The Pattern Unfolding

I taught my first workshop in the summer of 1972. I was seventeen. With all the confidence of the young who do not know what they do not know (yet) I volunteered to lead a workshop training staff at the United Church camp where I was going to work for the summer. The workshop was on introducing city kids who had often never been outside the urban environment, to a natural setting.

Nature programmes in 1972 were generally about identifying and naming the various species of birds, trees, flowers etc. This did not appeal to me, and I was guessing it would not bring the children who were coming to the camp any closer to feeling connected to the earth. The camp was in southern Ontario (outside the city of Hamilton) and I was from the bush of northern Ontario. I knew that the kind of feeling I had for being at home in the wilderness was difficult to cultivate in an urban environment.

It’s not surprising, given that I was a semi-permanent fixture at the town library, that I went to books to help me figure out what I would do for the training. By some miracle, I found a book, which I remember vividly to this day- Acclimatization by Steve Van Matre. The book suggested introducing children who lived in cities to nature by having them bring all of their senses to specific experiences and relating these experiences to their home environments. So, I had first the staff and then the children, stake out one foot square areas of ground and, lying on their stomachs, watch all the life happening in that area at nose level for fifteen minutes. Then I asked them to describe it in terms of their familiar territory. They told stories of miniature parks, of worker ants that were like the commuters in the city, of a whole “city” of activity going on. We did other exercises that brought each of the five senses to experiencing the environment.

I think back on this today and I can’t help but be astonished at how so much of what I eventually trained for, did for a living and love to do (group facilitation, taking people to the wilderness, teaching mindfulness practices, helping people align with their deepest selves and the earth . . .) was there in that initial experience. It drew me like a magnet, and some part of me (that was a long way from conscious) recognized this and ran toward it.

This comes to mind now, as I start a new chapter in my life. One of the great things about being in my mid-fifties is that I have a kind of freedom I haven't had since I was a young woman. Oh, I still need to make a living, but I am not responsible for anyone else. My children are grown and I am living alone. I find myself thinking about the young woman I was at the beginning of my working life, about the dreams and passions I had then and what aspects of that younger self I may have left behind and now want to retrieve. I got married the first time when I was just twenty (what were we thinking?) so I wonder what dreams may have gotten short circuited, what aspects of self did not fit my (woefully limited) ideas of being A Wife.

I don’t have a lot of answers to these questions yet, but I am enjoying the process of exploration. There are threads that are ever-present and ones that got dropped: the desire to write novels and pursuing more academic learning and teaching come to mind as the later, and I will weave these into my life now. But the thing that is truly wonderful to see is how much of what has happened- despite the detours, distractions and unconsciousness- has held a kind of implicate order, a coherent if sometimes chaotic tapestry shot through with the brilliant colours of a few of consistent threads. I could not have seen nor orchestrated such a pattern. I was just following my nose. Even the name of the summer camp- Restall- foreshadowed my own struggle with and need for rest, my own knowing that rest is found not only in being still but in going toward what we can do and be whole-heartedly.

When you look back on your life, can you see the pattern of what has always been loved, what has always drawn you? What intuitive wisdom did your seventeen year old self have whether or not he or she could have articulated it? What have you consistently given yourself to whole-heartedly?