It’s sunny in the gorge. I’ve heard locals call this a ‘Spring tease.’ Every year, we get a little preview of what’s to come, a tiny glimpse of hope that awaits on the other side of Winter. I’ve been taking long walks and soaking it all in. On one of these walks, I stopped at a little pond where hundreds of frog and bird-sounds mingled to create a pacifying melody that seemed to directly slow my heart-rate. As I continued up the road, I turned to catch the amber eyes of a Palomino horse. Sunshine permeated my coat, and it was the first day since October that was warm enough to tie it around my waist instead. The sun beat hot but the breeze was soft and alleviating. Willow and I reached the edges of a pasture, and everything fell quiet.

Perfect doesn’t begin to cut it.

This change in weather just happens to be mirroring a sweet process of unfolding taking place in my inner landscape. If you’ve been keeping pace with my newsletters then maybe you’ve caught wind of the shift. There are certain beliefs rearranging and patterns being disrupted. But, it can all be distilled down to: I am reorienting to what is within my control.

When 2020 began and Covid sent many of our lives into disarray, the tug-of-war for our attention became frenzied and demanding (pandemic, BLM, the horrors of existence, so on and so forth). Like most of us, I was quickly preyed on by the chaos, and the little energy I had at the time was siphoned to meld with mass hysteria. At this point in my life, I didn’t have very much to give. My body was at a low-point, and it was made rapidly apparent that if I didn’t acutely focus my attention on my life, I wouldn’t have a life to focus on. So, I diverted to what was necessary. This was the first time I touched the flavor of freedom that accompanies tending what’s right in front of you.

The thing about tending is that it isn’t just something you do once or for a little while and then you’re done. It’s an ongoing, ever-deepening process of tuning into what is alive for you and effectively discerning what actually requires your attention. Moment to moment, season to season. Your needs, your priorities, your shortcomings, your preferences, your values; the context of your intrinsic humanness.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

A while ago, I listened to a podcast on autoimmune disease, and the speakers used a phrase that stuck out to me: locus of control. This is a psychological concept that refers to how much a person believes they have control over the outcomes in their life. It’s basically about whether you think life happens to you or if you believe you have a hand in shaping the outcome.

There are two main types:

• Internal locus of control: You believe your actions, decisions, and efforts directly affect your life outcomes. (Example: "I didn't get the job because I didn't prepare enough.")

• External locus of control: You believe external forces like luck, fate, or other people have more control over what happens. (Example: "I didn't get the job because the interviewer didn't like me.")

Most people fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two, and one’s position isn’t fixed there. When I considered where I fell on this graph, I knew that what I believed was a type of participatory fate. A balance between accepting the things that are beyond our control and recognizing our power to shape our path within those constraints. But, there was something at odds with my belief that I have influence and how I’ve actually been wielding that influence.

I had begun to misplace my sense of control onto things like micromanaging, needing my environment perfectly curated to suit my sensitivities, over-caretaking my loved ones, and trying to force my perspectives or comprehension onto others. My locus of control had snuck into the external part of the graph without my realizing, and the misdirection has made it feel nearly impossible to manage what actually needs tending to in any given moment. It disrupted my discernment.

Right now, the question I’m working with is: am I tending or am I fixating? Tending flows with the natural rhythm of care and patience, allowing things to evolve and unfold. Fixating, on the other hand, creates stagnation, as it focuses on trying to manage every detail or anticipate every potential outcome. Something I’m noticing is how misplaced control will trap energy in a cycle. If I find myself repeatedly meeting the same issue and responding in the exact same way, something has become rigid and somewhere I have likely lost touch with my proper place in that dynamic.

Once you see the boundaries of your environment, they are no longer the boundaries of your environment.

Marshall McLuhan

While I sense this shift taking much fuller shape with time, what I’m sharing feels like a glimpse into the unfolding that’s afoot behind the scenes, a tease of Spring; the reminder to continue to tend that which is to bloom.

Happy Spring-Tease, everyone.

Gently Downstream,
Kara