Friday, October 12th, 2007
It has been longer than usual since I last wrote here, and during that time I have written so much on the walls of my mind, and filled the translucent pages of invisible books with so many different themes. And now I hardly know where to begin. Everything moves so fast, and at the same time if you reach out carefully enough you can slow moments into hardening taffy in your hands.
Last weekend I had the most extraordinary experiences with some of you at my workshop, The Oracle’s Path. And as I walked out of that room on the last night, when everything had been packed up and things were seemingly just as we had left them, there was still a glow in the room so powerful that even the front desk receptionist commented on it, I knew I would never be the same. I knew I was beginning a new life.
So many things touch us in this way…open our hearts to a new level of experience and transform us so deeply that we are made new, and then we have to bring that new self back into the world it came from. We still wake up in the same bed the next day, or come home to it one night…we are still called by the same name, and we still look, for the most part, the same when we look at ourselves in the mirror. And yet inside, everything is different.
They say that in the first instant when we wake up in the morning we don’t know who we are at all. It is only after a moment that it all comes rushing back to us…our identity, our past, and our circumstances. What if it didn’t? What if we really lived a new day each time we awoke in the morning? I often talk about the way that as a child of eight or nine years old I used to write in my journal “…and tomorrow I will be a new me.” I really believed I could leave behind anything I felt I had done wrong, any sorrow, any mistake.
Sometimes this world is so arresting…this life is so intense and rich, that I can hardly orient myself in everything. I ground through love and nature most definitely, but lately I have taken to finding the rhythms and cycles which sustain me. I take comfort in watching the fact that no matter how varied and inconsistent so much of my experience is while living in a world at its most profound time of shifting, the leaves still fall every year at autumn. The sun still sets and rises every day, and the moon always becomes shadow and then light again. I see the same vibrant red madrona berries hanging from the trees this time of year, and falling under my footsteps, that fell when I was a younger girl on my way home from school.
Every week I go to dance class, and though few words are shared, everyone is always there, same time, same place, and ready to dance. No matter what else has happened that week. No matter whether it seemed like just two days or a year had passed.
When a daydream of India or Egypt presses so hard against me that I can hardly remember where I am, I can go and touch something I brought home from those places…and I know they were real…and I was really there. Otherwise it might seem like a vivid dream, or past life…an imaginary place of longing.
When I was little there was a laundry mat on the island with a wonderful dark nook for children to play in…like a little closet with a mat on the floor, window, and a mirror inside. You could just sit and be with yourself. The ceiling was covered in crayoned writing and easy to reach. Everyone had written things like “so-and-so was here” and I used to ponder why someone would write that. Now I find those messages scrawled and inscribed all over the corridors of my heart, and I find it to be art…the art of my life.
A few weeks ago I sat in a beam of sunlight on the side porch of our wondrously great, old house and watched a stray strand of spider’s web float along on a breeze. It seemed to know such freedom. It moved in total surrender. I thought about the fact that it was what made up the structure of a web…something that trapped things. I thought about the beauty and the sophistication in the things that trap us, and the fact that they too are made of something inherently free. I thought about our ability to free ourselves from anything which could ever bind us, and to ultimately find the blessing within that capture and release.
If you feel changed in some way, deeply, but life has not reflected it to you yet, just be patient, and know that if you hold true to that new space inside of you it will ultimately be born into your physical life. Try to see the lag time between as a fertile, potent time for being in your deepest waters, and climbing into the reaches of your farthest caves within. If you can trust and be patient there, you will find fertility everywhere. Always remember you are not alone. Know that you can still be anything you want to be, and free yourself from any web which may bind you.
Love,
Jennifer
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