Pop 89: Trust the Rhythm
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Over thirty years ago, my friend Helen shared her new year’s ritual with me. The ritual has become a tradition in our family, so a few of us practiced it last week. It involves writing two words on two small pieces of paper. The first word represents what you plan to jettison from your last year, or your past in general. Perhaps it’s a bad habit or an old worldview, or maybe a grudge whose burial is long overdue. These word gets burned before the new year arrives.
The second word stands for what you want to bring into your life. The original ritual involves shouting out the new word as the bell tolls midnight, but nobody minds if you quietly slip into your wallet or back pocket.
The ritual tends to have more effect and staying power if you give some consideration to the new word throughout the month of December. However, for myself at least, the ejected words do not seem to require any premeditation; they crowd my head, vying for a chance to rule my world, which is always a clue they need to be released. This year I had more than one word on the burn list: “procrastination,” “justification,” and “pontificating” were all overdue for a one-way ticket out of here.
Over the years, I’ve burned old words in bonfires, cast-iron frying pans or with just a match, lit and then dropped in the calm waters of a dark lake. Once, my friend Avril took me to Antigua for Christmas, and after we burned our words, we waded into the ocean and dog-paddled under the stars while the rhythm of reggae Christmas carols drifted over from the small cafe across the road.
This year, however, we’ve yet to rid ourselves of the pieces of paper languishing in an old orange stew pot on the back porch of my sister and brother-in-law’s home in Medicine Hat. It’s too damn cold out there to be sitting in deck chairs burning a pile of paper. Perhaps, as we age, we find more and more troublesome words to eradicate. It appears the process of maturation is a process of subtraction rather than addition, reminding me of a Taoist saying that goes: “In pursuit of knowledge, every day something is acquired. In pursuit of wisdom, every day, something is dropped.”
My sister keeps a list of our new words every time we perform the ritual at her place. One year I tossed “illusion,” another year “fear,” replacing them with “presence” and “creativity,” respectively. This year my word is TRUST.
I have set the bar high. Perhaps because we live in a global climate where trust is virtually non-existent, I crave places where I can place my trust. I know I have, in the past, thrown my trust-hat into the wrong rings. And now I’m watching so many young women trying desperately to come off as “badasses,” a term indicating hipness and fearlessness; I lament their readiness to trust strangers with their bodies as if they were not attached to their hearts. The problem with instant trust is that it often gets trammelled, resulting in an assumption that trust is foolishness and that those who trust are naive.
People have to earn our trust. I once told a young woman who was spurned by the fella she slept with on their first date. Sorry to sound so old-fashioned, I said, but trust is not a fad. If you gave yourselves time to get to know each other, you could both decide whether or not you both could be trusted with each other’s hearts, minds and souls. Don’t set yourself up to be disappointed in people; that’s just a cop-out from being present with each other’s vulnerability.
But there’s another trust that interests me. A bedrock, eternal form of trust the comes from listening to the rhythm of nature and how I can adapt it to my own rhythm. Recently I came across a quote by the author Nikos Kazantzakis: “As I watched the seagulls, I thought: that’s the road to take; find the absolute rhythm and follow it with absolute trust.” I know what Kazantzakis is talking about when I watch the birds of the prairie, especially the soaring raptors riding the currents along the buttes and the Frenchman River.
Despite how I am often told by my scientist friends that I should not anthropomorphize the birds’ behaviour, I can’t help believe they are “enjoying” life through the very act of their surrender into it. Besides, if I adhere to Indigenous world views, I would see the raptors, and all the plants and animals as brothers and sisters, with lessons to teach and behaviours to emulate.
And that’s how I came to choose ‘trust’ as my word. That, and the fact that every time I set out to walk with my sisters, I realize: my rhythm is not the same as theirs. They are little motors, and I am a meanderer. I could not keep up their pace if my life depended upon it. I have finally accepted that fact, and now I watch as they prance into the sunset while I saunter at my own respectable, if lagging, pace further and further behind.
I recall a cold winter day not unlike today, twenty-odd years ago. I was on my way to work in Quebec City. A storm had arisen; I was on foot, and I realized I’d be late because I had to duck into a cafe until the wind died down. I was walking briskly, but I was starting to feel the frost biting my toes and fingers.
Every day has its rhythm - and my goal is to match the rhythms of nature with the rhythm of my body. I learned the term “storm stay” when I moved to the prairie. I realized the depth of the wisdom in those words. Rural folk in general are at the mercy of nature’s rhythms and weathers, trusting that ‘this too shall pass,’ they can wait out a storm, where urban folks drive into it swearing.
If I merge my internal rhythms with the rhythms of creation, writes Sherri Mitchell, an indigenous elder, I will find grace and dance the dance of life. And that is my New Year’s wish for you, dear readers, that you find your rhythm and dance to your heart’s content.