The audacity to bloom

What have you sucked at lately?

I have been combing the internet for sources of insight at the confluence of wildness and spirituality. The internet is not the most relevant place to search for such things. The most relevant places to search are wild places and wild spirits, your very own and those belonging to others. But there is no shortage of wild wisdom out there—even among the ones and zeros—for those who have eyes to see. 

Along with everything else it is, the internet is an archive of story, conversation, perspective, poetry, and song all telling the tale of how a bunch of featherless bipeds made their way on the crust of this planet.

So I have been compiling sources from the archive to weave into my own contribution, the online course that I am designing, which is getting close to ready for release into the wild.

In my search I came on a conversation that adrienne maree brown had with Marcia and en Lee, the founders of Taproot Sanctuary, a permaculture community in Detroit. The conversation meanders a little too much to fit the constraint of the learning experience that I am designing, but I have gleaned some welcome wisdom from listening in. 

They spend the hour talking about the people who have shaped and inspired them, about the way that the world tilts toward change, and about how to go about getting in right relationship with change.

At one point en Lee says, “We have to skill up.” And that got me thinking about the sort of skills I spend my days trying to gain and trying to hone.

He says: “It should be a human right to be able to live in right relationship with our bioregion and with our neighbors, but we’re deprived of these skills that may have been passed down to us in the past.”

Then he says something that I found so delightful and true, as he was reflecting on the ways that we block ourselves from seeking new skills. We block ourselves with fears of failure, with imposter syndrome, with the misconception that we need to be properly enrolled on a path of expertise before we can even begin to glean and hone new skills. We block ourselves from acquiring the things we need in order to live our best lives.

To all that, en Lee said we should go ahead and give ourselves permission to suck at things on the way to getting better at them. “I can really suck at this,” he says, “But as long as I have a relationship with it I will get better and better.”

So today, rather than asking you: “What have you learned from life lately?” I am asking you this: “What have you sucked at lately, but had the courage to try nevertheless?”

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This isn’t quite the same thing, but it comes to mind just now as I squint out the window into the the sun: That the flowering trees lining the sidewalks in my Cambridge neighborhood don’t get every blossom just right, but you wouldn’t know it from across the street, looking at the way they burst with the audacity to bloom, bloom, bloom.