10/05/2022
So many of Toko-pa’s words resonate. 🪷💛
“While it may feel like a lack of loyalty to break from the group, you are answering a higher authority which, paradoxically, may also be the life of the group wanting to grow through you.
More often than not, existing structures don’t listen to their constituents, because they want things to remain as they are - or grow in a single, unsustainable direction. But the greatest leaderships don’t create followers; they create innovators.
The healthy circle of belonging welcomes conflict and dissonance as the early warnings they are: signalling change and calling for growth. Your rebellion is a sign of health. It is the way of nature to shatter and reconstitute. Anything or anyone who denies your impulse to grow must either be revolutionized or relinquished.
As Marianne Williamson famously wrote, “It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” Ultimately, I think we’re afraid of the demands it makes on our complacency. Nature is always calling us into greater gestures of bravery. And as we accept those invitations to our personal edge, we lose the ability to shrink into falseness.
The practice above all practices is to relinquish the immature desire to be taken care of in false belonging and to parent our own originality. Again and again, our dreams demand leadership from us, calling our life’s vision forward into the world, step by tenderbrave step.”
Excerpt From “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner (belongingbook.com)
Photograph of Toko-pa’s brown boots, standing on a flat rock at the edge of a river. In the clear water we can see stones and fallen leaves.
