Unbecoming a Lone Wolf

I have lived much of my life in Lone Wolf territory: hunkering down, keeping myself to myself, figuring things out alone, guarding against the pressures and judgements of the world.

I have also lived in collaborative teamwork territory: sharing space and spaceholding, letting myself be known by others, risking honesty, figuring out how to do things together in ways that work.

What’s become ever more clear as I choose more often to be in radically collaborative territory (here at the Magic Cow Bridge-House) is that I bring my habits and attitudes with me from Lone Wolf territory:
I sit with a team, yet don’t say what’s is in me to say.
I declare that I am here for collaboration, yet I keep my proposals to myself.
I declare that I am here for transformation, yet I let victim stories silently rule.

I go back and forth between ‘being on the team’ and ‘being a Lone Wolf’. Between the ecstasy of creative collaboration and the misery of desperately wanting to escape.

I have what I somehow want, despite my outer declarations: energetic whiplash. Mixed commitments. An addiction to victim stories. Tools and possibilities that ‘solve it’ — temporarily.

Surveying all this the inevitable, familiar pull sets in; the same two roads: beat myself up and blame myself, or push away and blame ‘them’. The whiplash is inside me, twisting my parts around each other, dragging my attention, revving me up into ‘do something!’ mode. I freeze.

It is evermore obvious to my team that this is all going on. The dreaded question comes: “Why are you even here?”

I go liquid. I navigate, with the help of my teammates, into reality.

I feel scared. I don’t know what to do.

Soon it is obvious: ask for possibilities.

I ask my team, what do you have for me that I cannot see? Please give me possibilities for experiments I can do to shift out of these Insidious Stories.

They speak. I write:

1. Put it on the table when I am testing someone, and how I am testing them.
2. Strengthen my Purpose-Sniffing muscles: when I have left a conversation, review: what was my purpose? Go back and say what it was, and ask: how does this land?
3. Bring in what the assumptions are and shift on purpose to the assumption: “They love me.”
4. Sit down a couple of times each day and map the Underworld pattern: how does my Swamp go, how do I trap people not not being on my team? Get it super clear, and sit down with others and ask how they see it.

As I write, here, now, after doing #4 for 3 days, I discover: I have gone Lone Wolf about this! I forgot the part about asking others how they see it! Fascinating!

I feel joy that my response is, “Fascinating!’ Rather than “O fuck I am so hopeless.”

The mapping is working.

It turns out there are various types of Swamp I typically end up in. So far I have discovered these:
1. Noone wants me on their team, leave them before they leave me;
2. Frozen, I cannot say or do anything lest I be judged;
3. Hooked by a memory of being done wrong that never did get sorted out, and see how it is playing out all over again;
4. I just can’t do it, I am too late, too old, too set in my ways, not brave enough; therefore I am doomed.

Between the options of Lone Wolfing and Being on a Team, there is new territory I can discover and map out.

It is accessible when I become a Researcher discovering how the Lone Wolf and effort-to-Team patterns go. It is an accessible while I avoid and make it wrong or bad. When I go there, unfolding what I find, looking for the next layer, gathering possible Emotional Healing Process doorways, I find out how it really is.

I can taste a new kind of air as I encounter this territory, not trying to get out of the problem of having it, of having old patterns, obsessed with trying to fix my awful self. The air is fresh and light, and there is a lot of it.

The air in the territories I have become used to has its own qualities.

Shift almost imperceptibly and the air is completely different.

Noticing the change in ‘the air’, I can sit down with my Beep! Book and trace back to what began it this time. What was the trigger, the hook? Then what happened? How did it go in all 5 of my bodies? What stories did I tell myself and what proof did I gather? What voices did I hear? What voices responded? How did I try to get out of it? How did that go? Are there any assumptions to check out? Any Emotional Healing Processes to ask someone to hold space for?

The air starts to clear.

Something entirely different has become possible for me, and as I sit here breathing the air of new territory there is low intensity ecstasy. I can do this. And I am not alone as I do. I have a Team who are also Underworld Researchers, curious and fascinated by Underworlds; their own and …mine.

Not for the purpose of blaming, shaming, catching or calling out, but for the purpose of being alongside each other, on each other’s teams, noticing, shifting, rolling in new ways.

I let the ecstasy get bigger. This is the life of my wildest dreams.

AND! There are chickens, pigs, composting, food forests, a beaver pond and trails, deer, coyotes, porcupine, Monarch chrysalids and milkweed, apple trees, acres of forest, other edgeworkers coming to visit and who knows what else on the way: Inner and Outer Permaculture, with a TEAM! O MY!

And…they love me.