Making Space
in both the physical and mental spheres
profuse fruit on the Mulberry tree
It’s school holidays here in Australia; the break between Terms 3 and 4; the beginning of Spring! As a consequence I have been cleaning out the house - going through the linen cupboard, shifting my Autumn/Winter clothes into storage, pulling out the last of the root veggies in the garden….
Why do we feel the need to Spring Clean? It’s as if the concept is part of us, part of our deep evolution tucked down in our Rex Brain (the reptilian part of our brainstem that’s responsible for our basic survival). Many cultures have this concept at various points in the calendar year, like sweeping out of the house on New Year’s Eve to represent moving last years ‘stuff’ out of our lives and making space for new opportunities - “out with the old in with the new”.
I find it feels so good to remove the old linen and demote it to the ‘drop-cloth’ bag in the shed, and send the ill-fitting clothes to a clothing swap for someone else to find, and to make space in the garden for the lighter Summer fruits (by ‘fruit’ I mean anything with an internal seed).
As somewhat of a side-note…in Anthroposophical Medicine, Rudolph Steiner saw the eating of root vegetables as drawing us down into the Earth and increasing our Melancholic tendencies - good for Winter and good for, say, a child who is very ‘flighty’ (what he would call Sanguine) and not well-rooted in the World yet, but not so good for most of us in Spring when we need to be coming out of our hibernation back into the world around us. The Summer fruits have the opposite affect on us - they bring us up and out of our dormancy, ready to interact with our Community and find our conviviality again!
Another question I have been pondering is: how do we make space in our lives (in our minds and hearts) when everything seems so busy and chaotic and complicated and cluttered?
Several people have said to me lately that they feel overwhelmed or frenetic or chaotic. And several of my adult patients have said they were recently diagnosed with Adult ADHD or that their doctor/psychologist thinks they are ‘on the Spectrum’. I’m very dubious of these diagnoses, I must say. I wonder if they are, rather, symptoms of the frenetic culture we live in; the body’s way of telling us something in our environment isn’t right and that we need to pay close attention to our surroundings because there is danger close by.
I don’t doubt that people think differently and come at life from different angles, with varying personalities and perspectives; and I don’t doubt that our biochemistry can vary as well. But, I think your body (here I am including the brain in the body, not a separate entity as Renee Descartes perceived it to be) sends you messages about your safety and these are the things we call “symptoms”. Symptoms are your body’s way of communicating with you, they are not ‘bad’ in and of themselves, rather they are your body’s way of getting your attention.
In the case of ADD/ADHD and Autism diagnoses, I wonder if these symptoms are primarily a reflection of our frenetic lifestyles - lack of sleep, lack of nutrients in our food, toxins everywhere, bad relationships, the unhinged societies we live in, lack of trust…and, most importantly, an absence of Spirituality to anchor us to something, a moor. Without this mooring how can we feel secure in this World?
Paul Kingsnorth talks about the 4P’s: People, Place, Prayer and the Past as a way to sum up the necessities of our life here. We need other people, our Community, as we are social beings. We need to be rooted in a place, somewhere which is familiar that we steward in some way. We need a relationship with God. And we need a connection to where we came from - our family, ethnicity, tradition, rituals.
In our modern lives we lack some, maybe all, of these requirements. We find it hard to keep things in perspective without talking to others we trust about new ideas and concepts. We feel uprooted and transient without the familiarity of the country around us. We have no objective boundaries, ethics and morals without the tenants of a religion. And, we can’t find direction or orientation in a world devoid of any tradition, rituals and customs.
Our lack of the Four P’s has lead us to the chaos of our culture (I hate to use that word as I feel we no longer have a culture, maybe just a society, but the word society also points to some kind of commonality and cohesion, of which both are lacking greatly). This chaos, felt as free-floating anxiety or agitation or turmoil or however it is that you perceive it, are the symptoms of our societal upheaval. And we need to pay attention to those symptoms, not mask them or push them away or medicate ourselves through them. We are meant to pay attention to them like the canary in the coal mine.
The symptoms point towards the problem(s). I know it seems overwhelming at first glace to deal with our predicament, but we must, step-by step, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour. If we turn away, if we ignore the festering wound, it will just grow and eat away at everything it touches.
May I suggest a starting point might be to ‘make space’ in our lives - space for the 4 P’s. When we make space for relationships, for country, for God and for tradition we inevitably must remove other things in our lives; this is a trade-off. All the extraneous stuff needs to fall away so we can have space for that which is truly important.
Letting go of the pervasive ‘us vs them’ mentality that dominates our societies in the West today; letting go of always being right, of holding onto wounds and trauma - this is where we can start ‘making space’ so that the 4P’s can flood into that expanse and fill us with things we really need in our lives…People, Place Prayer and Past.
Now that I have spent time removing things from my life, here is a list of the things I am allowing into my life, in deference to the 4 P’s:
making a sprang bag - a prehistoric weaving technique that looks like netting, but only requires the warp threads
wet-felting toys for my grandson
praying the Rosary each day
going to church each Sunday followed by time and meals shared with family and friends
planting beans, potatoes and flowers (trying to encourage more bees to visit)
sowing Summer fruit seeds - zucchini, squash, tomatoes, cucumbers….
making a few salads and less stews; making more egg and dairy dishes
re-learning Latin (it’s all starting to come back to me now)