I will go to the beach tomorrow. Whatever the weather is doing, I will walk out past the lifeboat station onto the shingle. I will clamber over groynes and try to keep my footing on the sloping banks, angled to absorb the tide and keep it from the sandy cliffs of the glacial ridge, that will be rain-washed down to the beach anyway. Whatever the weather, I will hunker down on the pebbles, say a prayer and drink a toast.
This is an old ritual, adapted to a new circumstance, that I fully anticipated becoming a permanent part of my marking the turning of the year. It feels different already. It feels as though, so soon, this may be the last time that I do this in quite this way. It feels as though the shifts I have been living with, embracing, struggling against, trying to identify and understand and choose or reject or simply accept are finally reaching the tipping point. And it is not one that I want to pull back from.
When I have the courage to be honest with myself, I don’t really want to go to the scatter site tomorrow. When I have the resilience to step into my uncertainty, I hear the message that I need to do this again this year. Something that I expected to continue for many years, already feeling like it is something that needs to be released, set free to be reworked into something else, is not something that should be simply unconsciously abandoned. I need to go to the beach. I need to sit on the stones. I need to ask the questions and listen to the answers.
I need to sit on a winter beach and listen to the sea.
I need to be open to the possibility that it is not just the sea I am listening to, not just the elements, not just my own inner self.
And I feel both the pull and the resistance. The need and the reluctance. The faith and the fear.
~ / ~
The faith and the fear is something I am feeling more generally as this year turns. A year ago, I had a plan. It was a very detailed plan: goals and targets and timings, spreadsheets and everything. It covered travel and writing and finance and walking and getting fit and learning a language and… it didn’t happen. By March it was clear so much of it wasn’t going to happen to time. By June I had abandoned it completely.
I think I did so believing that I could resurrect it when we were ‘out the other side of this thing’. Between March and May, it still felt like this thing was just a short tunnel we had to negotiate but we’d soon be out the other side. We now know differently. The tunnel is much longer than we anticipated (or hoped for) and we’re beginning to realise that when we come out the other side, the landscape will have changed dramatically.
We can choose how to react to that: with faith or fear. We can choose to believe that enough has shifted on a global scale, that the message is finally being heard, that we will be more responsible, we will do what is needed to make this a kinder, more equitable world. Or we can choose to believe that human beings have centuries of indoctrination into a system essentially based on greed and consumption and that more serious impacts and disruptions will be needed to shake us out of that. We can have faith that we will be able to look back and say this was it: this was the year that everything changed. Or we can fear that we will look back and say this could have been it: the year that everything could have changed…but didn’t. Faith or fear.
My heart says have faith. My head clings to fear. I feel them both. Perhaps these are my wolves. In the old tale, we each have two wolves inside us, constantly fighting. They are normally named Love and Hate, but they could just as easily be Trust and Anger, or any other pairing you wish to make.
The question about the wolves is which is the stronger, which one will win the internal battle?
The answer is: whichever one you feed.
My fear feasts on knowledge and logic and personal experience. My faith scavenges for innocence and trust and synchronicity and love and light. My fear is certain of its ground. My faith is unsure of its footing. Sometimes my faith says: yes, but the ground itself is shifting, so being certain is maybe not so wise. Sometimes my fear is surprised into retreating.
While the wolves fight, or dance, there is another part of me which says simply: I do not know.
Fight or dance? Indeed. We assume the wolves are fighting. What if they are not? What if they are dancing? What if both the love and the hate, the trust and the anger, the faith and the fear are very necessary? What if they can only work in tandem? What if they both need to be fed?
I do not know.
What I do know is that fear will always be fed. It does not need my help. The feast of things to be afraid of will be continually lain before us.
As this year turns therefore, I am choosing consciously to move away from the fear-fest and towards the things that will feed my faith: to continue to seek out beauty and wisdom, to warm my heart at the fire of sharing such things, to look for the smiles from strangers and friends, to help, to allow myself to be helped, to love and be loved, to be kind, to be tolerant – but not at the cost of injustice, to be generous where I can afford to be, to work, to play, to rest, to read and write and walk. I am choosing to see innocence for what it is and to treasure its place in supporting me.
I am choosing to spend more time in nature and less time in cyberspace.
I am choosing to acknowledge my gifts and step into my light.
I am choosing discipline and work and grace.
I am choosing to acknowledge my fears and know that they will eternally dance with my faith, and maybe that dance is what strengthens faith to its own resilience. I won’t starve fear into submission, but I choose to trust over anger, I choose love over hate, I choose the light and the laughter.
I choose to believe that I can become who I am meant to be.
