Ripe Communities: Vulnerability and Patience, July 2014

Ripe Communities:  Vulnerability and Patience   July 6, 2014

Perspective & Hope.

How can I be nearly a year down the road of this particular journey?

It is easy to be impatient, to fear that I am too immersed in the details of arriving, of daily living.  Am I truly moving ahead in my life and my intentions of building rich human community, of devoting my experience, skills & voice— as wilderness guide, engineer, artist, parent, teacher, elder— towards a sweeter future?

There’s something about backpacking together with Shane that feeds my perspective and hope.  We are growing into this new life-place:  one of adult comrades with a variety of kindred interests and a deep history of knowing each other.

Shane’s current inquiry into the botany & ecology of wild places inspires conversations between us about the future of these mountain forests & humans within them.  I leap ahead— linking islands of native habitat & Shane’s idea about bringing permaculture & indigenous plants into local communities & yards— and connect all of that to my imagining of a land-based cross-generational teaching community.

Such a contrast between the more limited & “tame” forests of central North Carolina where Shane spent his elementary through early high school years, and this immense much-more-trackless land of north Idaho of his late teens and early adulthood.  

Musing about his love now of pathfinding across wild topography and his skill in using tiny twig-fires to heat food, we saw the gift of his younger years in North Carolina as a just-right and safe enough container.  That period and place— roaming those less-wild woodlands and learning basic fire skills— provided amazing freedom and stepping stones towards the future he now inhabits.

Something in all of this reminds me that it takes time for big dreams and futures to take visible shape.  Fostering underground roots that are mostly unseen and yet potent is the foundation.  Patience, persistence, holding intention:  they are roots.

(Do you see the mourning dove on her nest?)

Vulnerability seems a gift in this, too.  Often I feel my hesitation to risk; to articulate and share my deepest-held hopes and dreams.  “Someone” might laugh, or roll their eyes!  I might lose some conventional approval.

But I am NOT conventional.  And I do hold these big dreams.

Continuing to introduce myself genuinely as I am has brought in new and inspiring friends with kindred hopes, and I bet that in some years down the road, I will be able to have the perspective looking back of how these beginnings have grown into some chunk of the future I hope for. 

So I cheer myself on— and you, my friends— in holding to dreams.  May shy and wild snowshoe hares emerge to greet us as we stand, unsuspecting that some aspect of us and the way we are present has made a safe place.