At 1:21am on December 1st, the Moon was new again. Yes – that’s 1:21 on 12/1. Cool the way the Universe can spell things out for us, isn’t it?
The focus for the last cycle was, fittingly, Crossroads – where I’d wondered whether to cloister myself away or venture out into the world and try to make some kind of difference; it was a search for purpose and meaning.
There are always choices at a Crossroads – you can move forward, you can move to one side or another, you can retreat and move backwards, or you can even stand still. I was watching myself move through the potential choices as I stood. I really grappled with what this focus was going to be for a long time. Several times I thought I had topics that almost resonated but were never quite right.
I began to look back over the past few months of writings – from Freedom to Mattering to Definition to Crossroads – a linear struggle to encapsulate and thereby extrapolate who I am. Each potential focus was right – but they were also both extravagant and safe. Lovely for show, but were they real? Was I letting me be me? Was I perpetuating the same dilemma?
On Monday evening I had dinner with a friend I’d met through work. Over a dinner of Thai food, they were telling me about how they had bounced from their native Sydney to Denver, then Florida, then finally Philadelphia. As I was sitting and sharing stories with someone who, on paper, I would be unlikely to ever meet – I realized that this is the nature of my life. Yes, ‘Sydney’ was a helpful trigger — but the whole evening reminded me of something I have come to believe about myself.
I often have no idea what I’m doing. A technical band adventure last week was another case in point – collaborating to do a thing and do it the “right way” even though neither of us had a preconceived idea of how to go about it. But this informed “no idea what I’m doing” leads me to want to be the kind of person who leaves the village, walks across the land, and climbs up a hill just to see what’s there and tell the village. I don’t want to go to the thing I saw – I’ll let someone else blaze the trail. But I’ll tell them where the trail should go.
So from my station at the Crossroads, I want to climb the Hills. It’s only through going up, elevating ourselves, and seeing what the landscape looks like that we can make our best, most informed, and educated suppositions about where to go next. Not standing still, but rather carefully evaluating the potential directions. From the Hills we can see both the light and shadow; we can see where we’ve been and all of the places we might go.
The companion song this cycle is an obscure one – “Follow Me into the Hills” by Kathryn Calder. There were a number of songs about Hills and climbing, but many made reference to the higher ground – and I didn’t want to wrap myself in that style of judgment. Instead, the lyric that speaks to me here is “Into the Hills, I’ve got my hands and my head full – A cautious step but I’m hopeful. I leave the station I go up into the Hills”.
Next cycle I hope to come back down from those Hills and let you know what I found!