May's Theme: The Turning Wheel
And how we respond to it
The theme I’ll be sticking to for the month of May is: The Turning Wheel.
The turning wheel is a moment, a circumstance, or a season that might feel chaotic, or unfair or where we don’t like what’s happening, but there isn’t anything tangible we can do about it…
It’s uncertainty, it’s endings, it’s when we feel like we desperately have to figure it all out.
I’m currently in one of those seasons.
Historically, I would spend all my time, energy, thoughts, and conversations trying to grip and control that wheel of uncertainty.
Presently, I’m trying to change that.
I’m seeing what it’s like when I stay in the center.
Lindsay Mack, a wonderful teacher of Tarot, explains what this means in her podcast episode about The Wheel of Fortune card:
Staying in our center can be super uncomfortable, but it’s actually less uncomfortable than trying to grip and control. If you are busy trying to grip and control and figure out what’s coming next, then it becomes all about the bumps.
Staying in the center means you start with what’s immediately in front of you. The day-to-day. You are open to whatever wants to arise, and you are tending to what needs your attention. You are chopping wood and carrying water. You are being in your life.
There is only the present moment of your life.
The poem of the week is: “The Turning Wheel”
Everything within me wants to know: The time The place The state The weather The plan The way I should act to ensure nothing ever goes up in flames (again) Everything within me says it knows: nothing will turn out if I don’t monitor every moment and every moment around it… I’m just trying to turn the wheel around, to click different feelings into space, to direct a change, to make a right turn into fate. But I’m tired of all this forward & backward tired of being jostled about by turbo speeds & clumsy reversals and gravity keeps pulling all of my moments back down to the ground. So, finally I say: OKAY! Okay. And I go inward, to the still hub of the turning wheel, where time is not an ailment where nothing will move me - a place where I can be like a bear in her cave who knows the weather is not against her, It just is and it will be. I sit and let everything creak around me, every moment a wave every breath a cloud every pulse a yes, this too. I sit until the sun rises inside my chest and flowers start to grow out of my brain. Everything within me sees it now: Slowness is a gift, like the lollygagging lift of my eyelids every morning like waiting for coffee to fill the largest cup I own bit-by-bit, like unrushed red buds at the end of a cold-spring maple, a burgeoning reminder: I am right where I need to be. There is nothing I should be doing And nothing left undone right now, the only thing that needs me is this poem, slowly unfolding.
In my somatic movement class on Monday night (where we mapped the bones of the pelvis), our teacher reminded us that through gravity, we are always falling to the center of the earth, and so we are always held and supported by the earth. I loved being reminded of that feeling of releasing into gravity and thus being held here and now. And earth being a big turning wheel and our home, it syncs so nicely with your reflections! Loved reading this poem ❤️
🙏🏼 beautiful