The weight of inspiration (for an Ennea 7)
Thomas King reminds us that no-one actually wants to hear about your easy-breezy travel story in his novel Indians on Vacation. The ones that go like this: oh yeah, weather was hot, everyone got along, got all bronzed with new freckles, thighs are stronger than ever from those Andean climbs, and yeah no bed bugs or violent road protests! No. We prefer an edgier version. The stories about street food poisoning, scorpions in the shower or how an elder woman screamed “whore”! at you on the village bus.
While I could flood you with those details- I’ll tell you straight up that unplugging from work this summer was hard. I was genuinely worried. Running my own business means I need to actively tend the souls and teams I’m guiding/coaching and generating future opportunities. Leaving everything fallow brought up concerns how my business would look in the fall. I gave myself a second pep talk: just allow yourself to write when you feel inspired! The logic continued: then your writing will inspire new ideas and offerings. Given I was backpacking in South America, I assumed that I’d be inspired a lot. But honestly, I wasn’t.
So what happens when a plan to “just be” doesn’t inspire anything at all?
Forget the travel research, set tours or that list of recommended sites crumpled in my back pocket. My plan was to just ‘be’. I wanted to weave through villages like a motorcycle, taking in spontaneous conversation, scents and rituals that were far from mine. I believed this ‘way’ would bring genuine connection. I thought I’d feel open-hearted. But for many weeks, I felt anything but.
The word that comes to me as I describe my inner experience is “hovering”. Like a detached way of being that left me confused. I was happy-ish. There-ish. I was enjoying myself but also felt a mix of dissatisfaction and guilt. Was it my privilege? Transactional tourist encounters? Traveling too fast? Trying to fit into the 20-something hostel vibe? Fear that my kids will get robbed? All partially true.
But there was something else.
An overwhelm of fear
A couple weeks into our trip, I was in a small boat in a big ocean swell, ’bout 6-8 feet.
Big for a land creature like me. ‘Fun’ for the amphibious. In the middle of a 2 hour rough ride, where swells swallow air and birds and land without consent, I was super nervous. I kept imagining this is how it ends. Us being sucked off the back of the boat in the wildest ocean I’d seen in a long time. The person closest to me was a Jamaican traveler who watched me clutch the metal frame of the boat. He exclaimed generously, “you’re gonna rip that in two!”
“I’m a land creature”, I responded. “Not weird if I suddenly hold onto you?”
He laughed like it was nothing. Like he’d body surf the angry water if given the chance. We Jamaicans, we breathe underwater!
I looked at him, relieved that his knee was within reach. Glad for the amphibious among us as I counted the seconds for the scruffy shoreline to reappear behind the wave.
The swell of my contradictions
Swell.
Both a noun and verb. The erotic abandonment of linearity. How an ocean makes love to salt air. The movement of fear in my chest when I realize there’s no solid footing. Officially swell means, “to expand gradually beyond an original limit.” But sometimes there’s nothing gradual at all because you can’t see the swell coming. At one moment you’re laughing because of the unpredictable ride. The next you might have to swim for your life.
Swell.
The magnetic breath of water under tidal moons. Erratic and anticipated-just like every contradiction I hold.
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Contradictions- do they make for good stories? Can they compete with inspired romanticism?
In the midst of all my “being-ness”- I didn’t find inspiration, but slowly encountered the growth in my willingness to feel the “other half” of the emotional spectrum I like to ignore: shame, guilt, detachment, grief, confusion… Often coming to life through a continual flow of human contradiction. The strange sensation of “hovering” was my first. It beckoned me to become intimate with an experience I wasn’t anticipating nor wanted to feel. How can you feel “blah” on a mind-blowing trip with your family?!
Contradiction: a northern gal south of the Equator. A land creature in the middle of her own swell.
Instead of reading on long bus rides I watched myself spill open- contradictions flooding. I said I wouldn’t make the trip too long and extended it by a month. I’d commit to listen to my kids and ignore them. I was totally self-conscious of my privilege and completely grateful for the power of the Canadian dollar. I felt profound climate grief and spewed tons of CO2 into the air. Fiercely protected my heart and turned strangers into friends.
Befriending our inconsistencies- as a source of aliveness
Both erratic and gradual, I witnessed my human inconsistencies breaching over and over. My disembodied “hovering” becoming more like a sudden splash. A sign that something was alive in the deep. A feeling, an experience that wanted to become known. Perhaps the monstrous was at work (to quote Bayo Akómoláfé). A sea creature large enough to disrupt my modern habit of assuming inspiration=worth, including on precious sabbaticals. My uncomfortable departure from territorialized positivity.
Sounds like fun eh? Highly recommend. Though, not sure this was the travel story you were hoping for.
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The gift of my time in the southern hemisphere was to swell. To expand and include what I wasn’t willing to feel. To pay closer attention to what haunts me. To the feelings that disturb. To become re-acquainted with the endless waves of my own contradictions. I wish I had known this earlier in life. That someone would have told me that to courageously lead or create asks us to embrace what’s most true, not what’s most perfect.
So however this letter finds you, may you be re-membered to your turbulence and depth. To what’s true and simultaneously imperfect. Your lies and generous truths. The choppy surface and profound silence. Your mistakes and sincere effort. Your screams and broken prayers.
All of it, all of it is evidence that you’re willing to rough the swell of being alive.
