Holding space

I’ll confess: my life circumstances have a direct effect on my publishing. Sometimes when things are in process that I can’t talk about, I don’t write for fear of tipping hands that can’t afford to be tipped. I’m fully human, which means that even though we live in a compartmentalized fashion, tending and grooming our offerings to present the absolute best version of this moment, absent the context from which it came, when I’m in the thick of it, everything touches everything.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ll call holding space.

We’ve just come to the final determination on a big life-change process for our family. Everyone in our circles is learning about and dealing with this shift in their own pace and fashion. But the reality for me has been that this was months in the making. MONTHS. And during that span of time, we held space for hope, space for nerves, space for the possibility of what might be to come, and the possibility of disappointment. Life always tries to crowd in, and it takes effort to leave that space open for those possibilities, not unlike the effort to keep a kitchen table free of clutter. There were moments that it was effortless, like brushing away a fly. There were moments that were almost unbearable, Sisyphus pushing the rock, again. In those moments, I was most grateful for those very few who could stand beside me in the moment, lend their heart, shoulder, or ear, and stand in the stead to hold that space, making room for faith.

This gratitude has fostered an appreciations for the moments when I need space held, as well as the moments when I can hold space for others. Often people want to DO. We live in a perpetual state of busy, of filling in the gaps and cracks of our days. Go, and go faster is the order of our days. But faster isn’t always the way. Sometimes we just need to take the space to BE.

Change will happen. Frenzy will happen. In the moment you think your ability to manage all your open issues is at full maximum capacity, a new issue drops in and upsets any illusion of equilibrium in the chaos. And you adapt. But today, I sit with those I love, and hold space for all the things so that grace and faith can sift in.

“A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” George Eliot

Love and light to you all; holding space for you, too.

~Me