It may be that when we no longer know which way to go, we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. — Wendell Berry; Collected Poems
Today I’m in the frail kingdom, the space where you feel raw, as if your soul’s skin is all raw and anything and everything has the tendency to “hurt a little bit”. You’re looking for signs that would indicate which way the wind blows. After all, you went through a co-created hell where the heat was provided by the voluminous breath of your own fear of separation. You couldn’t see anything much, except the dark smoke coming from the cinders of your hopes.
You can see, now that some of the smoke is lifting, that drawing lines can be done without the fire and the brimstone. You accept your own limitations – the pattern of behavior and thinking and feeling that forms your character is now finally more or less OK with you. You come to accept that you’re far from perfect but that, if you keep on adapting to your deeper self, you’ll be as open as you need to be to flow with life, and as clear as needs to be to accept your limitations.
You can’t, no, you would never want to deny again your trans-and-ir-rational nature, your malleable and stubborn character. You have found some center, frail and promising, a space from where you can live an openness that before you had no idea of.
The chaos of your imagination’s darker regions need the balancing force of a brighter imagination to become acceptable in the constellation of what it means to be me,
And then there is the other One. And there is the dynamics between, the uncontrollable and utterly free forces that choose their own path – this is the kernel of vulnerability: that you don’t know what is going to happen. Life-changing forces are afoot and depending on where you are in this constellation, you can open to the other participants in the constellation.
In Hellinger’s vocabulary one of the primary forces in our life and character is the “Hinbewegung”, the “movement towards”; and what troubles us in these constellations is a “Movement toward” that is “broken” – the “unterbrochene Hinbewegung.”
To be vulnerable is to be aware of many of these “movements toward”. In the course of this experiment I have come to be in resonance with many, many of these “unterbrochene Hinbewegungen.” Maybe I’m still a romantic after all (I thought, I wasn’t), but I believe that in close and intimate relationship this one-on-one relationship itself is a “movement toward.” Maybe what I got a taste of recently is the promise of just such a possibility in my life. But the “Hinbewegung” is an utterly free movement – which doesn’t mean that it is not bound to circumstances, but rather that it is free to go with it, be neutral or go against it, but “it” is beyond control.
All day I feel vulnerable.
And I’m moving my attention from going in too deep.
Let me, vulnerable, stay near the surface.
I’m a hero and a coward
While I courageously go, I shiver inside considering possible consequences.
The longing for that space of intimacy with you, with life, with destiny is strong.
I accept that longing.
This longing makes me vulnerable.
Living vulnerable is part of me
Part of the whole.
All day I feel vulnerable.
