Risk, It’s My Recommendation
By Michelle Katz
Everything is in bloom as the rains have come to New Mexico. We have had a very inconsistent monsoon season, heat and drought and fire, then early rain, then heat and no rain in sight for weeks, then little spirts of rain to something that resembles true monsoons. I have watched the roses in my garden risk their fill bloom and fall various times this year. Small buds seemed to burn off in the early heat of the season, small burst of blooming and then wind that carried them away. Just in the last week they have become vibrant and full. I cannot help but applaud them for their ability to risk again and again, to show themselves and then be hit by the weather again and again, until they found a perfect symbiotic union with the elements for the full expression of reds, yellows, and pinks in layered mandala like petals moving from the center into the world.
It is no small feat to bloom in the desert as the climate grows more and more unpredictable and harsh. It is no different for us. The world grows more unpredictable and harsh: in climate, politics, race relations, war, national health emergencies, the list goes on. How are we to muster up the energy to attempt to bloom again and again if we get burned or tossed around and blown away from our base? Risk. Risk and the courage to risk. It takes guts to do what doesn’t quite make sense or is not popular, to embrace your vulnerability and show up regardless of how others perceive you or how ready the world is to see you in your fullness.
Love is a daily reminder of risk. Before a relationship, we are vulnerable to the quick judgements of a potential mate, someone who doesn’t yet know us projects ideas (the good and the bad) onto who we are, while all we can do is risk revealing ourselves as we truly are. At the beginning of a relationship, the projections continue and the risk to show up as our true self becomes greater, worried about acceptance and reciprocity. As the level of risk grows, the sense of potentially being obliterated increases, and so down goes our desire to show up. But if we do, if we risk to love consistently, eventually, love reaches a peak, a full seeing and showing up as our true selves with utter acceptance, reciprocity and the adventures together just get better!
Our hopes and dreams require risk as well. We risk every time we choose to step into the “arena”, (as Brene Brown calls the space where we are living our purpose). Especially right now, in the world of social media creating a platform for folks to rise each other up, but more often used to knock each other down. Following our purpose has the same path and require much risk. We grow a bud, we are hit with the impossibilities and the nay sayers, we shrivel small and fall off our foundation. But our knowing still lives in us and under some almost ideal conditions we bud again, even unfold a few petals here and there watered by the few drops that nourish our ideas, until the failures and defeats let the purpose fly away. Still it lives in us. When the absolutely right conditions come to be and if we are consistent in following our heart, the bud shows itself again and flowers into its full bloom. If we ever have risked to live into our dreams or to love another, we know this path well. It’s the most courageous thing we do.
My path has had many iterations, and locations, many defeats, and re-creations. Visions and loves that have come in and out of my life… tumbles and surrenders, abandoning and reviving, and oh so many beautiful revisions. There have been truly huge defeats, circumstances that have caused me to question everything about myself, to reinvent, to become more vibrant in color with each reclaiming of love and dreams. The falls, in their incredible pain, more wholly defined my path, solidified my resolve, and brought depth to my being and my vision. We never truly discard what lives in us, but it does require risk, despite the circumstances, if we are to live into our purpose, if we are to bloom. I cannot help but risk myself for it again. As Anais Nin reminds us, “and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” With this, I implore you, go out, bloom, risk it all to show your full self!