On the plateau — my year of shedding skin and taking flight
Last year, I came to a turning point in my life. I found out I had reached the plateau.
For a long time I had pictured my life’s path as some sort of upward slope. There was school to finish, a diploma to earn, a job to find, a family to build, a career as an author to pursue. When I had somehow managed all that, I figured I would reach a plateau where the view was gorgeous, a lush green meadow with a cabin on it shielded by woods, where I could settle for real, live my vocation and gaze at the snow-capped peaks in the distance.
For years I walked my climbing path. I frequently got out of breath, and the lush green high-altitude meadows seemed ever out of reach. But I kept going, convinced that one day I would reach the plateau that distinguished the experienced from the beginners, the professionals from the amateurs. I would recognize it when I reached it, I would know I was home as soon as I set foot on it. Once I got there, everything would fall into place.
(You can guess where this is going, right?)
I suffered some setbacks on my way up. I started second-guessing my job. Mothering two stepchildren was a very unrewarding and emotionally draining enterprise. Birthing and raising my own son was a transformative yet utterly exhausting experience.
I managed to publish four novels in ten years, but I never caught on to the kind of flow in which my next book was eagerly expected and appreciated by both audience and publishers. Instead, I toiled, and I carried on, knocking on doors over and over again, and waiting — hoping — for things to get a little easier and the plateau to arrive at last.
Last year, somewhere over the summer, it caught me off guard.
I have always lived my life consciously, keeping in touch with my aspirations, fears, longings and wounds and working with them as best I could. And I was aware that for the last year or two I had been going through a process of becoming more and more attuned to what I truly wanted to do with my life in order to have an impact on the world, to make a difference for the better. I had been letting go of some dear old pre-conceived goals and ideals I realized I had outgrown. It felt like shedding skin. Slowly, but decisively — multiple layers of skin. And it felt good.
Then something stalled. Evolution grinded to a halt, doubt crept in. I lost all sense of direction and purpose. I wasn’t getting anywhere, it seemed.
I was in our family car, cruising along some curving Spanish highway, when the image presented itself in full force to my mind. I saw myself standing in a meadow. The tall grass was summer dry and straw-colored. The image had a worm’s eye perspective: all I could see was grass, and me in it from the knees up, surrounded by nothing but blue sky.
In that instant I realized: I’m already there. I have in fact reached the altitude I was aiming for all along. I’m on the plateau. Only… there’s nothing here.
I felt utter dread and disappointment as the truth of it sank in. I had in fact reached what for two decades I had thought of as my destination. I had obtained all those goals I had initially set for myself. I had earned my place in the world, as mother, author, journalist and professional alike. I had toiled for so long, trying to get to this point for years, and now here I was — stuck. Nothing but grass and sky. No meadow, no cabin, no more slopes to climb or trails to follow. No snow-capped mountains in the distance.
I wondered: is this a midlife crisis? It sure felt like one.
It took a bit of mental and emotional adjustment to get my mind around this feeling of stuckness and dread, and I managed to do that, how appropriately, on a beautiful mountain hike. There I learned that the plateau was not the dreary sea of dried grass it had seemed at first sight. It was in fact a place of luxury.
I might not have turned out the bestselling author I once wished myself to be, but I had nothing left to prove to anyone. I had come into my own and I was appreciated and taken seriously by both loved ones and colleagues.
The true privilege of reaching the plateau was that I was now at liberty to enjoy myself. I didn’t have to climb steep slopes anymore, unless I felt like it. I could do a bit of everything, just for fun. Perhaps one day a sweet wind was blowing and it could be nice to follow it. Perhaps there was a butterfly I wanted to chase. Perhaps I just felt like lying flat on my back and looking up at the clouds for a while. Some occupations could be fleeting, others could turn out to be the start of an exciting new hike — anything was possible.
So I embraced the plateau.
I opened my arms, threw my head back for the sun and the wind to touch it, and waited for the clouds and the butterflies to catch my attention.
And they came.
Slowly and rather unobtrusively at first, but unmistakably. And the messages they brought grew ever clearer.
Looking back now, nine months — a full pregnancy — later, I feel that what was sown on that beautiful hike in the Pyrenees has matured to the point where I can start manifesting it in the world.
The little nudges life threw at me as I stood enjoying the weather on the plateau were colorful and diverse — I encountered and took up kyudo; I was asked to write a short story for ten-year olds that is to feature in school books all over the country; I started to gently shift the focus of some of the articles I write for a living; I resigned from the board of two volunteer organizations on which I had spent a number of pleasant years as I was climbing up to the plateau; I gave up my teaching tenure definitively; my collaboration with illustrator Jurgen Walschot sprouted wings (or should I say saplings?), unexpectedly turning what used to be a hesitant partnership into both a richly fulfilling multi-project endeavor and a friendship; I have begun writing and translating in English in earnest; I stumbled across the work of ecopsychologist David Abram and I am currently translating the first chapter of The spell of the sensuous into Dutch, hoping to spark a publisher’s interest — but soon I started to distinguish a common thread.
For lack of a better word, I will call it spirit.
I am no stranger to inner altitudes: as a child I used to ‘float’, always up in my head since the real world felt like too harsh and too threatening a place to live in. It took me years of patient work to land in my body and the sensuous world around me in such a way that it felt safe for me to put down roots and connect to reality. I eventually did, and I even enjoyed digging my roots in deep, feeling happy in this new, solid stability. A lot of this experience I acquired as I gradually made my climb towards the plateau. I arrived there firmly rooted.
Since last summer, when I surrendered myself to life on the plateau and connected to an inner source of strength an acceptance, I felt myself move skywards again, gently at first, than ever more purposefully.
I have always wanted to do spiritual work. Although I strongly benefited from several kinds of training I followed, becoming a personal coach in my own right never quite appealed to me. There always was a resonance of the spiritual in my writing, but often that would come about driven by a subconsious need rather than forged by conscious intent.
Recently, however, the spiritual has worked its way center stage in my life. I recognize it and I feel I have now reached the point where I can become an apprentice to this force for real.
I leafed through unpublished work that I wrote almost two decades ago, and I caught myself thinking: yes!
It was all there all along, only like lava too hot to touch I didn’t know how to handle it gently and bring it back to the village so others could use it.
Now I do.
I am not exceptional in any way, but like a vulture or a sequoia tree I feel that the altitude where part of my life naturally unfolds is on a higher plane than where many other living creatures go. It has always been this way, only I didn’t quite have conscious access to it.
Like a vulture, even if I frequently work on ground level, cleaning up and being useful in service of the greater good, I needed to be able to set off from a cliff in order to catch the thermal current that would lift me higher. Like a giant sequoia, meant to grow high enough to literally touch the sky, I needed to be firmly rooted in order to do that safely.
Now I am. I’m on the plateau. It’s where I’ve made my nest and dug in my roots.
In the end, I understand that this is the true reason why I had to come all this way, and that is also why I had to shed so much old skin as I arrived. You can’t fly high if you’re weighed down by too much ballast, however useful it might have been to you on the way up. Imagine a vulture sporting a backpack and walking boots…
In my early twenties, I woke up one morning with a phrase running through my head: ‘the one who walks between the worlds’. I loved the sound of it, it struck a chord somewhere deep inside me.
I truly wished this meant me, but I couldn’t for the life of me decide whether it wasn’t just a foolish dream by a girl who had read way too much Tolkien.
Now I know that it wasn’t.
My journey has only begun.
This post is based on the original Cowbird post On the Plateau, but elaborates on it and goes beyond it, since time has passed since then, and things have become ever so much clearer, like they tend to do from up on high…
