Notes from the Edge

 Many of regular readers here will be familiar with my monthly newsletter where I share some reflections on the month that passed, news of updates and happenings and links to resources from around the web to inspire, cajole and education us on our own path. I've recently added an audio section to the letter too, called Notes from the Edge. For for those not familiar here is a sample of this months below and you can listen back to last month's here. I am excited to see how all this evolves. It feels like a beginning.Click on the image below to have a listen and/or continue reading to the text format  Notes from the Edge// September 2017. ‘There should always be a healthy tension between the life we have settled for and the desires that still call us. In this sense, our desires are the messengers of our unlived life, call us to attention and action while we still have time here to explore fields where the treasure dwells’ - John O’Donohue I have the above quote scrawled at the beginning of my current journal. I like to inscribe the words in my own hand, hoping that the re-writing of them will endorse their memory, drawing their wisdom deeper towards where their essence can touch; which is inwards.I reread the quote aloud a few times then circled the word ‘tension’. It seemed a peculiar choice. So often we are sold the notion of ‘life balance’, and in many body practices we are instructed to ‘release the tension’, or ‘let go on the tension’. It is an instruction I have both followed, and in turn given.Writing the quote down a few weeks ago almost feels preemptive now, given the turn of events in my life. But it has certainly made me think; what is the role of tension- in our bodies, our lives and our dreams; and what is a healthy version of it.Let me explain.I’d followed the marketing book: word of mouth, testimonial, posters, newsletters, Facebook Ads, Instagram posts, linked in updates, other networks and all several times over. I was promoting a new round of Thrive School in Dublin aiming find the next cohort. It’s a powerful programme, and the content and connections among participants had been powerful too. I was looking forward to this round. But the raw truth is, not enough people applied, this thing I had poured my heart into. And so with the same heart, a little heavier, I need to cancel it.I have learned not to take it personally. It’s never personal. It’s to do with timing, and price, and offering and cultural context and where people are in their lives. All that said, it doesn’t mean it isn’t challenging, or the day I realised I needed to make the call, I didn’t shed a tear. It’s usually emotional for me- whatever I am doing, because, well, I care. I know the tears are cleansing, a way for the tension to transform. You see this was a thing that I was building.  It was going to be my core income for the coming months, and the way to channel my skills.  And the core truth of it is that, yes, sometimes it is tough.The irony is not lost on me either. Here am I running programmes called ‘Thrive’ and I am absolutely deep in the question of how. To Thrive, in some sense is an aspiration.  Thrive School is very much my own schooling too and I have much to learn.And yet, I have been here before- with other programmes, and ideas, and things I put out into the world which didn’t land the way I thought they would. And so I have learned too: it is never the end and it is never back to a blank drawing board. Looking along the trajectory of our lives the essence of our callings or what it is that drives us is usually there from early on; its just the form that changes.  Now I know the form needs changing. I don’t think this is the end of Thrive School- (I have a one day workshop coming up soon)- it’s just the model of these longer programmes needs to shift.We hear the phrases, ‘one door closes and another opens’, ‘what’s for you won’t pass you’.  Bantered around we can dismiss them for their familiarity. But Seamus Heaney knew of these things too. He wrote about them, with a twist, making me pay attention.‘Getting started, in art and in life, seems to be the essential rhythm'. He’d said the words to a group of graduating students, as commencement advice. They were words I scrawled years ago, and returned to them again and again.‘Getting started, in art and in life, seems to be the essential rhythm'.Heaney knew the path is never linear but filled with the mystic poetry of the journey; the potholes; the undulations; the points at which you glide and the point in which you ditch. The essential rhythm of art and life is punctuated with texture, if we are lucky.There seems equally to be a secret symmetry in the folding and re-folding of our lives. It is to do with this essential rhythm and this healthy tension. There is power in maintaining the quest, and there is power in letting go in order to build again. It’s between these folds that we can seek the balance. The balance may then be this bridge between where we are now and where we aim to go, holding both with a soft focus and a loose tension. Focus too hard, we squint and go off track anyway. Loose focus, and we loose traction. But find that point of balance between present and future, and our focus is both guide and companion. It’s how we stay attuned to this unlived life within us, as John O’Donohue speaks about. So with each iteration, our resilience is strengthened and, like an elastic band when pulled, it never goes back to its original shape. Even in our failings we are forever altered. It is the essential rhythm; the healthy tension.And so, my friends, while I find myself re-entering this gap of not knowing a little sooner than I hoped, I know I am working my way through this rhythm. Sometimes I jump to solution too quickly without staying in the unknown a while, to listen for what is really needed. Autumn is coming, the blackberries are ready for the picking, and there are lessons and learning to be harvested. I’m telling myself not to jump ahead too quickly. I’m telling myself to listen.So I am going to take some time to walk the shoreline, to mark this essential rhythm with my feet. Tomorrow I move into a new house, where I will be writing, and writing some more (yes, there is a new book brewing) and then to find my way into the next phase of the form, until it too will change, as surely as it will. Yes, I know I’ll start again. Just writing these words is starting again, and that, is both comfort and commencement, for his is the way of a lived life. So I lift my head, I brush off my heart, I pick up my pen, and I’ll take the next step on this camino, as always, onwards and with love,Clare x…Like this? Please share the link to my newsletter with others who may like it too! http://www.claremulvany.ie/contactme-2/