in the present moment, dancing with the wind and hunting while the snow flew. In fact, it appeared they were playing with their circumstances.

A few nights before I flew West I had a vision of a hawk soaring above my house. As I stood looking up, it rose higher and higher - eclipsing the sun and hovering above my home. After a few moments, it dropped something from it’s mouth. In this vision I wasn’t sure what it dropped —if it was a regurgitation or an object. The action in the vision reminded me of watching sea birds picking up oysters and mussels at low tide on the Tasman coast of New Zealand, floating up to some height and dropping the shell-fish onto the rocks.. over and over again until their prize was won.

Hawks, birds of prey, hawk-eyed.. offer a message of perspective, orientation and leadership. To me, in this moment of time, that vision was a message of asking the birds-eye and releasing what was ready to be released. Perhaps even to the extent of recognizing that that release might be what could not be digested (regurgitation), or that in the release that some other prize might be gained.

My home, a metaphor perhaps in the vision for my idea of self, the parts that I rest into, my inner domains.. the hawk was gaining altitude over my life and offering an invitation to a higher vantage point to that “home”. What a representation of the threshold I’ve been approaching and am stepping over this week, in so many subtle and obvious ways. The hawk wasn’t rising into the sky to find the next direction. There was no external guide in the sky. The hawk was orientating itself.

Over months, years even, I have sensed a re-orientation taking place in my inner world - and in the past few months that has become more and more expressed in my every-day worlds. Much of the reorientations have been anchored in self-leadership. A maturation of what I’ve deferred to and where that no longer works. A nod to the ways in which the only option is to move through and forwards via self-leadership. Shedding deferral and forms of appeasement to unearth authority, both in inner worlds and outer worlds.

Funnily enough, the evolution of these things likely hasn’t transmuted into any one big, obvious “hey world, this is me now” moment. It’s simply living into the answers to questions I’ve been walking through for some time. All of a sudden, there is no wiggle room in how I navigate and contemplate. Where there was once a maybe there is now a clear yes or no. The “I can’ts” became “I won’ts”.

When I invite clients into their inner worlds to explore sensation, dreamscapes or non-linear forms of information.. what often unfolds doesn’t quite line up with expectation. That’s usually part of the point. Altered states, even the subtle versions that unfold through somatic inquiry or guided practices, allow us to become the hawk, the storm, the hoodoo huddled in the snow or the home we are rising above. We get to see past, present and future all in one moment. The metaphors that lay in the body or in a squall screaming across the land become divine messengers of that inner inkling we’ve been toying with for months, or lifetimes.

In my surrender to this storm, this brief return to a nomadic living on the precipice of new challenges and inner evolutions, I gained the perspective of presence. The future is hurtling towards us at exactly the pace it chooses, just as the past is twirling it’s way through our dreams and imagination as it pleases. In our pocket of the present moment, whether it’s a clear day where we can see for miles in any direction, or a day where we only have a few feet of visibility and gale force winds to accompany us, that’s where we find every single thing we need. It’s all right here, and it always has been.

This morning’s journalling on my trip through the storm, some dreams that followed and a morning tarot pull brought this message, I’ll leave it here for you to contemplate:

The threshold of then and now, now and next, isn’t always what you’d expect. Can you create a throne out of a humble chair, wherever you find yourself? Anywhere can be your retreat. Be in complete residence wherever you are. The throne is in your heart, and the crown is in your bones. Be the who, not just the what/how/why.