by Troy Bronsink, Hive Founder
photo taken in Contemplative Photography course at the Hive in response to the prompt Grace
There is an unmistakable moment at the beach when tide changes and you sense the waves are towing harder, sand sucking out from underfoot. Like the moment when you’re letting string out to a kite, and a new wind stream picks up and pulls liberally, the spool spinning faster than the eye can track.
As a singer-songwriter in bands, there have been similar moments when I’m singing, and the alchemy of a well-written song, the fingers on the guitar, familiar vocalizations, and the attention of the room seem, altogether, to pull me into harmony with something else, something bigger.
“Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence” -poet David Whyte
Yet, pulls aren’t always reassuring. Daniel Hughes recently described it as a “rhetorical newness”. I was in a Hive course with Daniel recently when the room conversation tones shifted from our progressive-minded intentions into older, less-restrained patterns of reactions and triggers. We were pulled into crisis. Into saying things out loud that tested the tinsel strength of our brave space.
The storming moment made no promise to hold the room, instead it tested our promises, our collective intention, which proved up to the task. It required grace, and when grace was extended, we could feel it widening the playfield.
In ways like none I’ve been aware of before, these pandemic times seem to be pulling at us all, all at once. Pulling parents into the overwhelming struggles of arguing over carrying the one, to laughing about day drinking, between zoom calls with bad wifi, while rationing toilet paper.
Pulling apart our norms with unexpected freedoms and uncomfortable limits. Pulling managers into impossible cashflow decisions. Pulling concerned citizens out of the workforce. Pulling civil servants and healthcare professionals into impossible choices between personal homes and community care. Pulling consumers into the contradictory storms between conflicting “expertise” of news, health, economics or politics…
Just stop here for a moment. Can you notice the pull in your own body as these examples pile up? The inner and the outer are related… we can all sense these pulls within our tense, gut wrenching, exhausted bodies.
This feel of being pulled is quite different than feeling pushed. I’m experiencing more invitation than marching orders. A tug to yield.
I spot the yield in those rare moments of media interviews with surprising personal vulnerability. Or those cracks in the conversation with a stranger walking on the sidewalk in front of the house—a generosity in the face of threat. This pull to yield even pops up when someone, out of character, is forced to say, “I don’t know.” All of us, as if at once, are feeling a pull to yield…
Howard Thurman describes this as the fluid area of consent where the inward sea is awakened, swelling with the courage to vulnerably shift the undertow of their desire, to become what they really want in the world. This pulling from within emboldens the community of our world to entrust ourselves to a pulling from without. This is the power of contemplative practice, expanding our inner abilities to notice and yield to certain external pulls.
The surprise: it seems that when I yield to my own limits, I have to give myself a little grace. And this doesn’t just end with me. I find I then yield to giving grace to my family members, and my work colleagues. The void created by my trusting the pull to yield is exponentially creating awareness of grace. It is widening the playing field!
Like the spool unravelling on my kite, I find the unraveling of life in the time of Corona is lifting a sort of grace consciousness. Perhaps, I am just having a personal shift of perspective, and grace has been there all along. Or, perhaps the shift is pulling more string from our collective kites, and something is happening to the collective. Perhaps, this crisis is enabling us to enter tomorrow more capable to yield, to extend and receive grace.
This is not a cheap bypassing of the weight of grief, confusion, and yet-to-be-resolved community emergencies. But perhaps, in addition to the very, very real losses, we aren’t simply being pulled under, but also pulled out into something we never would have yielded to beforehand. Perhaps we’re falling in love with grace.