Wait and see pie

Women have waited – for a phone call, a proposal, or the return of the prodigal man from sea or war or a business trip. To wait like patients for a doctor, commuters for buses, prisoners for parole, is in a sense to be powerless… If we grow weary of waiting, we can go on a journey. We can be the stranger who comes to town.

Mary Morris ~ Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers (a great book)

Like Mary Morris suggests, I think there is a kind or way of waiting that is peculiar to women. I think we wait differently. One of the main tasks for a woman in becoming her fierce, feminine self is to dare to be the stranger who comes to town, to not stay in the passive, dependent condition of waiting but to be present to the soles of her feet and to go on her own journey, possibly literally, but certainly metaphorically. In all my literal wanderings and metaphorical journeying, this has been my goal, not in order to be self-sufficient and isolated because no-one flourishes that way, but to mark my own life. It is work, and often feels like cutting against the grain, but it is important.

And while it's true that we can go through our entire life with a kind of general waiting, there are also times when it is more ratcheted up, when there are specific endpoints we'd love to bring closer, but which we cannot rush. I've spent a lot of the last year in that sort of waiting - each time I apply for a job I have to wait, and until I know the outcome I don't know where I will be the following month and what I will be doing. I have to wait and see. Wait and see pie, that's what's for dinner.

This kind of waiting is then an urgent pull into planning the various possible futures, a constant state of uncertainty that prevents you from investing in where you are now. And you lurch from waiting to waiting, because it really doesn't end. It's exhausting.

So rather than waiting I've been trying to dwell. This is my word right now. Dwell where you are. This is the kind of 'wait' that says 'stop, breathe, look around'. The other day I took my camera out in my immediate neighbourhood precisely to wait, to hold up, to see where I live instead of rushing by in my car as I worry about next week or next month.

A few years ago I was part of a clearness committee for a woman who had given up her psychotherapy practice because she felt it was the right thing to do, but who had no idea what to do next and was feeling frustrated and stuck. She wanted to participate in the committee to discover what to do next, but as we all sat together I asked her if she felt able to befriend this time of in-betweenness, of feeling stuck. She said afterwards that she realized that this was her message that day. The pulling kind of waiting appeals to us if we're planners because it gives us something to do, something to control. The second kind of waiting - the dwelling - sets that aside, gives it up, lets things grow, heal and emerge at their own pace. It only works if we can accept the truth of ambiguity and doubt, hope and love, all present in the "great emptiness of the neutral zone" (here) and if we can trust that the Rhythm will eventually take us back to a beat.

image by me

In fact, the neutral zone is a time when the real business of transition takes place. It is a time when an inner reorientation and realignment are occurring, a time when we are making the all-but-imperceptible shift from one season of life to the next. Although such shifts cannot occur without an ending, and although they cannot bear fruit without a new beginning, it is in the neutral zone that the real work of transformation takes place.

William Bridges - Transitions (also a great book)

I've noticed that lately I like taking photos of buds rather than fully-blooming flowers. Makes sense.

 I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord.

Psalm 27: 13-14