We do not seek to conceal Rosslyn’s wrinkles with cosmetics, to shortchange her grace with pretense, to giddy-up her gait or hot rod her mojo. We strive to understand and embrace Rosslyn as she is, to nurture and encourage who she is becoming. In today’s post, a blueprint at best, I will endeavor to spotlight the “art of flux”, an essential ingredient in our coming to and preparing to depart Rosslyn, but also in our Rosslyn lifestyle itself.
As often with these daily dispatches from my meandering meditations, today’s post is a preemie, a premature precursor to what I hope to better articulate eventually. Part Frankensteinian skeleton. Part sketchy, scrapbooky outline. Judge not the compost-covered seed, and it may continue to germinate and eventually bear fruit. (Mix metaphors much?!)
Rosslyn & The Art of Flux
On the one hand, this property is timeless, consistent and enduring, guiding and nurturing. It has been for two centuries. It will be for two centuries more. On the other hand, there are so many elements of life at Rosslyn that align us, that keep us in tune with the perennial cycle of transition, including seasonality, lake levels rising and falling, sowing and harvesting, etc.
Rosslyn is steadfast, durable, and reliable. She is nevertheless nimble, protean, and perennially evolving. Little by little she’s cultivated in us the art of flux.
Change is the only constant in life.
— Heraclitus
Rosslyn has cultivated and rewarded our receptivity to — and even our courtship of — change. “What if?!”, mindset shifts, meaningful transition via whimsical experimentation, tapping into our inner child, cultivating our innate curiosity, challenging and questioning convention, sometimes breaking free from convention, flexing and stretching our potential, overcoming obstacles in new ways, iterating, innovating, creating questions that discomfit our confidence in existing answers, that embrace enthusiastically embrace uncertainty and familiarize us with the sorts of growing pains that reassure us we’re moving forward despite the inevitable aches of growth.
The secret of change is to focus your energy not on fighting the old, but building the new.— Socrates
At Rosslyn old and new coexist. We learn from, are fortified by, and appreciate the former while imagining and creating the new.
We’re on the cusp of a perennially bittersweet transition. One among many. A seasonal migration mid a monsoon of transitions… Such disconcert. Unsettled and evolving. If you’re curious, comfortable with unpredictability, inspired by inflection, then I invite you to join us. I’ll be waxing romantic-but-honest in the days and weeks ahead. Change, inside out, for the hale of heart. Bumps, bruises, and blemishes. But also predawn profiles emerging out of the obscurity of night; stark silhouettesand crystal clarity; the beginning of the end of a familiar, comfortable chapter and the end of the beginning of a still-enigmatic and wonder-filled new chapter. I will stumble. But with your patience, your guidance, I will get up again. And I will emerge on the other side, ready.
(Source: Predawn)
This tide change, this chapter change, this life change has concentrated my rumination much over this past year and a half. There’s a shift in the works, and I’m within it. Atop it. Sometimes beneath it. Like guiding a sloop through surging surf.
Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.— Lao Tzu
A home. A sailboat. Much overlap.
Helming 6-tons of home, vessel, food, and plans into a stiff chop and a swift blow is one of my “happy places”, as the saying goes. A plan and an itinerary but also a comfortable awareness that circumstances and conditions could shift unexpectedly, that sailing by definition presupposes a state of fluidity and flux from undocking (or untethering) to setting anchor or returning to harbor. To some degree this euphoric state is present every time I set out in any boat, any journey, any transition. Our seasonal migration between the lush shores of Lake Champlain and the high desert southwest is one of these undocking rituals. A setting out. An ending. A beginning. Closure. A fresh start. A new adventure. Another chapter. Seasonality writ large…
(Source: Undocking)
Coursing along, one with the turbulence, the urgency, the force pushing away and pulling toward,…
The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.— Kakuzo Okakura (Source: The Book of Tea)
Intentionally, consciously yielding.
Transitions. Flux. Liminality. Interstices. Inflection. Evolving. To remain nimble amidst unpredictability and unforeseen challenges, optimistic astride setbacks and failures, innovative and creative under duress. And to navigate gratefully and passionately at all times.
(Source: Transitions)
Intentionally. Consciously. Gratefully. Passionately. Yielding to flux. Growing. Creating anew. Recreating.
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.— Henri Bergson
Flowing forward.
Fusion. Collage. Combinatorial creativity… It’s been immensely satisfying to help catalyze the morphing. Every day there are more happy accidents. They’re not all tidy or comfortable. Sometimes there is friction and frustration. Sometime fission in place of fusion. But we’re in a flow state that, like an undertow and a strong surface current, are pulling us forward. Where? Too soon to say. But creative collisions and happy accidents suggest we’re trending in the right direction!
(Source: Creative Collisions & Happy Accidents)
Creative collisions. Happy accidents. While cultivating calm.
In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you.— Deepak Chopra
Is this the art of flux? So far. Update anon.
What do you think?