My friend Barbara and I had just ended a long season of doing our Spirit work out in the world. It was Winter Solstice 1995, the end both of a year of coordinating women’s drumming circles and of almost three and a half years of mounting local and geographically distant "road shows" selling her drums/rattles and my For the Little Ones wares. We were both pretty exhausted and "over it" with being in and around large crowds of even wonderful women. (See Too Much Work for more about that whole experience.)
Barbara was in a season of time-out/sabbatical from her ordinary professional life. It was for her a time of exploring new options, new possibilities and her own deep self. In the middle of this field of more open time in her life, she began to gently lobby me about creating a web site
The prospect of having to engage with the world of computers seemed way more than I, at the time, was ready or willing to address. Though not actually techno-phobic, I then (and still) found myself incredibly resistant to incorporating the "fast track" of technological "progress " into my slow lane life. No cell phone, no FAX, no microwave, no TV, no using ATM cards, no computers, no email was my committed choice in this life. At that point, cordless phones and a small word processor had been my major concessions to "technology." And the word processor came only when the limited 17 character "erasing capacity" of my 16 year old electronic typewriter began driving me nuts. Too many experiences of (painful) frustrated desk pounding and rageful yanking and ripping of error-riddled pages had put me over the edge.
Had we started building a web site at that point in time, we would have had to learn to write HTML. A probable but interesting stretch for computer literate Barbara, an utterly unfathomable undertaking for me. It would have been for Barbara a perfect time to begin such a project so she did gently press her case for a little while. In the face of my adamant resistance, she soon quietly backed off.
A year or so later, when web-authoring software became generally available, she delicately broached the possibility again. I responded as grumpily as before. Though more rested this time around, it all still felt like "work" to me. I wasn’t at all interested in starting any project that would feel like "work" to me. And, I didn’t seem to have much investment in getting my way of looking at life and growth further out into the world. I was content sharing my learnings with my clients and my friends. That they in turn shared with their own friends and familiars whatever in my sharings seemed of value to them–this seemed more than enough for me. And, too, the Rememberings and Celebrations Cards were continuing to find their way out into the world. This even though we weren’t anymore traveling to fairs and festivals to get them seen and known.
We went around and around a few times with Barbara nudging me–albeit gently. I was consistently crabby and irritated with her low key pressing of the web site idea. Again, after a while, she yielded in the face of my continuing resistance.
Another year later, in 1998, Barbara–amazingly persistent–re-opened the topic. This time she presented a much less ambitious framing of the undertaking: She would scan the texts of some of my earlier writings. She would help me to transfer my word processing skills so that I could use her Mac desktop computer to copy edit the scanning errors in those texts. Then, together, we would put up a minimalist, bare bones site. No bells and whistles, no re-framing or reorganizing of all the material that I had been creating over the years. Just a few selected pieces. Then, over time, if and as I felt moved to, I could add a "Monthly Musing" on one or another of the cards from the Rememberings and Celebrations Deck.
This time–with both the very simplified conception and her absolute commitment to going as slowly as I needed to go–she finally got my (still somewhat grudging) agreement. We then began what turned out to be the long, painstaking, challenging and sometimes incredibly tedious process of creating the (first) For the Little Ones Inside web site. I spent hours word processing in her study, yelling for help when I got stuck or in trouble, Then, with me watching–riding shotgun as it were–as she learned the software, we’d spend endless hours putting it all together and test mounting it on-line.
There were computer glitches of one sort or another almost every time we got together to work on the project. It always took longer to do anything than we thought it might. From the beginning, we understood the need to set sacred space with candles and smudging, reading oracles and asking the Grandmothers for their help and guidance. We learned (as we had before with the drumming project) that we needed to be absolutely committed to processing about the process of the work. I was so new to collaboration as a creative field. I often hated it all and wanted to give it all up. I had zero frustration tolerance with computer misbehavior, was always ready to take a hammer to it or just turn it off and go back home to my uncomputerized little cottage! All the while, I knew that this was a right thing to be doing and a right time to be doing it
Barbara, unlike crabby me, was an old hand at creative collaboration, an enterprise she usually found incredibly rewarding. She was adept at processing the interpersonal challenges that came up as we tried to integrate our different styles of working. She had seemingly endless patience with computer/software problems, enjoying the challenge of finding ways under, around or over the obstacles that littered our path. She always found a way through to the other side. How long that took was another matter! I’d fidget and grumble and get bleary-eyed and crabby and want to bail many times along the way to that other side.
Over time we learned to listen to Spirit better. To stop persisting when things got tangled between us or with the computer. To hear the obstacles as opportunities to take a break, a walk, get a bite to eat, to stretch, to try talk about other things. To find a better balance between Barbara’s inevitable willingness to stay with things and my repeated impulses to walk away totally. (As the work continued, we actually noticed ourselves sometimes switching roles!)
I also struggled mightily with allowing so much time and energy to be given to me, to a project that was involving my work. To find my way to feeling comfortable receiving all this from someone that wouldn’t accept payment for her time was enormously difficult. It was so challenging, finding my way to trusting her word that the collaboration on this particular project was in itself a gift to her. Was, for her, her Spirit work–even as it involved her in dealing with A LOT of crabbiness in me!
It was an amazing and transforming process! I was thoroughly delighted with the sweet and simple site that we finally launched. And, I was thrilled to be done with a project that took us about eight intensive months from scanning texts to being fully functionally on-line. The whole collaborative process grew and opened me in so many and such unexpected ways. Ways I didn’t really recognize until we embarked on the work of building the second (current) incarnation of the web site. Needless to say, this embarking on a second web site project came much to my initial dismay and seemingly much too soon after completing the first one!
Barbara again was being nudged by the Grandmothers into nudging me onto the next threshold. She and they were relentlessly pushing me to conceive of my writings as a "body of work" that had a form that was wanting to reveal itself. There was a similar but shorter period of me kicking and screaming and resisting. And then, there was an incredibly mysterious and magical moment in which I finally "got" what Barbara and the Grandmother’s were trying to get me to see!
That moment propelled me forward into the new more complex undertaking with enormous enthusiasm and excitement. In the new process, as Barbara’s professional life shifted into high gear, I got to discover just how much computer technology I had osmosed all those long hours of riding shotgun as she tried to get around obstacles! We designed the site together, with some consultation from a wonderful young woman computer nerd whose input I could mostly understand. We got a lot of inspiration/support from the fabulous Non-Designers Web Book (by Williams and Tollett). And, in the end, I kept amazing myself as I, mostly by myself with occasional coaching and technical input from Barbara and our consultant, built and rebuilt and refined the over 60 "pages" of the beginning of the second web site.
I found myself flying with the exhilaration of developing a whole new set of competencies. I was stretching my envelope so enormously as I came to be using the computer as just another creative medium: like the pen and ink, paint, yarn and words with which I had been more familiar and comfortable. I was giddy with the excitement of using my mind in ways I hadn’t in years as I problem-solved computer and software and design glitches. On my own some of the time and as a more and more creditable collaborator with Barbara much of the time.
Barbara had been (and continues to be) an extraordinary teacher-mentor/collaborator through the whole process. And, most amazingly–given my past experiences with academic mentors, she had been (and continues to be) fully as delighted in my fledging and my growing competencies as I’ve been. (See ThePower of Vulnerability and The Vulnerability of Power for more about that history.)
As I worked on the pages for the current web site, I gradually and with Barbara’s endless encouragement, came to see her little Mac power book as my own. It had been living at my house all through the months of constructing the new web site. I’d become completely attached to it. But this was a huge step, this claiming my ownership of a computer! When she (albeit reluctantly) let me replace it for her with a Titanium power book, it became truly mine!
Over the five years that this no-longer-new site has been functioning we’ve marveled again and again at all the magic and all the slogging and crabbing that’s gone into it. We’re both enormously proud of how easily one can navigate through it, out from it to links and back to it again. And, each month as we ceremoniously upload my new columns, we always grin enormously at how beautiful we think it is and how easily it has continued to allow expansion since it’s early days.
The entire process has been a most powerful lesson. A lesson in NOT doing anything before one feels ready to. In NOT "taking advantage" of what feels like an opportunity-coming-at-the-wrong-time. In our culture there’s so much pressure all the time on seizing the opportunity when it comes along, no matter how it fits or feels in the moment. So much fear that, if we don’t take advantage of the moment/the chance, it will never come again. That we’ll have missed it. That we’ll regret missing it for the rest of our days. What a terrible lie of a story to be taught to tell ourselves!
Life and the Grandmothers/my deep self show me over and over again that opportunities that I don’t feel ready for or that don’t feel right to me are opportunities that I can let pass. That more and different and better-for-me opportunities will keep coming over and over again until the one that feels absolutely right arrives and I take it up. When we choose our moments out of a deep sense that the time is ripe (even if/when we feel crabby about it) we are being loving, gentle and supportive to our growth. When we choose the moment because it’s "there" and because we’ve been taught to be afraid to let it pass, it’s always a much rockier road for our tender, vulnerable selves.
If you don’t feel ready yet for an opportunity that presents itself, consider letting it pass, trusting there will always be other more-right-for-you opportunities down the road,
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
If you'd like a deck of your very own to support you in your journey, click here to download Order Form.
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