A gladness list runs away and becomes a pilgrimage

Bonus gift at the end

When I was younger I started a social initiative called Ten Million True which was an online platform where you could send anyone a list of ten things you loved about them. Because, well, so many becauses, but mostly because real love orients to truth like compasses do to true North.

In my own life, I feel that gratitude is still a wildly underused tool, companion, compass, poem, journey way so i continue to lean into it, thirsty, holding on. Today I sat down to write and a gladness list kind of went, delectably, off the rails.

1. ILOVELOVE that past me turned off spellcheck, grammar check and all checky check checks on my laptop. As I sit here in a sea of red squiggly lines, I feel a strange tenderness with those red squiggly lines, some of the mistakes are beautifulful (I am going to edit most of those but leave beautifulful foreverever.) Who I am without grammar police? Watching my unpoliced mind go about letter shapes and word clusters like a child down to the business of mud-pies. And how things change when I am very exciting (I meant to write excited, but did I?) Grammar popo would have nipped that shenanigan in the baby shenanigan bud but now I get to witness how when I get writing fast with all the heart windows wide open I am exciting, a whirlwind, a kind of human weather.

2. I think of poet David Whyte work of leading adults, desperately trying to claw their way back to sanity and grace in a world gone mad, on pilgrimages in places where “adults are treated as adults”. The longer I carry this innocuous phrase the more real estate it takes up. Adults? Treated as one? treating each other as such? Bill Plotkins posits that most of the world is frozen in a pathological adolescence. I imagine the rag taggle group of sad stuck teens, in grown up bodies, unraveling, undoing, and marching along like hopeful kites along some ancient wild byway. A sudden (formerly hidden) whim leaps to the surface, seeking expression. What happens next?

3. I am a relentless fan of the 1995 version of Little Women. Tell me there’s ever been a better Marmee than Susan Sarandon and it is ON. But there is a delight to lingering a little longer in the fields of our deepest held fascinations, making room to dialogue with and maybe even trust the impetus behind its magnetism. Louisa May Alcott wrote the book and was a transcendentalist, like Thoreau or Emerson, a movement that basically posits that everything a human needs to know about being a human in harmony with All can and is found by apprenticing ourselves to the natural world. Nature as Divinity. Imagine that.

4. It’s clear we’re all deconditioning, unmasking, unboxing, rebooting corrupt codes and coming back to sea level in our own beingness. We’re becoming deconditioning buddies and I love it. I love that my relationships now include Really Hard Undoing seasons as well as buddy road-trips montages. This little detail has become a defining delight in my recent life. It feels like that time I was trapped in a small cabin at the end of the world during a long winter storm and just kept the fire going and tea boiling. I felt so held and safe. The harder the storm raged, the cozier the inner warmth. Authenticity as a revolution is that cabin. More tea?

5. There’s such a delight to movements. When I was eight I remember writing in my journal “I would die for something to die for.” I knew then, and remember now that the greatest joy is to live a life of meaning and service to something you get the privilege of being indevotion to and with. To and with. Who knew devotion could be so delightfull?

6. I remember once (maybe more than once. Okay. Definitely many times) a friend and I went into Wal-mart for late night shenanigans. Riding bikes around. Cartwheel marathons (can you make it from Crafts to Shoes without taking a step?) and when I first started doing this (living in a rural isolated area in cold Maine and needing Outness and Fun) I fully expected to be caught and kicked out. Like, quickly, I didn’t even think I’d make it to the end of the first aisle (it’s 17 cartwheels long in case you’re wondering.) But never. Not once. Even when we road little kids bikes around that had sirens and horns on them going at full blast. During one of our Romps, someone got arrested for stealing and ushered out as I sailed by on my toddler scooter like an invisible ghost. I’ve since thot a lot about what allowed this dynamic to happen. I don’t think there are any grown ups there, who care and are invested in something, so the container is very loose. So they are only looking at the bare minimum of what they need to do to endure the catastrophic life-away trade they are doing for money. Also, they didn’t seem to see us. It occurs to me now that I wish I’d invited the workers to join us. Join us on our pilgrimage in the wilds of the cereal aisle. Come reclaim some relationship with delight and care. Come, we must embark immediately.

7. In Ed Psych my professor told a story that lives rent free in my brain ever since: Someone in his quaint, harbor town in New Hampshire stole a yacht and went bonkers with it, eventually crashing it into a restaurant at which point he proceeded to live in and hide in people’s homes. At his trial, he paused in his tail telling and turned towards my professor and his wife, and said, “she saw me” pointing directly to his wife. She started trembling. He continued “I thot I was gonezo but she never said anything.” As he went on, a memory emerged of him crouching between the washer and dryer in her basement. A memory she had never had any conscious experience with because she had no conscious permission for it. This is all to say: the revolution will not be televised.

8. In the luscious, and bath-soused novel, “Jitterbug Perfume” by Tom Robbins, one of the core questions is how many angels questions can dance on the head of a pin? To which the story deliciously answers: it depends on whether or not they’re jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

9. I cling to delight. It’s a counter pose in the yoga move of dealing with trauma, ancestral wounding and the excruciating pain of watching people suffer and feeling tromplingly helpless to help them enough. I cling to delight as I try to be the little boy with my fingers in the dyke trying to hold the dam from coming down. I cling to it because inside of the wisdom of what directly delights me is a seed. A seed, if met with a gardener’s love, will grow the nutrients for the future, what’s left after Rome burns.

10. There is a delight in acknowledging that the mind is a secretary (Gurdjeff) and it doesn’t know the way forward. I have a game that I designed called the Willingness Game. In my work as a conscious play facilitator I’ve joined in, thousands of times, with every which different kind of person. And each time, it’s taken us somewhere we’ve never been, some wild ancient way emerges between us willing pilgrims. I want to offer this game to pilgrims who are sailing forth into the holidays amidst the Roman fires burning in the foreground. I dare you to try it with your people that you’ll share these holidays with, as a way of reorienting, together, away from the world the broken mind has created, and towards the future world that emerges out of the wisdom of our playful, united hearts:

The Willingness Game dials into the fun-wisdom of collective consciousness and elevates a group dynamic into a heart-full space, which can be used as a resource towards any endeavor. It’s simple and free and can be played anywhere, with anyone at any time. You’ll need a bit of paper and a pen or two.

Everyone writes on a piece of paper something they genuinely want to do with this particular group, now, for four minutes (it can be shorter or longer if you write a number on the bottom). All papers are collected in a container. No limit. Write until the inspiration passes. This phase of the game is inspiring and revealing. First time players often feel stymied or shy. Old hands at the game often run out of paper, they’re so inspired and excited to do things with other people. By writing ONLY something you feel GENUINELY interested in experiencing, in a LIFE GIVING way, a natural safety and container is held.

Now someone volunteers to be the DJ and draws 5 prompts out of the hat and reads them. They discard one, line up the other four in any order that pleases them. Someone volunteers to keep time (four minutes unless otherwise noted) Sometimes someone puts music on, sometimes someone has to give a willingness speech, like, how we grow craggy and whittled in our expected ruts and that sometimes life comes along and offers us a chance to step out into the heart’s pilgrimage, together, and to hold hands a little, as we learn again to play with life and with each other with tenderness and wide open hearts.

Then someone says go and you do each prompt, together, exactly as written and you’ll likely have to be creative. We had to make a waffle in four minutes and eat it, at a house party. We did. It required a brilliant quick witted child to race to kitchen and find and plug in a waffle machine immediately. People often bring in their unique passions or skills and we all learn or join in and are more for the process. I have learned SO MUCH from this game. And, it’s become a way of traveling while staying still. One weary woman wrote “I want to lay on the ground and have everyone massage me and tell me things they love about me.” We did. And cried as she cried in the receiving.

Lastly! I have so appreciated (cried in the receiving) of your notes, feedback, insights and responses. I write from the sense of being pilgrims together and love the chats out on the wild ancient roads. But I would especially love to hear if anyone experiments with this game. It’s been a kind of miracle elixir of authentic engagement in families and groups that felt separate or fake. Thanks so much for reading, dear pilgrim.