New Metaphors for Life

New Metaphors for New Life
If you haven’t read any Lakoff and Johnson, go do it. You’ll have a deeper appreciation of metaphors’ impact on meaning generation and how they act as a window to our deepest beliefs. Also, a bit from my notes on the book Action Research in Organizations:

Dominant western intellectual traditions love binary opposition – ‘either-or.’ This love of absolutes emphasizes confrontation, establishing zero-sum categories as facts. Western tradition loves fragmentation and binary opposition, and therefore they tend not to notice the metaphorical basis of scientific inquiry and social practices. What would happen if the metaphor of binary divide were to disappear? Perhaps, if we commit ourselves to generating new living theories of practice we will find metaphors that more adequately represent the transformative nature of living. Then we could move beyond metaphor, and generate theories and new forms of representation that show life as it is truly lived.

Please comment to add yours, or email me and I will add those that ring true to me.

Eels
Holly, one of the facilitators at the AHo gathering I went to, presented the group with a beautiful metaphor about birthing ideas.

Female eels live in the underground water below Florida where they swim and live until they are developed and ready to enter the world. These eels are like the unmanifest ideas, questions and projects swimming within our depths. There is nothing wrong with not saying something if it is not fully ready to emerge. There is a time and place for everything. When it is their time, they will arise of their own accord. There is no need to push or force anything.

Rails-to-Trail
I was recently riding bikes with my husband on the rails-to-trails paths where we live in Durham. This was different than any riding that I had done in a long time. I bike a lot and have even been on a one-month bike trip through four states, crossing the western continental divide about 6 times. (Lots of hills!!!!!) While riding on this completely flat rails-to-trails path, I saw a beautiful parallel between this ride and my life: it doesn’t have to be hard.

I see how so often I have implicitly made things be of higher value if I worked really hard and extended a lot of effort; I earned it. Life doesn’t have to be work. The hills and valleys of life can rise and fall to meet you. You don’t have to do everything. Some things in life can just ‘happen.’ My guess is that if you’re reading this blog you’re at least vaguely familiar the way that life can ‘just work’ sometimes, when it seems like a flow greater than yourself is guiding you. It is. Well, it is not different than that which you are. You (little, separate you) don’t have to effort and do everything. Put yourself in the flow of life and watch what emerges for and through you.