I reached for my smart phone this morning to read today's trust30 prompt.
When I read it, I immediately thought of a favorite quote from my friend, ancient Sufi Mystic, Rumi. He wrote, "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment."
I love the quote so much it is written in gold pen upon the purple front door of my home.
When I share this quote with my writing students, I am chronically surprised that their response to bewilderment has a tendency to opt toward being afraid of it. They think of bewilderment as confused, disoriented and that ever unpopular ambiguous place coated with thick grey unknowing covering their minds and hearts. Somehow this lovely bewildered place becomes a dark land of fear where one is relentllessly caught without a smart phone or GPS or google ~ just first hand experience of "what is"...I see some other people - certainly not you or me - run away with their arms akimbo and flailing at the mist screaming... "not that, please... I'm not ready to leap without a net, to improvise in front of an audience, to not have an exact recipe for someone, anyone's brand of success!!"
Our trust30 prompter today, Patti Digh, wrote:
"We are our most potent at our most ordinary. And yet most of us discount our "ordinary" because it is, well, ordinary. Or so we believe."
One of my a-ha's through this Trust30 experience is I am pretty darned comfortable with being afraid. I don't mind wobbly-sea-legs when trying something new.
I still have some familiar fear blocks, but I am working on them. I certainly don't buy into fear-worship.
One of my gaps left to bridge is noting when these ordinary aspects of life are awfully extraordinary.
I just saw a tweet where someone scoffed, "I refuse to accept ordinary" or something like that.
Well, I see ordinary as extraordinary.
I see ordinary as blissed out wonder. In my coffee cup, in my overly-hot, blisteringly dry Bakersfield, I see gloriousness. I don't need to go away to a mountaintop because what is inside me - how I look out from my nearsighted, oddly colored blue eyes is ordinarily extraordinary.
Just last night I sat across a table from a friend of mine, helping her through a challenge. "Scrape away all the opinions, all the judgments and tell me the facts here. Each fact, plain and simple. No extra embellishments."
The ordinary is extraordinary. The ordinary gives us clarity.
As I wrote, a fascinating a-ha just happened. I was about to list all the ordinary extraordinary things here in my home sphere:
My lavendar crop, my poetry fire sculpture I didn't know how to do and did it and now I discover is cutting edge in the art world, my son Samuel's continued success even with his fabulous extraordinary ordinary atypical neurology, my first pumpkin plant growing roots in this Bakersfield heat.... and then I thought..
Wait: this prompt is about my ordinary-ness. Those parts of me I tend to overlook as "the same as everyone" because I believe anyone can do what I do, yet at the same time I am naturally gifted and can use these gifts to offer my ordinary-extraordinaryness back to the world.
Like my story-telling, both in writing and how about that victory at the first story telling slam I ever intended?
How about guest lecturing/experiencing at the college last week and after reading Alice Walker's Rilkean inspired poem "Reassurance" I poo pooed my own read of it saying, "I am an actor, which is why I read this like I do but you could learn how, too, with practice." Both are true. My Divinely given vocal chords are my ordinary extraordinary and my use of them and practice with them is extraordinary ordinary which I am so willing to share with others.
How many people have to tell me what my writing classes have done in changing their lives and work before I admit "My teaching has extraordinary value simply by me being ordinarily me?"
I simply AM. And living inside that I AM and continuing to practice who I AM is what will enhance my world as well as my experience of the world because it just feels so darn good!
From Trust30 today:
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. – Ralph Waldo Emerson From Patti Digh: We are our most potent at our most ordinary. And yet most of us discount our “ordinary” because it is, well, ordinary. Or so we believe. But my ordinary is not yours. Three things block us from putting down our clever and picking up our ordinary: false comparisons with others (I’m not as good a writer as _____), false expectations of ourselves (I should be on the NYTimes best seller list or not write at all), and false investments in a story (it’s all been written before, I shouldn’t bother). What are your false comparisons? What are your false expectations? What are your false investments in a story? List them. Each keep you from that internal knowing about which Emerson writes. Each keeps you from making your strong offer to the world. Put down your clever, and pick up your ordinary.
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Julie Jordan Scott
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