Generosity warrants AT LEAST another week of exploring, experimenting, and creating!
I’m now in Minneapolis, a city that knows how to Winter! This resilience is partly necessary, given the low temperatures (currently 6° degrees) and lots of snow. The substantial Winter appreciation also comes from the many humans living here who look at Winter as an opportunity for creativity, connection, and getting their cozy on.
There’s a lot of Winter cozy in Minnesota! Some of this is due to the concentration of Nordic culture throughout the state. You know, the Northern clime humans that brought us the desire to embrace Winter with the Danish hygge, Finnish kalsarikännit, or päntsdrunk (yup, getting drunk in your underwear!), Swedish mis, Norwegian koselig, and Icelandic notalegt.
Hygge's great, but what about Kalsarikannit - the Finnish word for staying at home alone and getting drunk in your underwear
By: Kelly Bertrand
Just being in Minneapolis enhances my love for Winter!
It snowed again last night. This morning I was greeted by a sparkly, powdery layer over the previously shoveled sidewalks. Late morning, after two cups of coffee and creating a Mind Map about Generosity, I was ready to tend to the snow before the colder temperature of -10° tomorrow makes shoveling akin to chipping through ice.
Shoveling snow is enjoyable for me.
(I can hear the chorus of humans telling me to fuck off right now! Noted.)
I’m not going to lie; my back from yesterday's snow removal is tender.
But for a bear who is predominately of the Polar variety, snow is a sweet sigh for my spirit. (Also, I don’t own a car. Auto-related snow shenanigans are not my lot.)
It is with the snow that the beauty of Winter blooms.
The piles of snow are already high here in Minneapolis. As I made the pathways from the backyard to the front of the house, I finally reached the sidewalk. Ahead of me sat a car in the street, heavily mounded with snow. I thought, for a brief moment, it was Baci’s. I began removing the snow with my gloved paws. Then, across the street, I noticed Baci's actual car. Whose car was I cleaning?! I had a moment of hesitation before our Generosity theme swooped into my brain hole. I cleared the car of snow and felt the warmth of Generosity even while my body shivered with cold.
Generosity is Life calling to itself.
I heard the call.
I noticed the opportunity for Generosity.
I acted.
Practice
1. The first step is probably the hardest: remembering Generosity as a regular practice. This is one of the most challenging steps in Life, remembering to set the compass of our days in the direction we choose.
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(Wonderful, inspiring sidebar: Today, the fabulous, magical creature/writer/teacher Phoenix LeFae wrote on IG about the struggle to remember daily practices when you’re wading through the muck, exactly when you need those practices so desperately.
I'm sharing the post here to gift you her wisdom: https://linktr.ee/phoenixlefae
"My anxiety has been off the charts for almost two months now. One of the things that happens when my anxiety spikes is my daily practice falls away. Which makes sense, but it’s like the worst thing.
I need my daily practice the most when my anxiety spikes. And yet….
So the past two weeks I’ve been giving myself permission to play with my daily practice. I’ve been writing and meditating and pulling cards and practicing playing my flute and just letting it be fun with no rules.
And most importantly, when I don’t do my daily practice, I don’t beat myself up or take it as a sign of failure or let myself get anxious about it.
This card is my card pull from this morning. The message “be what you want to see” is what this journey with anxiety has been about.
I’m learning to go with the flow and not attempt to control every moment (not so easy for me). I’m learning to just be."
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2. Remember, we will forget to remember. We will fail to notice opportunities to enact Generosity. Totally cool. Don't fret or stress about it. We get to try again until we die.
3. Experiment with methods that gently bring Generosity to mind.
Leave notes. For me, that means some BIG ASS notes that are hard to ignore! I leave them in spots I regularly encounter, like my favorite coffee mug before the java.
Set sweet alarms unless you roll with wondrous cacophony!
Use calendars. I guess this is the same as alarms-ish?
Use Visual, audial, multi-sensorial representations of Generosity that draw your focus. Photos/songs/scents, etc...
More, please? Any ideas/suggestions would be appreciated!
4. Go about your day noticing opportunities for Generosity.
5. DO NOT feel like you have to enact all of them!
6. The Generous opportunities that give you a spark of yum? Go there/do and be that.
7. Repeat.
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I love that the person whose car I cleared will probably never know it was me, the best kind of on the DL!
There are grand gestures of Generosity, but I personally like the little ones. The tiny moments in Life where I can expand my awareness into the larger reality: my time and presence are the most precious gifts I have to give.
I know that time often seems so scarce. Maybe this is why we sometimes substitute money and things when enacting Generosity instead of offering time and presence? As a species, we're having difficulty resisting the urge to hoard resources we feel we sorely lack. We feel depleted of time and authentic presence. I know this lack feels real for many of us. But are these feelings of time and presence scarcity yet another clever trick of our survival needs going askew in a funky, consumer/extractive late-stage capitalism fandango? How are our experiences of time, presence, and Generosity warped by power over systems? Who profits from our resistance towards being Generous?
Be open today to the opportunities to be Generous that present themselves. Lean into a bigger truth that abundance is the default in Life while remembering to include ourselves in the mix. We also crave the beautiful Generosity of our own good magic and care.
We do this thing together.
We do this thing together.