rhythm

My heart is pounding. My breath is short. I stumble over one more rock on the trail. Behind me I heard, ‘Polepole. Walk polepole’.

It was my first fall living in the mountains and I was climbing with a seasoned hiker. ‘Anne, only walk as fast as you can walk without loosing your breath. Walk slowly. Walk polepole’. He described this wonderful Swahili expression that teaches one to walk slowly, gently and calmly. He wanted me to learn that I was to climb the mountain at my speed. I was to walk uphill slowly and steadily. It’s not a race. There’s no competition, only self-care, acceptance, wisdom and completion.

In my early days in the village, sometimes it seemed like too much work to climb the mountain behind my home. It’s like having a Stairmaster from a gym in my backyard, only I don’t get to chose how steep it is! What he was teaching me was that I can’t adjust the steepness but I’m completely in charge of my speed.

Since those early days I’ve changed my walking pace. My heart still pounds, but I seldom lose my breath. I walk polepole (sounds like ‘pulley-pulley’). And I enjoy my walks. I have time to breath, to enjoy the trees, the creek, the birds and anything else that my senses linger on.

I know that pace of life has helped me find my way. As a Mystic in Motion, I’m susceptible to the chaos and fast pace of our world. I need help to walk slowly and calmly, not taking on more than I can manage without loosing my breath, my grounding. I think too this relates to the bigger world. We’ve just entered another season of restrictions due to COVID19. I think it’s time to remember ‘polepole’. That means it’s time to move slowly, gently and calmly through the days. Not get out of breath through an overload of news, worries or anxieties. Time to hold life lightly, move through it gently, savoring what we see, accepting that we can’t change the size of the mountain, but we can change how we walk it. Polepole. We can walk polepole.

Are you fighting the ‘size’ of anything in your life? Is there anyway you might adjust your pace to ‘polepole’?

Love and prayers

Anne

Mystic in Motion

Companion on the Way with Contemplative Fire

Contemplative Fire Canada, Founder

Society Member with Shalem Institute for Contemplative Living

Companion with The Rivendell Way

Years ago over lunch, a friend asked me to describe a core quality to my life. I told her that I dropped a drag anchor each day. I didn’t think about it. I’d never used that image before. It just came out of me. As soon as I said it, I recognized the truth in the description even though nautically it was incorrect! Large boats and ships have many kinds of anchors for different reasons. Technically a drag anchor is what happens when an anchor doesn’t hold properly. It will slow the boat down, but not keep it in one place. I responded from the desire to live more slowly, to have something in my life that would slow me down and help keep me stable in uncertain times.

Currently someone close to me wants to live on a boat. She describes building a moorage, a solid base in a harbour where she can tie her boat. It will be strong, made of concrete, and set to the bottom of the ocean. She’ll be secure whatever currents, winds or storms come. This week my spiritual director asked me to describe what I was experiencing in life and without thinking I responded that I had within me a spiritual moorage. I could feel it inside me.

Today I don’t just drop a drag anchor to slow me down, today I know my interior world secured to a spiritual moorage that is in the ocean that belongs to God, Creator of All.

I feel secure, despite the challenges and hurts that blow through my life. I feel secure, attached, embedded within God. My eyes are opening. My faith is growing deeper. I’m grateful to Contemplative Fire’s rhythm of life for it’s been the drag anchor that has brought me here. Prayer/study/action have become a normal flow in my days; a regular meditation practice, regular, intensive and specific study of the contemplative life, and an intentional compassionate practice towards myself and all others have become the path that I walk. That path is taking me deeper into the spiritual reality that surrounds us.

Are you curious spiritually or a seeker of God? Do you sample many different ideas or are you focused on going deeper spiritually? If you want to go deeper, do you have a rhythm that guides your life, a teacher who you trust? If you do – wonderful, hang in there and go deep, do the cleansing work of deep spiritual diving. If not, I encourage you to begin to ask God for one. Those are precious requests for our Loving Spirit. As they say….when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

from a Anchored Mystic in Motion

Love and Prayers

Anne

Companion on the Way with Contemplative Fire

Contemplative Fire Canada, Founder

Society Member with Shalem Institute for Contemplative Living

Companion with The Rivendell Way

Mystic in Motion

Finding a contemplative pathway through a chaotic world

Polepole

Spiritual Moorage