Thursday, March 6th, 2008
Notes from an Oracle, after one thousand readings in this lifetime…and as many other lifetimes as a tree has leaves…
or, on why I don’t predict the future…most of the time…
There are no promises in this life, and I wouldn’t change that fact for anything. The greatest thing my vision gives me is not a perfect view of the future…I would tremble at the thought…but a better view of right now. After all, the future is both written and unwritten, and the writing was both written long ago, and is at the same time just the extension of the pen stroke we are making right now. We are writing it, and looking ahead in the book is not going to give us answers about the future so much as clues to the present…where both past and future always reside.
The past and the future are glorious myths, and at the same time they are as real as the moment we stand in. They are not separate. The past and the future are treasure maps…and the treasure is this moment. The more we can claim the treasure, the richer and more beautiful the landscape around us becomes. Suddenly there is gold even in the ugliness behind us, and the things we fear could be yet to come.
When someone asks me a question in a reading that I can’t see the outcome of, I describe it as a “little curtain” that is closed. It isn’t that I couldn’t push it aside…it is that I never would. What is there is sacred. What is there is a mystery. That mystery is worth more unseen than it could ever be when pushed or prodded, or looked at prematurely. It is yet unformed, or not meant to be seen. It is not good to force the opening of a bud. Do we really want to know what day of the year we will meet our soulmate? Or what he or she will be wearing, or their name? Do we want to remove the mystery that we would find in all the ones who come before, whose names are different? We usually don’t want to know when we would die…why would we want a map of how we will live? Instead, we want to know how to live. Instead we want to know if we have a soulmate and will meet them this lifetime. The details are details and they are the secret and gorgeous artwork of the universe. We don’t need to know everything about how a flower grows in order to marvel at its aliveness. In fact, its exquisiteness speaks for it and tells us things we could never get from facts.
What we really want is confirmation…and to be gently led and reminded how to return to our own heart’s wisdom. For it is infinite.
The most beautiful things that happen in my life, and the most painful, I sometimes don’t even ask for guidance about. I just let them unfold. I know I will find out as I go along…and I love that achy, excruciating and yet unbelievably-alive process. Don’t get me wrong. I go for guidance on most things…and even when it isn’t about future outcomes, it is always like a ray of light on a dark corner. It is always like sun on my face. It is one of the most beautiful gifts the universe has given me, and all of us.
I just don’t want a map for absolutely everything. Sometimes I think there is nothing better than just heading right into the jungle, with all its dangers and revelations….or a city I have never been to…just to wander without a plan. Just to see what life might put in front of you that you could never have expected. Any other promise is just a ticket to a show that may never happen. Because you are the star. And you get to decide what show you would like to play. Nobody else can tell you that. They can help you remember who you are, but not who you will certainly become.
Because you are becoming. Any image of you is just a freeze-frame of a moving work of art. And if you could see the whole future life would lose some of its very most lovely qualities…spontaneity, creativity, serendipity, synchronicity, surprise, and wilderness….and blindness. Blindness? Oh yes. What would we know about feeling, if we didn’t have to reach out our hands and feel around in the dark when we can’t see? What would we know of the texture of our very own soul? When I was in Tibet and in a very bad way, I wrote in my journal that I didn’t think one could be a true Oracle unless they had trusted in blindness. Trusted not just what they had foreseen and been foretold, but also what they hadn’t seen or been told. Trusting all.
Can we love without knowing? And then love some more?
I am celebrating having done over a thousand readings in this lifetime, and adding that to an ageless past…this just another ring on a very ancient tree. I have seen that it isn’t what you learn about your life in a reading…it is what you learn about your heart that most matters. You may learn about your heart by asking about your life…for your life leads you always back to your heart. No question is too small…it is that it means something to you, and what it means that makes it powerful. Recently, communicating with the Sibyls for my upcoming workshop, they said, “the answer is in the question.” Always.
We know. We know just what we need and how to open to it. We just need to be reminded sometimes, when the pain of living gets to be too much. The heart just needs a place to feel loved and safe enough to let go, to unburden, so it can feel itself again.
We are Oracles to one another all the time when we just stand still and hear someone speak to themselves, and we are Oracles to ourselves when we give ourselves permission to be held. It is all so much more than telling a fortune…it is finding one.
May you be so held, and guided so purely…
With love in my heart,
Jennifer
