The Yin And The Yang Of It, For The Moment

Nancy and I were talking yesterday about my experience of the changes afoot in our lives. It ocurred to me that at least two levels are active, the opposites, the yin and the yang of things as they appear right now vis a vis life stage transitions and personal inclinations and the impetus for this rather than that. I was comparing earlier stages of our lives together and our current stage, and seeing a flip of yins and yangs as they relate to specific global elements, such as, most particularly, being at the ocean.

 

The only other time in our lives together that we lived at the ocean were the years we spent in and around Santa Cruz (CA). The yin, expansive, elaborative, diffusing energy of that location and time had come to be experienced as a dead end for us. During that period we were talking about leaving Santa Cruz for many years, knowing somehow that we wanted to or needed to, but having nowhere to go and no particular reason to go there. Until the earthquake of '89. After that we picked up and within 3 months found ourselves in Santa Fe with two small children and no prospects for anything but a new life.

As it turned out, the mountainous, yang, grounding, solid, consolidating energy of New Mexico was precisely what we needed in order to get things done. Within a year and a half of living in Santa Fe we were on our land, pioneering a new way of life, building a house over the first ten years on the land, raising creative, demanding, sensitive, perceptive and independent children, developing, expressing, learning, going to graduate school, beginning and developing new careers, engaging in and with the world in meaningful and satisfying ways, and of course facing and surmounting all the challenges confronting us over the 25 years we've been there.. We were making things happen. We were doing things. We were living original creative lives. We were healing and growing and manifesting and working and making our marks, such as they might be. Yang. It's what was needed.

And now here we are, at what I'm calling the next, and as far as I can see for myself anyway, the last, stage of life. My experience of this (and being here at the tropical ocean is feeding this view), is that this stage is again more Yin: opened, reflective, expansive, amourphous, receptive, flowing without doing, resting without sloth, nowhere to go and nothing to do as I'm enjoying saying these days, being, allowing, not pushing or forging or making or developing. Being relentlessly and naturally and effortlessly and inescapably creative in this other way. Nancy says that her learning and experience of the past six months has been a lot about finding her home within herself, and being in grace without having to do anything; about a surrendering that is not to a higher power outside of herself, but to the great flow that is herself as well as it is all else; about seeing and experiencing more closely her identity with this flow and with this all else.

What I'm wanting in this stage of my life is just what is happening: an expansion of the yin of things in internal terms: easefulness; gracefulness; a different dimension of responsibility that isn't about carving out a life in the world, but about simply living the life that I have for its own perfect sake; and a contraction, a condensation, a distillation and a consolidation, a yang-i-fying of my obligations and responsibilities in the world of doing and making and accomplishing. This most practically and immediately might include going through our two storage sheds of stuff when we get back to NM and shedding lots of that stuff. It would include reducing my/our foot print in the outer world in other areas, like the kinds of accommodations we would live in, for example (think small is beautiful here). It would include that venerable ideal of simplifying (material) things altogether.

The fact that Nancy and I have lived quite comfortably and harmoniously– ask her about this for her experience; I speak only for myself! - in one room together for the past six months; and that we have lived quite comfortably out of basically two suitcases during this time, speaks loudly and clearly to me about a direction I'm happy to be going in. Lately I've said to Nancy that, for example, I would be quite happy, if we were to rent a place to be for a while in Santa Fe let's say, to live in a furnished studio apartment. She's not altogether certain about this, but not altogether opposed to the idea either. Who can say just yet?

And since the direction and stage of life appears to be moving more yin-ly, we talk about feeling like we may be “done with” the yang-ness of NM, and the “harshness” and “austerity” of the desert, and more ready for an environment of increased “softness” and “lushness” and “gentleness”. Again, being at this tropical jungle ocean feeds this vision and these feelings, but we can't yet say exactly where such a new place might finally be, if it is to be finally anywhere at all, instead of sometimes here and sometimes there.

To be continued..................