Hopeful lessons from gorse!

hopeful-lessons-from-gorse

Who knew that the outer petals of gorse flowers were hairy!

I didn’t until I saw them close up this week.

Are you discovering your noticing skills are increasing or is it all just a blur?

We assume that to notice the new we need to go to different places. When actually much of it is right in front of us, we’ve just stopped seeing.

Therefore, being in the same place, walking the same route, need not lead to boredom. Not if we are open to noticing amongst the familiar.

I’m finding this with relationships too.

We can choose to hop-off a familiar difficult conversation at the same point, or give it space to breathe. And go deeper.

Yes, this is uncomfortable, but when are we going to have this opportunity again?

Which brings me to hope.

A hope-reset

I feel like I’m only scratching the surface here, but I sense that there is something really important about restoring hope.

Not the kind of superficial hope that just wants to hear: “be happy – everything is going to be okay.” Just like it was before…

I want to be part of a hope-reset that has a much wider application than just me and mine.

And whilst I don’t know what it looks like – yet – I choose hope and want to explore what it means.

I get a hint of it in the words circulating this week from Sonya Renee Taylor

We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalised greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.

Sonya Renee Taylor quoted by Brené Brown

Let’s choose hope as we inch forward. It’s a daily practice and we need to give ourselves permission to fail, and then pick ourselves up again.

Cheering each other on as we go.

Thanks for reading,

Sue

BTW I hope you don’t mind my frequent images of gorse at the moment – it’s what’s here in abundance in the valley. And I love the smell of coconut as I walk by. As my colleague, Dominic Chiarella from The Creative’s Workshop said: “The yellow brightness shows hope.”

This week

Learning in a time of lockdown takes many forms. Perhaps this is all part of the hope–reset. Hopeful lessons from gorse, wild cherry and conifers. And friends…