What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep. ~ David Whyte
Dear Springhouse community,
I had an experience at my oncologist’s office that I wanted to share with you.
I love my oncologist. And I love the people who work with her. This is not personal. It is about what happens when systems and institutions slowly become organized around something other than life.
As I sat in the room waiting for my doctor, the nurse came in to take my vitals. As she took my blood pressure, she asked me the usual questions—the ones they are required to ask. As she finished up, she inquired, “Can you just go home and rest now?” I said, “Nope. I am going back to my work that I love. I am excited.” She stopped and looked at me with a blank stare. After a long pause, she asked through a look of surprise, “Oh, are you being sarcastic?”
“No, I am not being sarcastic,” I said to her. “I am serious. I love my work.”
She responded, “I have never heard anyone say that.”
That they love their work? That they are excited about their lives? I believe her. And I found it incredibly sad that we have come to expect people to tolerate their lives rather than be animated by them. If we heard more people say those things, we would live in a different world.
My heart was broken. Here I was, in a cancer center, where I would think we all might be especially awake to the gift of life. And yet as I observed the rhythms around me, I found myself wondering how easily a system can become organized around something other than the life it is meant to serve.
Habit. Status quo. Rote ways of being. Survival strategies. Slowly, they can take over. And before we know it, we are leading lives that are much too small for us.
What happens when we become awake to the habits that shape our lives and make room for something more? This question was at the heart of why I co-founded and stuck with Springhouse. What would happen if a group of people decided to take care of life in place over time?
We are in our 13th year and I have learned so much. One thing I have learned is that stepping outside the day-to-day rhythms of our lives and the structures we have grown accustomed to can give us enough space to notice our habits, loosen their hold on us, and try something new—with the support of community.
This is one of the reasons we take trips at Springhouse. Trips have become a tradition here. Our first was to Harlan, Kentucky, where we learned about strip mining and worked with the Beehive Design Collective to create a mural about industrialized education.
Since then, our trips have taken many forms, but they have always been about more than going somewhere. We go to encounter a place and discover what becomes possible when we step outside the routines of everyday life. We are changed by what we experience together.
There is something powerful about leaving home. When we step outside our familiar surroundings, we become beginners again. We have to pay attention. We encounter people and places we don’t already know. We adapt. We ask questions. We listen. We notice habits and behaviors that might otherwise remain invisible to us. We depend on one another. We see things differently. We become more resilient together.
This is true for our teens, and it is true for adults. Trips change the conditions in which we live and learn, creating opportunities for learning and transformation that are difficult to create within our ordinary routines.
This summer, a group of adults from our community traveled together on pilgrimage to Ireland. We walked, listened, sang, learned, wandered, and encountered a place and culture that invited us to see the world, and ourselves, a little differently. This fall, we will head to Connecticut to immerse ourselves in boating and maritime culture. We will spend time along the coast, learning from people whose lives have been shaped by their proximity to the water. We go together into the mystery of how much there is to learn.
We go because there are things we cannot encounter by staying home.
We go to wake up.
We go to remember that there is more possible than the life we already know.
Perhaps that is what these trips, and so many of our practices at Springhouse, are really about: creating conditions that help us stay awake to our lives.
We live within systems and ways of life that can, often without our intention, perpetuate harm, to the Earth, to one another, and to the deeper capacities of human life. What surrounds us can begin to feel inevitable simply because it is familiar. But it is not inevitable. We can wake up to what we have inherited, choose what we want to carry forward, and protect and practice new ways of living.
At Springhouse, part of our work is to protect the conditions in which another way of life can take root, not by waiting for the world to change, but by beginning to live differently together now.
May we all wake up to the gift of our lives. May we notice the habits and structures that shape us, and have the courage to change what no longer serves life. May we make room for what we cannot yet plan for, and live wholeheartedly enough that new possibilities can find us.
Thank you for reading, and I wish you well this autumn season,
Jenny
