I recently led a Hop, Skip, Jump retreat in Portland. It was a wonderful weekend with women from across the country, coming together to playfully manifest.
This is a story about one of the activities that I led, with the held of Barbara Krauss.
We all stood in a circle, each with a ball of yarn in our hands, and then tossed the ball to someone else in the group, while finishing the phrase, “I am saying YES to _______________.”
After several go rounds, the goal was to then follow the ball of yarn to find your partner for the next exercise. Seems simple enough, and a fun kind of ice-breaker for connecting with your partner.
It didn’t end up working that way; the yarn was too tangled to easily find the partner. Yet it was just beautiful to see that tangled web in the middle of the circle, each of us holding a thread of it. It held our YESes.
We worked together to untangle. We moved slowly, we moved quickly, let go and held on. Eventually we stopped, and hung up the design in the window, a colorful web of light.
The “planned” partner activity gave way to something else…a moment of just being present. Nietzsche said “One must have chaos in oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star.”
How might you love the beauty of your tangles?