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The Places We Seek, The Places We Return To | 009 · Magic Thread Media

• 0:01
  Aaron Tabacco: Our lives move in patterns, things we repeat, things we return to, rituals, stories, people, and places, the familiar cycles we experience as our signposts, our stations of attention, and then sometimes we awaken more fully to these patterns, reaching a moment that asks something of us, a boundary with an invitation to turn those lines into thresholds of growth and transformation. I am Aaron Tobacco, here again with you tonight. You're listening to Circles Edges.
• 0:56
  Good evening, and good wishes, all of my friends listening to Circle's edges tonight. Welcome back to one of our regular evening programs. I've really been missing you and looking forward to this time together. Feels like it has been an age since we were sitting together here, connecting and going deep into some of the questions that you know arise for me as I think about these circles of our lives, these recurring patterns and the edges that they bring forward in us, those places where we grow and develop and struggle the places where we find joy, peace, happiness, connection, and greater purpose. I hope you enjoyed the last two new style episodes, this sort of daytime conversation programming that my producer and I put together, we both felt that it would be helpful to give you more insight into the show and into me, some of the things that I do outside of this circles edges radio in my everyday life, how I show up in the world, and the kinds of people I'm working with, and the
• 2:26
  problems I'm solving, and yet with all of that, I can't tell you how happy I am to be back again with the candles going in my late night set up in my home office just to be with you, because I've really missed you, and being together with you is so nice and so fulfilling, and just makes me feel really warm and happy. Tomorrow I am leaving to go on a much needed vacation, although I already live in the Pacific Northwest and the state of Washington. We're going to drive up to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, where we've rented a house on the water for a week. I'm taking a couple of weeks off, but this span right in the middle of that, I'm looking forward to so much. It has been six months since I've taken any time off from all of my day job work, my creative work here on Circle's edges, and of course just the work of everyday life and family, and I don't know about you, but I feel exhausted and very much ready to quiet my own mind and give some deep thought to the
• 3:55
  episodes and sessions ahead, the conversations you and I are going to have over the next six episodes or the second half of this first season, I can't help but think about this place I'm going, this need for me to leave my very comfortable home or have a beautiful garden my office looks out into, surrounded by trees, surrounded by ferns and mosses and rose bushes and a beautiful deck, I can sit out on my home is a peaceful place, and yet something inside of me desperately needs to go somewhere else, and while it will take a great deal of driving tomorrow to get where we're going, and although I'll still be surrounded by Pacific Northwest Forest, although with a different view, I find myself considering why it is that this is necessary. All that I know inside my heart is that I need to be in a different place. That place needs to be nature. It needs to feel remote. It needs to offer new spaces to explore, direct access to the water, the Pacific Ocean water, something inside
• 5:24
  of me right now is desperate for something like this. So, let's consider this together. On this episode of Circle's Edges, I had already planned that we would be moving into the third ecological circle of our lived experience, the circle of our lived environment, and I knew this episode was going to be about the places we seek and the places we return to.
• 5:58
  I didn't know at the time that I would be recording this episode ahead of experiencing this very circle, so as we're arriving together tonight here in my office, and there with you on your sofa, in your bed, in your favorite armchair, walking through a beautiful park, wherever you might be. I just want to invite you and me to arrive together in a space that we've been creating for months now, a space of trust, a space of caring, a space of deep presence, and I want you to take a breath with me, just one big giant lung-filling breath, and release it, and relax into yourself, and relax into this conversation, and come with me as we jump into this circle of places and our relationships to them about a year ago, an elderly family member of mine, who had recently lost his wife, embarked on a journey that he had wanted to make for a very long time, and that was to attend a milestone reunion of his graduating high school class, I think it was like the 60th, maybe it was even later than
• 7:48
  that. It was always held in his former hometown, which was a very, very small and dwindling community in a rural area of a far away state, and while he had been many times to this reunion with his wife over the years, it was going to be the first time he was attending alone, and it was his dream to travel there across the country by train. Now we all, as a family, were very concerned about him embarking on a very long solo train ride to attend this reunion in a relatively poor state of health, and with increasingly difficult mobility. Our concerns were very real, but he was very insistent on this trip, very committed, and it was clear that it was deeply important to him, and so, of course, we respected his autonomy and his sovereignty, and he traveled away to try and attend this reunion. There's more detail to this story that I will hold sacred and quiet, because I think it's still a fresh and difficult and personal story for my family, but I wanted to share that what I
• 9:25
  observed in this situation with him and his unflinching desire to attend this reunion was just how important places are to us as humans, how much meaning we attach to them, and how strongly we feel about them across a whole spectrum of possibilities, from the side of the spectrum where we know we will never set foot. In a place like that again, all the way to the other side of the spectrum, which is I want to be there every day of my life. There's something so powerful about geography and its relationship to what it means for us to be humans. In getting ready to record this episode, I, you know, as I am, want to do often, did a deep dive into some research around, I think, what's called mobility science, the idea of exploring how humans move around the world are in their geographies, and a very interesting study from 2018 that was conducted that involved 40,000 people resulted in the knowledge that in this very large sample that on average our worlds are lived in
• 10:59
  loops that we experience over and over and over again with about 25 places. Sometimes places will leave the list of locations we go to or spend time in, and sometimes new ones will be added, but by and large we live our lives by returning to about 25 locations over and over and over again. They also kind of discovered that there were sort of two different camps of people in their study, people who were returners consistently stayed within the bounds of the same places in their lived loops or circles, and explorers, people who were actively going to new places frequently, even if they didn't return to them, but who were seeking and looking for novelty as part of their life experience. I don't know how it is for you, but I'm very curious. As we're just setting this up for this deep dive into the circles of places, where those places are for you, where are the places you want to be and go to often. Where are the places you long to be and find yourself struggling to get there?
• 12:33
  Where are the places you actively avoid, and what might that reveal to you about yourself? So many thoughts, even circles, edges radio is in a way a place that you're returning to. It's a virtual place, and you come to it from wherever you are, and you join me from here, where I am, and our two places in space and time become sort of quantumly connected, whether you're listening to this live or in recording format, so there is something there for us to look at, something very human about trying to locate ourselves through places we leave them, we return to them, we seek them, we avoid them, we remember them, we imagine them, we consecrate them, we vilify them. All of this because we are asking places in some way, I think, to help us understand who we are through where we've been, where we seek, where we've survived, where we have thrived, where we have desired, where we hope to find ourselves becoming something greater than we are. Think we seek places because we're seeking
• 14:03
  sometimes not just the knowledge of who we are, but how to alter our state of being. We go to places that are different from the usual, like this vacation I'm heading on tomorrow, to rest, to find a sense of aliveness, experience beauty. Oh gosh, feel a certain sense of safety, of peace. Sometimes I wonder if we're seeking them because we're looking for permission to be more real than we feel we can be on a daily basis, that there's something about a particular place that's drawing us to visit it, so that we can allow ourselves to be, or to surface some part of ourselves that feels lost or can. Trained when we're experiencing the geographic circles we're looping in on an everyday basis, so I think one of these circles that places offers us to experience is that circle of seeking, we seek places and we return to them because something in us believes that we might become more whole, there we ask ourselves all kinds of questions about where those places might be, we imagine what
• 15:33
  they would be like and what qualities they would have, or we've experienced it in the past, and we want to return to that same set of circumstances over and over and over again, and we think, you know, if I can get there, I will remember who I am. If I can get to that place again, or this new place with this environment, I will finally be able to rest, or, you know, if I can get to this place where I can experience awe and magic, something will open up inside of me that I need to discover, or that I need to free, and this is all very real, because there are certain places that really help us to regulate, places that give us back a part of ourselves that ordinary life has exiled, and adjacent to that circle of seeking, I think, is a circle of escape. This idea that a place isn't just a container for awe, but that it can function as a sanctuary, and it creates a little bit of a tension, because I wonder sometimes if that sanctuary we're seeking is a place for us to escape to, or is
• 16:57
  it just that we need to escape from the place we're currently in that isn't serving us in some way, maybe it's both of those things at the same time, but just a precursor to our next discussion about edges that places can function in duality and in multiplicity, because even if we find a sanctuary where we feel we can return or discover to figure out who we are or find the rest we're seeking, we're occasionally disappointed to discover that that locked room we felt we were in, wherever we were before our escape is something we carried with us, and the place didn't affect us in the way we had hoped. Does that seem very relatable to you? I would bet you have stories just like I do of grand expectations about some sort of place you wanted to go to with very high idealized hopes of what you would find and gain there, only to leave feeling unchanged and disappointed.
• 18:15
  Certainly, the opposite happens as well, by intention or by just delightful happenstance, we find ourselves in a place where our intentions are met or even exceeded or revealed to us needs within ourselves we didn't even know we had, and maybe that's why these places that exist for us, whether they're they exist in reality, and they're grounded in a particular geography, or they exist in our mind, and they're a dream we constantly seek, is that they're interwoven experiences with the idea of the circle of leaving and returning. Sometimes it's very literal. These places are hometowns, a childhood home you haven't been in in 40 years, but drive by from time to time just to take a look. For me, one of my most healing places is Cannon Beach, Oregon. I've returned there over many times, over several decades, because I have attached there the experience of solitude and renewal and self discovery. I've returned to it, and left it, and returned to it so many times that it's become
• 19:45
  crystallized, I think, in my bones as one of those places that I need to return to in order to feel that level of self connection I have disciplined myself to discuss. Ever when I'm there, sometimes these places aren't visited in that literal context, but we go there in our heads, maybe we can't drive by the childhood home or grandparents' home that was so meaningful to us, maybe it doesn't exist anymore, or we don't have access to it, or it's been changed so profoundly that it hurts our heart, so we return to it in our mind over and over again. We return to it in a space where it provides us the thing we're seeking in terms of that familiarity in the feelings that it gave us at a former or earlier time in our lives. I think it's often true that that particular experience is often tied to a circle of home in whatever home has meant to us at different points in our lives, there seems to be some kind of a need for us to reconnect with that, whether mentally or physically, just like the
• 21:14
  family member I mentioned who traveled so far to a disappearing town to a disappearing reunion where only a few faces remained from their original community, because going there reignites a certain set of feelings and an experience of knowing who he was during the most formative years of his life, perhaps it was to re-experience the feeling of early strength and vigor and aliveness that came from growing up in this small town with these particular people who were among the very few who had any shared context with what that experience was like, perhaps for him the need to return to that space was a need to return to his own identity, some earlier form of it that emerged before his identity of being the married man who returned over subsequent years to the reunion and was now coming back alone, which speaks to another interconnected circle here of place, and that is the circle of belonging or unbelonging that places can reveal to us where we feel coherent, where we feel we exist
• 22:52
  in our integrity, and I'm not talking here about moral integrity, but I'm talking about physiological, psychological, spiritual, and emotional integrity. We sometimes have a great need to return to or discover a place, a new place, an old place, where we feel we can fully breathe, where we can be seen for who we really are, where we can tell the truth and know that we're safe, where we feel a sense of belonging to people and even the earth, the belonging we felt earlier in our lives that was atmospheric, almost in its nature.
• 23:41
  I personally feel that way about two places on earth, the place of my birth, which was in the high plains of the state of Montana in the United States, called Big Sky Country, because there's so much sky, so much open land, and I grew up in a place where I could position myself often as a child strategically on a bluff or on a hillside, looking out over rolling plains, where I couldn't even see a road, where I felt literally like I was the only person alive on the vastness of the planet, and I could see in the distance the great Rocky Mountains and the little belt mountains in another direction, and plateaus and bluffs, and creek carved valleys and river beds, and every time I'm back in that environment, something inside of me relaxes more deeply than I was aware I was even holding tension. It's real, and it's profound, and. And the other place I feel this is in my beautiful home in the Pacific Northwest. I moved here to these places when I was about 11 years old. I've spent the
• 25:13
  rest of my life nearly here, surrounded by these forests and the Cascade Mountains and the Coast Range and the beautiful Willamette Valley and Puget Sound in the Seattle area, the islands like the San Juans in the northern part of the Pacific Northwest, and here I also breathe deeply, differently but deeply, and I relax in different dimensions of my body and my soul and my heart, and that connection to place enlivens me, reminds me who I am, reminds me where I came from. I have a romantic notion that kind of like a salmon that can leave its tiny stream after its birth to find its way out to the great Pacific Ocean hundreds of miles away and make its way when it's time to spawn all the way back to that exact same place in the stream I mean that is mind blowing to think how that's possible, yet I really relate to that, because there's something about these two places where, when I was growing the minerals of the water, laid down the bones in my body, my bones are literally
• 26:39
  crafted from the earth of the Montana plains and the waterfall-laden forests of the Pacific Northwest, and something in my bones knows that those are two places where I can stand in my integrity of being a whole person, and yet, like everyone else, the places I return to, the places I seek, expose in me the edges of where I am growing. Every time I return to a place where I seek a new place, I now ask myself, what is it that I am asking of this place. I want to be really clear about that, and I want to invite you to consider that question as well. When we return to a place with intention, when we seek a place familiar or new when there's something inside of us that says we need to be locating ourselves in a particular place and environment. What are we asking of that place? What does it reveal to us about who we are right now and what we need, and are we preparing ourselves to receive that, or are we asking too much, carrying with us the things we're hoping to abandon? So, let's
• 28:13
  do that now, my dear ones. Let's jump into those edges that we can find in these many circles we experience as we loop through these 25 places we seem to frequent on average in our lives both the familiar and the new and so here we are arriving at the edges of places, and maybe it makes sense to begin with what's deeper than the place we're seeking or returning to or discovering something of like the place beneath the place to do that, I want to invite you as we sit here together to close your eyes and imagine going somewhere, somewhere different than where you are right now. What inside of you, spiritually, emotionally, physically, are you aware of as having needs, and as you think about whatever your need is right now, the biggest thing calling to you, what image does that evoke in terms of a place, is it a place you've been and want to return to, is it a place. Yes, you've never been, but always longed to go.
• 30:05
  Is it a place of pain that you wish not to return to, or a place of fantasy that might not even exist in the real world? And now I want you to picture yourself in that place, if it is a pleasant place for you to be, and ask yourself what you're feeling being there, and then ask yourself what's below that, and then when you can figure out that what is just below that immediate feeling, what is below even that? How much deeper can you go inside of yourself and your awareness when you think about this place that you were asking something of it may be, for example, that you're imagining yourself on a beach somewhere, and your initial feeling is freedom. Feels so good to be out in the salt spray air, and then you ask yourself, why does it feel free? What's deeper than that? And perhaps you discover that there is a space of grief, and you're asking this place to provide you a sense of relief, and that's what feels like freedom, and maybe if you ask yourself to go farther and deeper than
• 31:50
  the grief, you discover that what is there is a constant state of fear about something, maybe about a relationship or a job, a story you're telling yourself about being alone in a way that scares you. This is obviously just one example, one scenario of a possible line of thinking and self-awareness about the places that you might be seeking, and the possibilities are really endless when it comes to what it is you're asking of the places you want to be in, or that you're imagining yourself in right now. So, there we begin with the edge of encountering the place beneath the place, seeking to discover it, and I can never be exhaustive in circles edges radio with all the circles and all the edges on a given topic, but let's look at a few more. Sometimes places call us or call to us because they're genuinely aligned with where we want to go with the life we're trying to build or the person we're trying to become, whoever it is that authentically we're wanting to emerge through us, and
• 33:17
  then there are other times where places are calling to us because they represent something old, something in the past, an old fantasy we lived out, some sort of unhealed wound, or some sort of desire we have, maybe to disappear in the hopes that relocating ourselves will solve some sort of problem we're experiencing internally or maybe even externally, and I think that the edge that this exposes in us is the edge of discernment. Can we learn through our relationship to places, how to discern longing from calling, those are two very different things, and I think that places offer us the invitation to figure that out in a really beautiful way, because not every longing is a calling, for sure. Some longings are memories that we're trying to assimilate, make sense of. Sometimes, you know, our longings are wounds that are asking to be witnessed, that have gone unseen. That's different than a calling, like a future that's trying to find us, a future that's calling to us, such that
• 34:49
  we need to go to a specific space in order to hear that voice more clearly, so how do we know when a. Places calling us forward rather than pulling us backward, pretty significant edge for us to think about, and if by chance what we're experiencing with our place seeking is a longing, it might invite us to the edge of asking if we can return to this place without regressing, you know, when we return, when we go back to a place over and over and over again, especially, it's not something that's neutral when we go back to a childhood home, a grandparent's home, a favorite auntie's home, an old city, or a familiar farm landscape that was attached to our family generations ago, or even an ancestral place that holds the memories of many of our former generations, there's a choice we're presented with to return as we currently are, or to return as an earlier self. The edge is to be able to return without collapsing into a past identity or a story we inherited in that place. Sometimes
• 36:26
  places remember too little or too narrowly who we are.
• 36:33
  Maybe when you're there, you're called by an old name. Maybe when you're there the story that surfaces everyone tells about you is painful and a reminder of a former self you've grown beyond, so the place offers us that edge, that non-neutral edge of choosing to inhabit a former self or to inhabit our present self, if we were returning to a place or seeking a place where it was longing that was driving us, where we were being called to a future self that would present us a different non-neutral edge, do we show up as a past or present self, or do we choose to show up to manifest who we wish to become? In either case, I truly believe that edge of returning without regressing is a really important one for us to think about, and what it is like for us to go to a place seeking to fulfill that need to hear and receive the future that awaits us, because I think there's a bit of a shadow side to that, and places sometimes offer us the edge of not only discerning longing from calling, but
• 38:05
  also by inhabiting calling and releasing a mythic elsewhere. This, I think, is a form of going to places, seeking places, inhabiting places as a form of escape. This is where, when we say I'm going to find a cabin near a lake, secluded, and when I'm there, then I will be creative. There I will feel rested. That's where I'll gain the discipline I'm seeking, I have to go somewhere else to manifest those things. I think it's important that we recognize when we're in a space of seeking places or returning to places, there's an edge in recognizing the difference between a truly supportive environment and then projecting some sort of salvation for ourselves on the place we inhabit. Now, it is certainly true that very often we find ourselves in spaces that don't support who we are becoming, and the need to inhabit a different place is fundamental to manifesting this future that we're seeking to make for ourselves. At the same time, we need to be careful that we're not
• 39:35
  externalizing our internal growth and making a place responsible for it, we will bring to every space we inhabit the ability to become who we seek, only in as much as we own the responsibility for the growth, so if we go to a place. Driven by calling the edge of growth can appear to us when we stop asking the place to save us and begin asking what it has been trying to show us. The edge appears when the place we seek begins to reveal the self we are seeking. Places are fundamentally instrumental in helping us understand who we are in the world, and I think the whole invitation of this episode is to encounter places with more intention to go deeper into the feelings of longing or calling when we consider the places we're seeking and inhabiting, so that we can find those places of deep aliveness and invite ourselves to become something more than we currently are in some way, whether that be great or small, and I would be remiss if I did not state the importance of stewarding
• 41:16
  places as sacred landscapes of our becoming. I know there are people right now who are listening to this. I'll speak to you directly. I know you are listening to this, some of you from places in the throes of war and devastation, and our longing for peace and comfort and safety. I know there are those of you listening who find yourself in spaces where the wars and the devastation aren't societal but are internal to your family or your household, and are longing for a sense of escape. I know there are those of you who are listening, who are standing in places of safety and security, and are also longing for more, because something feels like it's missing, and you're seeking to discover your own version of a new sense of safety and belonging and understanding and possibility, and maybe that's the umbrella that unites all of us listening to this radio program tonight, together, including myself, is that we return to places, and we seek places where there exists possibilities that
• 42:50
  free us from something within ourselves that feels constrained. It may be subtle, or it may be grand.
• 42:57
  It may be as highly evolved as a deep sense of spiritual creativity, or as primal and basic as a sense of safety and peace, but it is that calling and longing for possibility that place invites us to consider. So, I think tonight I'll bring our edges discussion to a close right there, and simply invite you to think about the places you wish to be and go and discover a return to, and identify what possibilities there are that you are seeking, and if I can, I would extend to you, borrowing a word from maybe historically religious contexts, but I would extend to you a blessing that you will find that which you were seeking by standing in the places where there is an edge of possibility and growth, and I want to bless you that you will have the strength and awareness and determination and help to stand in those places as you discover not only who you are, but the best of who you could become. Okay, my friends. Well, it's that time in circles edges where we circle back, as is our ritual, to
• 44:45
  you, to your outreach, your messages, your observations, and reflections, your very kind words, and resurface things from previous episodes, and this week I want to. To highlight just a real simple and yet very powerful message I received from a listener who had been sick in bed listening to episode six, which was all about teachers and mentors in our lives and being intentional with who we allow to have influence in who we become and who we are, and she shared that as she was listening to the show, she just happened to receive a text from her daughter, who had just finished her very first year of teaching as a primary educator, and how absolutely joyful and thrilled she was to have finished the year, even though it had been a pretty difficult year with a co-teacher that wasn't really inhabiting their best selves, who seemed very frustrating and difficult to work with by the account I seem to read, and yet How proud this listener was of her daughter for the kind of human she
• 46:16
  had become because of the influences in her life and that her desire to be a teacher was certainly evidence of those influences, and her desire to be a specific kind of teacher, the kind of human that really is committed and shows up for the students, and who brings love and compassion and inspiration and stability to them in their experiences of life. I just found it so moving and so timely. What a gift that this listener, and I'm sure she knows who she is, given I'm speaking out right now, but just so grateful for the blessing that was to me to hear about how this particular episode was in synchrony with this exchange with her daughter and I just continue to think about over and over again the growing impact of Circles Edges Radio, the ways in which you are being moved by it or inspired by it, the way that you are tuning in episode after episode to sit with me here in my office, sit beside me, talk with me, tell me your stories, ask me your questions, answer the ones that I've
• 47:45
  offered to you. It's so impactful, and I just feel that now that we've reached a first milestone of well over 1000 listener downloads across the planet, which just feels incredible to me. It just feels like there is a growing place to use this episode's vernacular for peace, for caring, for connection, for presence, for one another, and I am beyond grateful for that. My invitation to you this week, as we circle back, is to go back to those other episodes. If you're new to the show and haven't listened to them, I invite you to go backward and discover some of these deep and wonderful conversations.
• 48:42
  If you've been here the whole time and are looking forward to the next episode, maybe what you can do to help expand all of this is simply share what you have enjoyed about the show with friends, send a link to somebody if you feel so inspired to go to your favorite platform and write a review that highlights something very specific that was meaningful to you that someone else might read and go, oh, I was looking for some sort of inspiration about why I'm seeking this thing in my life right now that through your words they might find our space together. I would be incredibly grateful for that. So, to each of you who every week sends me messages and shares stories of impact and reflection, thank you. Please continue to do that. You are all welcome to reach out to me by email, which is Aaron Double A R O N at Circles edges.org Well, dear ones, it is time for me to say good night to you. It has been a long many weeks, honestly, or maybe even months since I have taken some significant
• 50:24
  downtime and traveled to a place where I'm asking a sense of renewal and peace, and this whole evening with you tonight has really made me think very deeply about what I am asking of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, in the seven or eight days ahead of me. So, thank you for your presence. Thank you for being here with me, as I've been considering what it is I need in order to fill refreshed and filled and centered, what's deeper than that, and perhaps even what's deeper than that deeper thing. Let's take a few moments here before I blow out the candles for one last light, and for this I wanted to leave you with the words of T S Eliot, the poet from the long form, a long form poem called Little Gidding, which is a part of a larger work called Four Quartets. Each of these quartets is named for a specific place, and Little Gidding is known as that place in its time of, wouldn't necessarily say pilgrimage, but a place of reflection and prayer, potentially renewal, a finding of self,
• 52:04
  and at the end of this very long form poem, he refers to drawing on this voice of this calling, and he writes, we shall not cease from exploration, in the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time through the unknown unremembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning, I think this so beautifully speaks to what we've been trying to explore today about the circles we engage in with places, those we seek, those we return to, those we avoid, that there's something deeply in us as humans that means we're constantly exploring, and as we grow, if we're wise and committed in all of our exploring, there's something about returning to the place where it all began and seeing it for the first time, not because the place has changed, but because we have changed in relation to who we are and in relation to the places we've inhabited, with that, dear ones, I will send you to bed, to rest, to work, to
• 53:49
  walking, wherever you're going, with the hopes that you will find yourself seeking and returning to places where you can see the edges of who you are and take one step further to become someone new and to be changed in all of the best possible ways. Take care until we are together again, and I offer you good wishes and a good night,
• 54:30
  Unknown: you.