The edge

Posted On August 21, 2015

I’ve been getting back into yoga. A few weeks back I made a commitment to myself to do it every day, even if it’s for a short minute before I crawl into bed. So far I’ve only missed a couple of days, when I just had zero time to even think about it and crashed at the end of the day. Not bad! Anyway, I went to a class recently and the instructor mentioned reaching your “edge”- finding that place where you struggle a bit and can feel that limit, but you can still breathe and make the conscious decision to keep going a little farther and to let your body get stronger. It made me think of one of the concepts in permaculture that I love, also all about finding and honoring the “edge”. In an ecosystem, it’s the interface between two living systems. Imagine an old forest greeting a prairie, or the space on the shore of a body of water. These spaces are teeming with diversity and life, in a much more abundant way than the established ecosystems on either side of them. It’s like these spaces are fluid and ripe with possibility.

Anyway, I’m feeling the edge. I’m finding it in my physical practices, I feel it mentally and spiritually and just practically with shifting around this house project and everything going on day to day. I feel like I’m finding and creating edges all over the place, and while I feel alive and excited and ripe with that edgy-possibility, I am also feeling a little run-down, a little uncertain, a little vulnerable. This is all good, but also something to acknowledge and watch. I need to take care not to push beyond my capacity, but instead to hold things on that edge just long enough to grow a little more. I don’t believe your capacity for joy can expand without that stretching and balancing on the other side. I’m trying to remember that when I feel low or overwhelmed.

We decided to camp on the land finally. We bought this massive tent last year in anticipation of spending lots of time out on the land and basically living out there. However, the bug pressure and weather just weren’t really making that vision practical, and then the work site was so freaking dangerous… Anyway, it just hadn’t worked out the way we envisioned, but such is life.

The camping was super fun and the kids kept talking about what a good time they were having and how they felt closer to the house. It was special. This was extra lovely for me because they occasionally whine at me about not liking the fact that we left our old house, which was pretty great. I explain to them that we needed to sell it to make this happen, and that I understand the transition is not all they’d hoped, etc. They get it, but they do occasionally air their grievances.

Sitting all together and imagining our life out there, it was good and connective and overdue. It was really lovely and relaxing to spend our first official night out there, with many more to come. 🙂

 

Vera got this nutcracker at a neighbor’s yard sale the other day. She loves him and named him Robertson. She asked me to take a picture of him. Asa bought a lava lamp at the same sale and he’s totally enamored with it. <3

View the rest of this post in Part 2!