Or: the path of true awakening
by kim mcmechan

It was a lovely summer day. Mid-August. Ryn, my 3-month old daughter was napping, and I was on the front steps in the sun, a cool breeze gently lifting my hair. I’d been worried for a while wondering when exactly I was supposed to find time to do my art. For starters, Ryn didn’t sleep well. And then there was the fact that when she finally did,
I was usually so beat I didn’t have the energy or presence of mind to write or practice myguitar or pick up a paintbrush.

When would there be time for my creative pursuits? When was my destiny supposed to start unfolding again?

And that’s when it happened. A sort of, I don’t know, flash, an up rush of something I didn’t recognize. A sharper sense of knowing than I’d ever had before. In my journals I would call it, for the next few years, an awakening. It was simply this: a deep, clear understanding that all was right, that everything would find its place in the right time. That I was not separate from the creative life I wanted to be living (doing music and writing). That every point up until this point fit perfectly and that any so-called “lost time” in this season of learning to live with my new daughter could be easily made up in the future in a day, an hour, a split second, if I could stay aligned with this sense of ease and trust.

I sat there spinning, in a good way, the way you feel when you’re a kid right after you’ve been twirling in the yard, and you lay down on your back in the grass surrounded by dandelion puffs and the warm buzz of bees.

This incident was actually the strongest of a series of epiphanies. I kept having around this time, all centering around the theme of feeling supported by life, of time being pliable and able to contract or expand according to my needs. I spent 2 ½ years living in the joy of this new clarity. That’s not to say I didn’t have moments of frustration over sleep-deprivation and toddler tantrums, or make changes when something wasn’t working. But it did mean I stopped fighting my own life so much. When my daughter woke early from a nap, I accepted it was what was needed in the moment, for me and for her. Not uncoincidentally, my creativity flourished. I learned to work fast: as a songwriter, I learned to draft out lyrics in 10 minutes, then put them to music in the next available fifteen. I became a poet because I could scratch poems on the backs of napkins, finish them in little found cracks of time. My life feels magical, I scribbled in my journal sometimes, and it was true. I felt like I had found some secret door into a beautiful new life.

But then we moved out West and I found myself pregnant again, and horribly nauseous, and shortly after the new baby came my marriage suffered some major challenges and then of course there was the whole being really really broke thing. And there’s no other way to say it—I lost it. That clarity. That sense of things being okay. It shriveled up. And for the life of me, I couldn’t get it back.

I searched for it everywhere. But life had gotten busy and panic had taken over and the harder I tried, the more clarity seemed to elude me. Forget magical. Instead, my life felt more like a wasteland.

What I hadn’t yet learned (and what I’ve begun, slowly, thankfully, to learn) is that those moments of clarity are just seeds. To grow, to thrive, they need to be nurtured, cared for, fertilized with our habits and our life practices, our silences and our effort. I made the mistake of thinking that once I had woken up to a truth, it was mine forever. I see now that while it was wonderful that my initial “awakening” made such an impact, it was inevitable that it would eventually wane; I hadn’t yet learned how to practice it consciously. I hadn’t yet learned how to water my own life.

I’ve begun to surround myself with teachers, with books that show me the way ahead, with long walks and times of sitting still.

In Pema Chodron’s wonderful book “When Things Fall Apart”, she says: To stay with the shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness—that is the path of true awakening. To find my way again, I’ve had to sit with the shakiness for awhile. And I’ve had to surrender the panic and go back to the beginning—to that first flash of knowing on the steps seven years ago. I’ve had to learn how to tend to it mindfully this time round rather than by default—knowing and trusting every day that even when it doesn’t feel like it, I am in the right place, that I haven’t missed my life, that my path is this next step right in front of me.

Have you experienced a magical season in your life that you seem to have moved away from? I want to tell you not to despair. Now is the time to return to the beginning, to relearn what your heart used to know. What would you like to know deep within you again?