Am I learning, or remembering?
Thoughts on what we've always known, even if it feels new.
As I’ve been working on a manuscript these last couple of months, something that keeps coming up is how much the story I’m sharing is not one of learning new things, but instead, of remembering things that were already present a long time ago, both in me, and in others.
I submitted a proposal for this book not thinking I’d share too much of my story, and now, pieces of my story are the spine that holds the words together. Chapter by chapter I thought I would be inviting the reader into beautiful new rhythms that I had learned, rhythms of slowing down, tuning in with the body, and tending to the soul. The more I’ve written though, the more I’ve realize over and over again, that this was not a process of learning, but of remembering. The movements of a couple sweet little ones made me think about this more this past week…
On a hot and humid Wednesday, I visited a friend with twin girls who just turned one. Despite the adults preferring the air conditioning to the oppressive heat, they wanted to visit their flowers and trees in the front yard. One of them asked me to pick her up, frantically pointing to a dogwood that she wanted to be near. I walked over, and she started touching and grabbing the leaves and the bark. As though she was petting a beloved cat, she pressed her fingers against the bark, slowly enjoying the texture that met her fingertips. Her face lit up with joy, making clear she had no desire to go inside anytime soon.
The next day, a friend sent me a video of her daughter in the front yard, taking turns hugging different plants in their flower bed. One by one, she crouched down to the ground, face to the mulch, embracing the plant she chose for that moment. Then she’d stand up, slowly surveying where the soles of her feet would step next, finding her next stems to clutch. Her thoughtfulness and presence with these plants in her rotation of hugs was palpable through the video.
These moments make me wonder, when did we stop petting bark and hugging plants? And why did we stop petting bark and hugging plants? I’ve spent the last 2+ years taking clients outdoors for outdoor therapy, walking alongside rivers, sitting under trees, and hiking trails while moving through grief. I’ve thought of this shift in my professional work as a shift toward something new, like I found something and learned something that was first foreign to me, but now I know and love. Really though, this wasn’t me learning something new, this was me tapping back into things that I already knew, and helping my clients do the same.
In those outdoor therapy spaces, there’s a rawness that invites us to slow down and notice a bird call, enjoy the season of the leaves, and feel the thickness or chill in the air, things that our fast paced lives rarely have margin for. This is just one kind of space where I’ve felt my system lulled into a new rhythm, one that seems brand new and like an answer to the ache inside that is sick of having spent so much of life feeling tired and stuck. The more I’ve seen and breathed that there’s so much more to us than our thinking brains, the more I feel like a little kid who has stumbled across a treasure that feels new and shiny. But the more I slow down with this, the more I realize that the youngest and most core facets of me have known these things all along, and it’s just the doing parts of me that are starting to catch on.
For me, it hits differently to think about this as remembering something that my body has already known, rather than learning something new. Instead of thinking that I’m fixing myself with some sort of new solution, it helps point me to neglected facets of my being — depths of my soul that have been there since I would pet bark and hug trees, never having gone away even if my attunement with them did.
And so, to gently remind myself that I’m remembering helps me see the parts of me that have been there all along, even if I haven’t seen them along the way. To realize I’m not simply learning something new is like a sweet invitation to sink into what I’ve always known, bringing together the young parts of me that want to join in petting bark with the tired parts of me that are often doing too much to slow down and follow an inclination to hug a plant, remembering that I’m so much more than my thinking brain — a whole embodied being.
