"...Bring your self back in again
And allow yourself to blossom
Don’t worry about time
Don’t count minutes
Orient yourself to your truest north
And proceed..."
excerpted from Poem in Defense of Geraniums by Amy Shimshon-Santo
I was fortunate enough to hear Amy Shimshon-Santo read her poem, Poem in Defnse of Geraniums last week. An excerpt is above and the full poem is posted on her blogsite [ shimshona ]. I would highly recommend that you take a moment to go there and read it. She is an amazing poet and her words touched my soul and made me ponder the question: Just what does it mean to ‘orient yourself to your truest north?’
First of all, orienting to true north implies that there is a compass involved, that it is working and that it belongs to us. There can be many ‘norths’ when the compass isn’t ours or when it is being magnetized by someone else either inside and outside of us. We can spend years thinking that we are heading due east only to end up heading south every time. As children we learn to orient to our own truest north by being allowed the space to locate ourselves in our Self rather than in our parents, our environment, our school, or our world. We need to be able to rest in our internal focus free from structured time and external demands long enough to show up on our own map. Without sounding too anachronistic, things were simpler before. There was always unstructured time in a child’s day where they could hang out with themselves and explore the far reaches of their inner worlds.
Even in normal, trauma-free childhood the tendency these days is to organize the child’s world from the moment they wake until the moment they go to sleep in alignment with some external norm, preference, goal or electronic distraction. The infant’s environment comes to bear on the newborn from the moment his skin registers temperature and eyes are forced to adjust to light. He meets his world like a car meeting a wall at 60 mph and learns quickly that adaptation is the way to survive. Protest is an option but adaptation is the path of least discomfort. Little by little the infant learns to focus externally and adjust internally to match their environment. This becomes a strategy that becomes a way of being and as an adult it is hard to even connect with our experience enough to know how we are when asked.
Orienting to YOUR truest north is not about knowing ‘who’ you are. Everyone asks that question at some point in their lives but it is a rather Alice in Wonderland question given that it is being posed to a Self that at the moment isn’t online enough to tell the asker, the self, that they don’t need to ask the question. ‘Who’ we are evolves from an experience of ‘that’ we are and to get there you need to ask yourself 3 things:
Where am I? Where are my feet, my legs, the house to my brain and my being located? Where am I in space and in time. Am I here? Am I present or am I a floating head using my eyes to try and know everything about my experience? Anxiety, insomnia, addictions, stress related digestive issues and obsessive thinking are what show up when we try to live our lives without ground, without our feet being planted and knowing where those feet are right here, right now.
How am I? How are things with me, with my body, with my mind, with my heart, with my soul? Am I recreating myself, am I resting, nourishing and caring for my Self in the ways I know, in the truest sense of ‘know’, my body-mind needs? We all know what we need. The knowledge is there, where you left it, in that inner safe that you haven’t opened in years and can’t exactly remember the combination to. You left it in your box of secret things; you left it in your 5th grade diary with ‘KEEP OUT’ written in glitter ink on the cover; you left it in the can that you filled with your special stuff and buried in the yard for safe keeping. It is not childish to have special things, or to need cookies and milk, or a hug from a soft and warm friend. It not selfish to know what we need and to give ourselves that even if it means someone else will have to wait for what they need from us. We give best from a place of fullness. When the cupboard is bare even the best Mother Hubbard can’t feed anyone else. A wonderful African American poet Nikki Giovanni said it best in her poem ‘The Women and The Men’ when she wrote, “Show me a person who is not full of themselves and I will show you a hungry person.” FEED YOURSELF FIRST!
What am I? Are you animal, vegetable or mineral? Remember that game from childhood where one person would pick an object and the others would guess what it was by asking about its qualities like animal, vegetable or mineral? You are your own object in that you have mass, exist in space and time and have certain defining qualities. That said, these qualities change and are subject to the experience of our Self meeting our worlds on a moment to moment basis. To know your truest north you need to know what you are. The belly of the lion is hungry for the hunt and for fresh meat and the feeling of satiety after gorging. The belly of the humming bird is sated by a few drops of the sweetest nectar and rarely lingers long at a feast. You are animal, that is a given but what animal on any given day and in any given moment is not. Ask yourself today ‘what am I today?’ Do my muscles need to move, do they feel restless and longing for a good chase? Am I feeling feline and languid and would be fed by a good stretch and a nap? Are you feeling your fins and longing for fluidity of movement and to be buoyed by the water of your world? Care isn’t care unless it meets the need. Tomatoes are all full and juicy but hate to have their feet wet. Know the plant that you are in this moment and water yourself appropriately!
