The Soul is the fierce and relentless Fire that illuminates your being. The forces of the world are the howling winds that try to put it out. The challenge put forth to the Human Spirit is to channel the power of each through the expression of ones Calling.
I feel like a traveler who never left home but has been everywhere and back again. I'm writing from the same old spot in the same old room with the same old hands on a slightly newer keyboard. My hair is less brown and my eye sight is less clear but otherwise I seem like the same old me.
But not.
As I flip through mental post cards - the images and scribbled notes that chronicle my journey - I see the twinklings that were clues to the larger constellation that I've become. "Wondering Soul", "Soul Search Retreats", and "Soul Sabbatical". Each of these endeavors - starting a blog, creating a small business, and quitting a "perfectly good job" to go off the grid for a month - were all impulsive, and sometimes irrational decisions. They rose up suddenly, manifesting as fierce and relentless urges that refused to take no for an answer. Some of those urges I accepted quite easily before logic could exercise its veto power. But some I agonized over for weeks before I finally surrendered. I learned that my Soul had something to say and we had someplace important to go and I had no idea where that was, but she did, and we were going.
It's hard to know where to begin to tell this tale - to explain to you what has happened to me - like one might share her life story with a new lover. To speak merely of the timeline and the measurable facts would be like reciting my resume and my accumulated transcripts. Lifeless and dull.
I think it is our concern with the howling winds of the small life that distract us from the roaring joy of the Big Life. The small life is the grocery store life and the insurance plans life and the "when am I going to win the lottery" life. The small life is filled with the yipping and complaining of task after task fighting for your attention. Most of those tasks mean nothing, in the end. But the Big Life is, in short, the seeking out and bring forth of ones unique calling in the world. It is the becoming of "that which we are and have always been" in a visible, practical way - without apology and without doubt. The constellation coming together, finally, and illuminating what was once an inky black sky.
That's what I've been up to.
I'll say right up front that I don't have answers as to how you might go about uncovering your own true gifts to the world. No one-size-fits-all road map exists that I ever found. But I can share the ways that I gathered clues that led me to mine. For every Soul on this planet at this time, there are infinite ways for each of us to express our gifts. It's truly about following bread crumbs that only you can see. For me, the hardest thing to overcome was the idea that I needed someone else to be able to see them, and value them, before I could accept what I saw as real. Doubting intuition and denying internal truth is the biggest boulder in the river of Life.
The most profound leg of my journey began in December of 2014 when I quit that perfectly good job and went into a spiritual seclusion that I called my Soul Sabbatical. I took an oath of sorts - made a promise - that I would devote the next year of my life to listening to and following the yearnings of my Soul. Before that time I had hardly given my Soul a second thought. I knew I had one, at least I believed I did, but I had no idea how it worked or what it did or the value it added in the whole scheme of life. I didn't know what I had signed on for, but I did it because I was despairingly tired of doing things "my way" and falling on my face over and over and over.
I was afraid, in case you're wondering. Petrified actually. I questioned my sanity daily. Some part of me was smart enough to keep most of it to myself. There were very few people in my inner circle who knew I was "out of work", and not all of them knew the depth of the reason why. Having what could be categorized as a mystical experience doesn't go over that well with the mainstream public. The means through which I was receiving guidance were beyond my own understanding, and therefore very hard to articulate, but what I was receiving was so loving and reassuring and made so much sense, I allowed it to come in. I made space and time for it, and I listened. Words flowed out across page after page of my journals. Volumes. Then the unexplained coincidences and random conversations that were synchronous with what I was writing began to catch my attention and I could see they were no accident. Wondrous and terrifying.
I was being cracked open and remolded at the same time.
Seriously uncomfortable.
One of my closest friends described how she saw me then as "pixelated" and I did indeed feel as if my molecular structure was being rearranged with each passing day. Shadows rose up like long forgotten banshees from the dark dungeons within me where they'd been banished. I had to hear them out, listen to their wailings and memories of woundings until they felt whole again and could fly away at last.
I never knew there could be so many fragments. And as they came up, I was astonished that I'd been able to walk around my whole life while carrying the weight of them. The gift they brought me as they broke out to tell their stories was that of compassion. I know now that ALL of US, without exception, carry around wounded bits of ourselves that suffer in silence within. We are influenced by them but are also blind to them. This is the nature of human suffering, unknown.
This is a howling wind.
Up until now, I hadn't felt nudged to share this story quite yet. It's not the lack of willingness that has kept me from it. I've been writing it down all along. But a few nights ago in two separate conversations, I was given the message that it's time.
Who am I to ignore a double nudge?
Rhymes with double fudge...
Amen to that.
I suspect there will be more installments in the coming days. Rarely do real nudges fizzle out quickly...but some do. I can't know. If there is any advice I can offer on anyone's journey it is to learn to be okay with the "not knowing" because it is a land where you can find peace - as nonsensical as that may seem.
So for now, I send you love and courage. Hope to chat again soon.
WS
Photo credit:
http://www.npr.org/multimedia/2009/05/hubble/custom/elmegreen.jpg
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