Medium Short: Scary box checked

A week in which I did things that scare me

I went ice-skating for the first time since… 1983? It was like being a beginner all over again, only now I am a bigger entity if I crash to the ground, and I know more about the potential impacts. Scary. I eventually got the hang of it and can’t wait to get out there again. (Photo by me; handknit, homespun leg warmers also by me.)

Welcome to the latest Medium Short, a weekly accountability practice highlighting what I am reading, writing, and doing along the unmarked trail towards #IndustrialHealing. Meanwhile, all my articles are freely available through this link.

They say we should do something that scares us every day. I checked that box and then some this week. Many moments found me on the edge of a decision wondering if I was really going to take that next step.

Reminding myself that I’ve been here before (“I don’t know how to do this…”), and that courage is always there if I open the tap and let it flow (“Carolyn and the Courageous Cushion”), I got on with things. Here’s a bit of what I read, wrote, and did this past week.

Reading: Another wise woman (+ a dash of running men)

If you’ve been with me for a while you’ll know I keep my eyes peeled and my mind open for wise women to guide me. I just finished an inspiring book by one such woman, Apela Colorado. Her collection of personal stories, Woman Between the Worlds, is rich with evidence of the interconnectedness of communities across time and place, as well as the importance of listening to our bodies and instincts.

A fragment from Chapter 17 hints at the kinds of places she leads us to.

Taking his chair, the High Sanusi drew a breath and sat in silence for a few minutes, then looked up, taking us in one at a time, and said with no preliminaries and never having heard of us before, “We used to have a Great Chief, Mawela or Maui. People say he was a god, but he was a real man. He sailed east from Libya in a great canoe, pulling islands out of the sea as he voyaged. He was a great man, but we do not know what happened to him. Do you?”

An audible collective gasp escaped our delegation. We could scarcely believe that Hawaii and South Africa shared the same oral history of Maui, demigod of initiation, each island pulled from the sea, a new consciousness.

This book is less about examining Indigenous cultures and more about bravely seeking out and drawing on all of our very real, ancient, and present interconnections. As an Oneida-Gaul…