This spring the pinks have been making me crazy!
Everywhere I look I see pink and just a few days ago I looked down to see some neon pink toes to add to the insanity. What is it about pink? Somehow it suggests a new born babe, a fresh start, an exciting moment. And you can’t ignore it. In nature, the pinks are there to attract the bees, the birds, the pollinators and the propagators. The things that increase activity, reproduction and well, possibly, happiness, if I’m not so cleverly alluding to the thing that makes most of us happy in spring.
But usually, I’m not an avid fan of Spring (as some of you may remember from the grumpy post last Spring…). Usually, it makes me grumpy. I don’t like being called to action, called to this kind of floozy behavior. What is different this spring? Well, this spring I’ve given in to an enormous amount of activity myself, to writing, creating, and generally proliferating in a big way. It has been scary. But on the other hand, I am finally beginning to have fun. I’m actually enjoying the crazy impulse to write, take pictures and dance all at once that seems to overcome me when I am walking down the street. I visited Germany last month. I stopped in Berlin and traveled to a small medieval town in the south called Rothenburg ob der Tauber. In both places, the weather was patently spectacular and the flowers and trees were profuse with blossoms, pink, green and otherwise.
I was, in theory, working while I was in Germany. I attended the biggest congregation of Chinese medicine practitioners in Europe, over a thousand people gathered for the week to think, talk and walk Chinese medicine. It did not at all feel like work. I went to enjoy the company, attend workshops and share the fruits of my own activities this spring. The blossom of josephinespilka.com is the fruit of over year of planning and over 15 years of desire to offer personal medicine retreats.
In personal medicine retreats I work with one person only and we are together for 12 hours a day. We take meals together, walks together, and meditate together. Participants receive a complete health evaluation, treatments daily and leave with a guidebook for going forward. Family, friends and other health practitioners can be invited to join for a meal or a conversation but, in general, it is just the two of us without the interference of phone, internet or television of any kind.
I love this old way; the slowed-down, simple, direct and potent process of relationship that can yield change on every level of being. Before we had the idea of making money by the hour, we had teachers, mentors, wise ones, priests and priestesses. They didn’t charge by the hour. They didn’t track the amount of time that was required for someone to move into their own knowing. They offered their open hearts, their peaceful dwellings and their ease with the way nature moves. Slowly.
In Europe, in many places, this old way still exists. People don’t rush through meals, they enjoy long evenings of conversation and don’t worry about getting everything done instantly. You can feel it when you sit down in a restaurant or walk by the canal. When people come on retreat with me, the atmosphere becomes the medicine; pleasurable, engaged and rich with meaning, purpose, conversation. This IS medicine. And yes, there is the more specific sort of medicine that comes through needles, prescriptions, essential oils, but the conversation to me is key.
I had loads and loads of amazing conversation in this last month. It was so nourishing, healing and, at the same time, provocative. Pink, you might say. New, bright, colorful and, well, quite stimulating. I hope that you will join me in continuing to have conversation here and elsewhere, to let the pink provoke you to widen, deepen, say things you are surprised by and share, share, share your lovely self!
