[Coordinates: in bed in my friend’s guest apartment in Mexico City]
When Dorothy woke up in the land of wonder, the land of Oz, she lept from the black-and-white of familiar life to the technicolor extraordinary. We all know that part.
But, what happened next? Her ordinary got upgraded. What used to be counted as extraordinary came to pass so frequently that it became the new ordinary. Friends singing her songs and magical rescues came to be her “new normal.”
Here’s a poem I published on April 11, 2020 mere weeks after our old normal slipped away in a storm much like Dorothy’s tornado.
Center Yourself in the Abyss
What comes next has yet to be written.
We are not going back to where we were.
We are not staying here.
What comes next has yet to be written.
Know that we are crossing a gap.
Liminal spaces are harder
than a hard certainty.
Until…
Until you ground yourself in groundlessness.
Until you find the freedom in uncertainty,
and the grace in the breaking apart.
Center yourself in the abyss.
Find the edges of the chaos.
Search, see the unseen.
I already knew in April 2020 that I wanted my new ordinary to be a meaningful and personally significant journey into the unknown. Like in Dorothy’s world, the fact that we were entering the unknown had been determined by forces far greater than myself. So, by June I had already sold my car, packed everything into storage, and boarded a one-way flight to Mexico.
I left the familiar black-and-white and lept fully into technicolor. I’d do it all over again.
What I notice is that still, two years later, it’s easy for us all to be distracted by the dramatic challenges such as flying monkeys and lose track that the scene unfolding before us is now in technicolor.
Remind yourself – now there’s magic. Now there’s an opening to write a totally new story.
What’s the particular story that yours alone to tell?
What space of possibility would you like to hold open?
What future will you predict by living it into being?
What would it take for your new normal to be colorful, juicy, luscious, and vibrantly alive?
Until Friday’s silliness, besos (kisses),
Cris and Team Dragon