| The Wisdom of Mud
Ever have one of those days when your mind is muddy and you can’t “think straight?”
Sometimes I’ll chalk it up to hormones or hydration or hot dogs or…I just push through, never actually meeting my Self when she’s trying to offer me cues about my life.
There’s a wealth of wisdom buried in our mud.
Recently I was asked to create a “cultural bio” for a coaching panel I was invited to, and I noticed with chagrin a really muddy phenomenon.
I was blocked. Completely mired. I could not seem to get words on the page.
At first, I cursed the assignment, grumbling about the short deadline, but that didn’t help it get written.
Then, I cursed myself for overthinking, but smearing mud on myself just made more of a mess.
I was stuck in the muck of my confusion, flailing around and wanting to be anywhere but exactly. where. I. was.
So, instead of working on the assignment, I took to the page, as I often do, and gave myself permission to look inside. I know from vast experience that resistance always means something.
Mud has meaning.
The blank page and I had a staring contest for a good long time. Pausing to ask myself why I seemed so bogged down, I honed in on a feeling that I couldn’t identify right away. The sensation was a fluttering discomfort in my middle section. Then arose a question: What’s between me and peace?
And immediately, I saw an old companion: my privilege. Every time my pen hit the page to begin that assignment, I cringed at the privilege my life represented. Unearned privilege, that is. The kind that my whiteness and upbringing often blind me to…the whiteness of the very page that my life was written on.
Naming what was buried beneath the mud of my resistance cleared things up a bit but still wasn’t enough to propel my process. There was no peace inside me as long as my discomfort went unheeded. As I mentioned, the bio request had a tight turnaround time – 2 days! – so even though my whiteness tried to tell me that I could put it off, another aspect of my being kept my pen to the page. Something new wanted to be born from this mud.
“See! See what’s there!” it exhorted me.
I turned to a new page in my notebook and mustered the will to create a space for allowing my privilege to be laid bare. While my white body and its privilege is not new to me, my writing that day took me to new depths of my own awareness, mooring my boots in the mud ‘til the rains of truth came down.
Mud…who knew?!
With mud wisdom and daffodils,
Nancy |
