was reflecting today that maybe its a general law of nature that personal fulfillment and growth can only be hatched by leaning _into_ our dysfunctions instead of pulling back from them, and that the wild knowledge of our soft animal bodies knows more than any waking approach to the problems of earth.
example... i opened a restaurant once because i wanted to go deeper into my difficulties with food, to work daily with my weakest inner link, forge a new skill out of years of apathy and neglect of the 'problem', and in so doing liberate myself from the fate of an earlier imprint. some people get insight and relief from psychotherapeutic chat, i like to work with my wounds until they become civilized, the task of tasks who's work is never really quite finished... :)
point is, when it emerged i had the gall to play cook without ever having been one before, i developed an instant bad reputation. i was accused of making gastronomy a kind of monkey business, and worse, that i was a thief, for where else could my ideas come from, thin air? and though these lies were forced into retraction a few years later, the rumours persisted and touched my life for the next nine years in ways that would test a saint. and while i understand completely why it would seem more plausible to think i stole my vision from a real chef than to consider the almost limitless potential of the human being, i wonder if we could be more brave in imagining what we're capable of.
the inconvenient truth was that my ideas and aptitude for a job i shouldn't be able to do _did_ come out of thin air. all ideas and aptitudes do. if you shock someone with a new set of conditions, like a tea bag in hot water, something unexpressed under normal conditions rises to the occasion. running on wild knowledge is not the same kind of technology as a classical training, it serves a different master, true. but we've become so besotted by convention we've forgotten how to turn on the tap of our inner university and its this disconnect that allows us to live out of balance.
it seems the more i relax into the void and away from the beaten track, the more instinct directs my hand, the more complete i feel in my experiences... and while codified learning isn't an adversary it has trained us to think we have no source for independent learning and nothing to teach ourselves. in fact we seem to enjoy avoiding our full potential and collective endowments perhaps because we prefer the ideas standing in the way.... 'i couldn't do this because..... or no one's ever done that before..... i'm not qualified... etc.'
i'm reflecting just now on all the things we take as a 'given,' that make us numb to new approaches, new ways of being our doing and doing our being... and i'm wishing for a little more wild knowledge for us all on this road the magicians use, the one just outside the borders of how it should and was supposed to be.... ♥
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