What Do We Bring (to our work)?

In the dark of the moon,

in flying snow,

in the dead of winter,

war spreading, families dying,

the world in danger,

I walk the rocky hillside,

sowing clover.

- Wendell Berry -

 

At the beginning of many of the trainings I offer, I ask some version of the question: 

What do you bring?

 

I hope to get answers like: a questioning mind; an open heart; an adventurous spirit; resilience; my yearning inner child; my questing young adult; and the like. I ask because I am interested in how we recognize ourselves as resources. Through our days and years we have gathered vast and diverse experience. All too frequently we don’t recognize the value that these experiences offer. And we forget to honour them. Yet we are resources and the best resource for our own lives.

 

The responses I get are frequently something along the lines of:

I am a teacher/parent/office worker/student, etc. You get the picture. We are used to responding with one or more of the roles that we carry in our lives rather than with the qualities of being that make each of us unique.

 

We have been trained by society, by advertising, by overloaded educators, by bosses, even by our peers to see ourselves as ‘less than’. This reality is such a loss to ourselves and to our world.

And thus the work begins….

In our work we dive deeply, exploring the many faces of our being. We summon our courage and look into the mirror that life provides and seek to see who we truly are becoming.

 

And we gather our strengths, recognizing them as assets. And we begin to trust.

 

We trust that we are enough.

We trust that we can find a pathway through the times we are living. We trust that we can because we have done so before.

 

We acknowledge that the tools we have accumulated throughout travels will be there to hold us. We can trust them because we have practiced them when we first learned them.

 

When we find that we have jumped into the deep end of the pool we know that we will swim. We know it in our bones and we know it in our hearts and we know it in every fiber of our being.