Giving Up the Ghosts of Unholy Hustle

Photos and thoughts taken, captured, and compiled by Jeanette Mayo. Fabric is, as so often is the case, the benefactor of such thoughtful creativity!

Cultural winter descends bedazzled with holiday season pomp and cheer, eventually crossing the fabricated threshold of calendar pages and settling into a long-haul bleakness (at least for some of us!), offering the distraction of shiny newness as an antidote. Who isn’t enticed by the allure and promise of physical or psychological “remodeling”? Better, Best and Beyond to the rescue! What an ideal time to get off the treadmill instead. Fabric’s January series has been a perhaps counterintuitive opportunity to reflect on the merits of “giving up” some of these habitual “new year” grooves.

Speaking of worshipping at the altar of More and Better, I savor the “wish list” perusal of holiday catalogs from my mailbox as much as anyone. One particularly festive LL Bean cover featured a creative Christmas “tree” fashioned from cozy slippers, but what really caught my eye were the words printed in large white font: “Well Made to be Well Loved”. Clever marketing aside, I could almost hear an angelic whisper: “Hey you, in case you forgot . . . YOU are the gift.” We are, each of us, loving one another into realness like the Velveteen Rabbit. What if that were enough? What if we didn’t need to be, do, or have “more”? What if today’s me doesn’t need to be justified, nor future me “earned”? Does a hibernating grizzly enter her den expecting to emerge a “better” bear? She might have a new cub or two, but her essence remains unimproved (gasp!).

In contrast, Nature’s “new” waits for spring, and even then, it’s not a matter of “new and improved”, merely a quiet reawakening of what lay beneath all along: a cyclical, seasonal unfolding of the fullness of time. Mother Earth’s winter brings multiple lessons about stillness, slowing down, embracing the dark and the stark. In her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, author Katherine May observes the wisdom shown by animals and plants: “Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs.” Human social constructs may not allow us to fully mimic seasonal wisdom in our lives, but perhaps there are ways to prioritize the yin/yang dance between receptivity and agency. The pull of exaggerated resolve—navigating life by effort and will alone—can too easily convince us that “success” or “failure” depends solely on individual actions, leaving no room for acknowledging the power of external conditions or our interdependence. An insightful tidbit that helps redirect my fault-finding tendencies comes from speaker Alexander den Heijer: “When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.” Conditions must be right before the flower can take in what it needs and thrive. Are we not the same?

One of the most significant aspects of my spiritual growth over time has been learning how much I need to flex my “receiving muscle”, as author Toko-pa Turner calls it in her book Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home. Between unhealthy childhood programming and relentless societal training about rugged individualism, presto: instant shame whenever I cannot handle a hurdle on my own. What a revelation (and revolution!) that perhaps human beings are designed for community and reciprocity. “Worship at the altar of your being supported. After all, you are the receiver of too many generosities to count. Count them anyway,” Toko-pa Turner encourages. She continues: “. . . receptivity is the capacity that allows us to accept divine support, as well as the gifts of others and of nature. Like a plant drawing nutrients from the earth, we are equipped with the ability to receive guidance and well-being from a field greater than ourselves. But if we’ve been conditioned by scarcity, or the culture’s pronounced bias towards doing, we may have atrophied the receiving muscle.” Especially in Western culture, where being in the position of giving is far preferable and receiving is tainted with the taste of moral failure.

“To receive well is to know the wisdom of surrender,” writes Turner. Surrender—the opposite of hustling. And your tribe is wider than you might think: “In some native cultures, the term for plant translates to ‘those who take care of us’,” Robin Wall Kimmerer states in Braiding Sweetgrass. What a mindset shift! Next time you’re on a walk, thank the trees for taking care of you. Think expansively about all the networks and all the layers of belonging, human and wild, that are embedded in your existence. You matter, you are not alone, and you are held by these sacred threads; lean into the peace of that assurance.