I've been working on a Musing on the theme of not knowing. At least in part my musing on a musing has delayed this announcement, and that's not separate from the theme. At present I am writing to you from that little island off the coast of Rhode Island where I come to work and be with friends. The wind has been blowing since Friday and the boats have been canceled while shutters bang and shop signs twist around their hinges, gutters get lifted up and set down. Here wind makes our choices and exaggerates the space where we just don't know - which in some ways makes the going about our days easier, no boats nowhere to go, and in other ways it makes it harder, no boats, nowhere to go. There is a clear force outside to reconcile. Of course, this is always true. And force outside is also inside.
It feels like I could write forever on this theme of not knowing- it's central and takes so many shapes. It has many names and many applications and I have lots of remedies and counter postures to assert myself against the wind! Again, we are not separate. And we are not going to either unearth nor are we going to bury our theme all in one sitting. But to start the conversation, to study the colors - ahh this is beautiful, this is living, this is practice, this is desire, this is friendship.
A friend recently shared with me something a friend had shared with her, it hit me like an arrow, she asked: What if the not knowing is freedom?
We were talking about preparing, all the notes and outlines and books and rehearsals that get collected when one is readying something to deliver, getting ready to share something with others. All the nervousness, all the wanting something to illuminate and be useful, and all the not knowing what it will be or what will be there when it is sent and when it arrives:
What if the not knowing is freedom?
Wait, freedom? Wait, hold on..I thought.. wait, - Do I really know what freedom is? What it looks like? What it requires?
What if this place occupied by the dizziness of not knowing is ***freedom***.
The example of preparing to teach is lovely, tender in it's reach. Not knowing can show up in other, less friendly costumes -the anxiety of needing something to be a certain way, a plan to go as planned, a person to act a certain way. We want to know the weather, the traffic patterns, the time, the schedule, the answer, the right way......that's a lot of lining up.
Yet, at the edge of all these efforts, which are really vulnerable tremblings, vibrations of hope, there is a place (it might be a precipice) where we walk out onto the field and meet, both life and death - we meet what might call Reality. Autonomous.
So what if we say, there is freedom inside not knowing. All these places where we don't know what something is or we don't know when we will get there or we don't know who we will meet or we don't know what the thing we make or say will become. We stand there/here inside the great unknown and offer it to the great unknown. Like setting the table again and again and never knowing if the guest will come, laying down the napkin, putting the spoon top.
Come explore these places where our bodies live, where we come to meet ourselves and the world in which we live, listen to what the heart wants. Maybe there is an answer, maybe not. The studio is open and the table is there, I hope to see you soon.
With big Love,
Molly