I’m not sure where I’m going. I’ll lead!
                                          - Emmanuelle Heyman

The Call
I’ve definitely done some things that many people would call courageous, and I am also terrified to do some things that other people wouldn’t blink at. Even though I didn’t know two months before I left that I was about to change my whole life, I’m actually not all that impulsive, or even spontaneous. What I have learned over time, however, is that I have a “still small voice”, as they say, and it lets me know when to say yes to something that has presented itself, even though it’s missing most of the details.  As it turns out, it’s kind of a quiet, background voice rather than the loud, commanding, accompanied-by-celestial-trumpets (or a hammer-over-the head) type messenger that I thought would be required in order for me to know for sure that I should pay attention, that it really was my wise, inner guidance.

I don’t know about you but I have been seeking this voice for a long time. I want to be internally guided, by a higher authority/self/whatever-name-you-want-to-assign-it that I know I can absolutely trust, that has my best and highest interests in mind. Not by my ego-ic self, which I find is quite unreliable and causes suffering. I knew that voice was there but didn’t know how to access it. Well, be careful what you ask for.

Meeting the Voice
The first time I became acquainted with this voice was when I was at a workshop with Russill Paul (who became one of my beloved teachers). The group gathered for a pot luck on Saturday night, we introduced ourselves and shared how we got to be at the workshop. The wife of the host said that she had recently done a pilgrimage to India with Russill. She described it as gritty and deeply spiritual (I love opposites when they have an “and” in the middle) and said, “If you have $5, just put it down toward the trip. Don’t worry about how the rest will happen. Just do it. You won’t be sorry.” Or something to that effect. Her comment wasn’t any big deal. Except that throughout the evening, and all the next morning, it would not leave my head. It just kept being there, and then began to evolve, something like this:

Hmmm, I wonder what it would be like to go to India with Russill. Wow, India, I hadn’t really thought about going there seriously before. Hmmm, still thinking about it.  Hmmm, still thinking about it, that’s interesting. Maybe I’d better ask him a question or two during the break cause, you know, I don’t really do the group travel thing…. Hmmm I kinda feel like I might want to do this…wow, really?   Okay, I think I might do this. Where are the trumpets/hammer, so I can be sure? Okay I think I’m going to do this. Okay, I’m going to India. What????

My whole life changed as a result of listening to this small voice that weekend. And even better, that guidance became conscious. I learned to recognize when a thought would lodge itself in the back of my head and take up permanent residence until I realized it and did something about it. (This is a quiet voice, however, so I can only hear it if I tone down the thinking mind and make a little space for it)

Back to California. So last summer my now-tenants posted on our community forum that they were looking for a place to live. They described in detail what they were looking for and it so perfectly matched my home that I felt compelled to answer. This was actually the original Yes. Can you imagine? Hi, I see you are looking for …… Well, I’m pretty sure I have what you’re looking for, although I don’t really have any plans to vacate. Wanna see it?

Bless their hearts, they said yes, all potential obstacles seemed to just disappear, one by one, and I thought, well maybe, just maybe, there’s an opportunity here. Maybe I can go to California - something that had been a dream for a decade, although most assuredly on the back-est of the back burners at that particular moment. (the universe, as we know, has its own unique timing). So we left it that they would keep looking for a house and I would see if I could figure out the California side, i.e., where I would/could live, etc.

Enter the still, small voice. Although I began to do my due diligence - putting out feelers, connecting with people I had met out there, asking everyone I knew what they knew about CA, where they’d been, what they liked, who they knew - within a week (probably less) I knew I was going, no matter what. I then gave it another week, even though I had already recognized the "voice". A major clue for me was that I was very energized, I felt way more excitement than fear. I actually didn’t really feel fear, just awareness of what I was apparently being invited to do, and how big it was.

So I simply said OK. Honestly, that was it. I said, I trust you. OK. I'm doing this. I called and said the house is yours if you want it. My tenant wondered where I had found/decided to live. I said I didn’t know, I just knew that I was going. (of course, that caused some undue concern over whether I would end up back here wanting my house back but that simply wasn’t an option for me.) No plan, no real idea of where I wanted to be, except that it wasn’t going to be inland, and I wasn’t going to room with 4 people. Way over that. How? Well, that's always the kicker, isn't it. If there is one thing I have learned over the past decade or two, in my own life and that of my clients, is that the how doesn't determine the what. It impedes it. If we pay attention to the what, and the why, the how flows from there. And that's how it should be.....but not what most of us learned.

So this turned out to be a huge experiment/experience of manifestation which I’ll talk about in the next installment. Meanwhile this voice, this knowing, sustained me throughout not only the trials of negotiating a lease and packing up the house, but the entire two and a half months before I landed here, where I am now. I never once lost that energized feeling, that excitement. On the contrary, it grew every day, building my belief and trust, until I felt so full, and so alive I couldn’t imagine what had taken me so long!

I pay attention now.

One year ago today, and 6 1/2 weeks before my  60th birthday, I got in the car and headed west.

(For Newcomers - although I had no plans to go anywhere, someone serendipitously showed up to rent my house. So I headed for CA - a long time dream - without a place to live or, really, the means to live there.)

I want to honor this amazing year by sharing a little of the fun, amazing times and learning I've experienced along the way. Since there's so much, I'm going to share in parts.

Right up front, I'll tell you that one of the things I've learned is how much I love my home, at a deep, heart level (lest any of you think what you read means I'm not coming back!)
Here's something else I learned (with more to come):

It's Never Too Late for An Adventure

With my fatigue and other challenges, life has felt considerably contracted in the last several years. If you had told me I would up and move across the country within 2 months I would have laughed. Impossible. I simply did not have the physical, mental or emotional resources to tackle something like that. There are several errors in this line of thinking, as it turns out, but more on that in a later entry. From where I sit now, I can say from experience that it is truly NEVER too late for an adventure.

By the time I got in the car, I was so exhausted from consolidating 30 years of accumulated stuff into a reduced space, as well as from all the work/challenges that come with renting a property for the first time, that I was literally numb. I could not even feel relief, nor could I feel the emotional impact of leaving my friend, Sara, that morning. I just got in the car and put it into drive. None of it seemed real. I just knew what I needed to do next - head toward Burlington. And I know the way to Burlington like the back of my hand so nothing was different from any other day (well, except for a car full of what I thought were the things I MUST have to live for 9 months)..............until about an hour and a half into the trip when I took the first turn in NY State I'd never taken before. For all our fear of the unknown, it has incredible activating power. I literally felt my cells begin to wake up. I slowly became aware of myself - first as my body in the car, on a road trip.

A word about road trips. I only realized in the last 5-10 years that I love road trips - particularly when I'm alone. Just going to my mother's in Maine I can feel a shift, somewhere past Hardwick, where I feel myself on my way, and the excitement kicks in. I think it must be the point where I let go of everything I’ve done to prepare for the trip, everything I had forgotten I needed to do which made my departure 3 hours later than planned, and everything I remembered once in the car that it was now too late to do; and begin to turn my attention toward where I’m going.  In order to make that transition from past to future, I need to pass through the present. Like all moments in the present, there is an activation, an awareness, an aliveness.

So the moment I pulled onto that unknown road, stepped away from a month of non-stop running/organizing/packing/cleaning/dealing, and into my body in the car… in that moment I felt the shift. It came upon me slowly, thank God. I don’t think I could have withstood the impact of what I had just done if it had hit me all at once. The first sign was, as I said, my cells beginning to quiver with a little familiar excitement. I guess I’d been too busy to realize I would be taking the mother of all road trips; for me, anyway.

From then on that feeling started to grow. I knew I would have some recovering to do so I really wanted to get to Rochester, my first destination, before dark and before my exhaustion hit. I didn’t quite make it before dark but my host (airbnb) was not only kind and gave me lots of space to just crash, it turned out she had some magic to share as well. She had not only been on her own journey (and spoke my language), which she waited to share till I'd had a good night's sleep, she also had her own representative mascot (created with her own hands and psyche), and recognized Sacred and Sassy right away!! She was completely supportive of and inspired by my journey and it felt like such an auspicious beginning. How did I happen to land at her particular house, of all the airbnb possibilities in Rochester?

OK, here I am today, sitting on the balcony amidst the ancient oaks  that grace my current home.
With so much gratitude, and looking forward to the next installment.

Here's to adventure!

You just never know what strange convergence will come about in the blink of an eye to inspire you. I’ve been totally dragging my feet for over a week on a piece whose topic is actually of great interest to me. Apparently, something different wanted to happen. And the key to life (among others) is to recognize that moment, and say YES.

Ben
My good friend Ben sent me an e-mail recently, having just read my first blog entry and wanting to share a piece of much appreciated advice. Keep your writing to a single screensworth - he said from experience - so people will read it, know it’s do-able and keep coming back. I really appreciate this advice because 1) I love Ben and I know he loves me, and 2) he’s right. I imagine a short piece would help keep me coming back, as well.  I have another friend who writes prolifically. I read every word, of course, because I want to know everything he’s thinking about but sometimes I have to plan the time for it, so I get Ben's point. And I am always so impressed with people who give me a profound nugget to take away in one or 2 paragraphs.

But here’s the deal. My struggle with writing (more accurately, not writing), has been going on for decades.  The simplest idea can be very painful and take days to express. I know that I just have to write in order to move through this, so I decided that my commitment would be to just show up and write, and keep at it till it felt good, and easy.....well, easier. It feels like a muscle that has severely atrophied from years of neglect and needs to be exercised - slowly, gently, over time. If I thought I had to write well, or make it interesting to my audience (who is my audience? I don’t even know yet), I’d probably stop before I started. I just need to get myself writing. It feels like a tender transplant that needs the gentlest of attention and encouragement while it acclimates.  I show up and keep it simple so as not to overwhelm it. I weed it - of any rules, shoulds and pesky beliefs that choke inspiration, and I water it - with permission to do what moves me when it moves me whether I’m good at it or not, and with time. The time it takes, whatever that is.
 Later I can determine the best fertilizers and location for it to thrive and become a superflower if I want but, for now, the focus is simple. This is not to say I don’t work at being succinct, sometimes compulsively, but I don’t expect to get my thoughts down to a screensworth any time soon, other than by a total act of grace.

I read somewhere you should write for a while before you blog. And I have. But working within a live container somehow gets me to show up. So be it. Whatever it takes.

Ziggy
I spent last evening watching videos of David Bowie, curious to update my previous opinion and understand the impact his death has had on so many. Asked in an interview how people like him (or Springsteen, Dylan...) just keep going, can’t stop, won’t stop, sacrifice nothing, and seem to just get better, he said:
I’m very selfish as a writer + performer ...I only write for me and I only perform for me.
If I’m not enjoying what I’m doing, I can’t meet other people’s expectations. I can’t possibly pretend to second-guess what other people want.....so, I just do.....what I want to do.

Clearly, it worked for David Bowie. He stayed so fresh and popular through so much change, crossing generations, by staying true to who he was - which meant not only doing what interested him but letting go of what didn’t anymore. In general, the industry considers that behavior commercial suicide but you can find that true-to-center attitude in successful people across all industries.
I think we are here to be who we are and to express that. It’s the work of a lifetime for many of us to rediscover the who and have the courage to step into the how. There isn’t anything else that we should be doing. We are life itself, evolving.

I totally updated my opinion of Bowie, by the way. If I knew then what I know about myself now, I would have been right there with him, reveling and joining in on such wildly creative self-expression!

Magic
So, I’ve just read Ben’s e-mail, I’m thinking about what Bowie said, and I open the book Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert, to a page where she’s talking about the success of Eat, Pray, Love and her absolute inability to have foreseen that. That her intention had never been to write a giant bestseller and she wouldn’t have known how to do that if she tried. Of her deep, lifelong conviction that “the results of my work don’t have much to do with me. I can only be in charge of producing the work itself.”

Not that EG isn’t a master of her craft, or the paragon of diligence. But she’s clear that she’s not in charge of the whole show, particularly, the response to her work. I think she and Ziggy are saying the same thing in a way, and it’s the way I’m learning to live my life.

Show up, do what inspires you. Trust the impulses. Follow through on them. Keep showing up.  Find ways to keep inspiration flowing, which doesn’t mean second-guessing, questioning or getting too attached to a plan. Keep doing what’s yours to do. Don’t exhaust yourself or confuse your offering by trying to control what happens to it then. Your part is enough.

Well, I’ve done my part for today. Thank you, Ben, for your unintended inspiration. Hopefully, you’ll still be reading this by the time I get it down to a screensworth!



Be who you are
Do what you’re here to do

 I’m not interested in transcending.
What I want to know is how do I be a human being having a spiritual experience AND a spiritual being having a human experience? There is a cosmic dance going on between spirit and matter and I want to learn the steps!

I did this gorgeous guided visualization with Laura Hollick (one of my heroes) a couple of years ago. We connected with our Soulstars (the original star home of each of our souls), embodied our higher self energy, and then shot out across the cosmos toward the earth.
...... pulled like a lover, with magnetic attraction, dripping with desire, like you HAVE to go there! You’re called, you want to, it’s your purpose, your destiny.....Laura said. This energy went deep into the core of the earth, the Earthstar. Planting the seeds of our divine dreams, of their full expression, the knowing and wisdom of who we really are. She called on us to feel our spirits in earthly form, to feel the support of the earth as we anchored in our spirit vibration, to know that it CALLED us to come just as much as we wanted to come....... the earth WANTS receive your magnificence. FEEL it just sucking it in with pure delight! Feel it wrap itself around that seed and feel the seed in your body. Feel it being nourished, starting to grow......

Forget tango. THIS is the dance I want to learn!
Seriously, what if that were the relationship between spirit and matter, rather than matter being something we had to overcome, to transcend, in order to become enlightened. A divine love affair between the two, the union of which was enlightenment.

There is so much to this shift from either/or to both/and that I have typically become paralyzed by the sheer volume of my thoughts before I could ever write a single word. But my friends here, Sacred and Sassy, seem to have something to say and the pressure they are exerting from the inside has become greater than the other pressure I feel around my writing needing to be good, or have any particular value. As Anais Nin says,

......and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

So let me begin by introducing you to them.

Who is this head and what’s her story?
Some of you (probably most of you who are reading this) know I got in the car last October and drove cross country to my beloved California. I'd been looking for Sacred for a while and, of course, found him* the week before I left. After a minor struggle - you just know when you've found what you were looking for -  I decided to get him and bring him with me as my travel companion. Sassy, who was a gift from the talented and generous Tyler Gillen and had been with me for several months (patiently waiting for the rest of her body and teaching me some serious attitude), had NO intention of staying behind. Somehow she made it perfectly clear - in the midst of my sorting through almost 30 years of stuff to decide what was essential to take - that she was essential.

Originally, I thought she could sit up front with me and deter those bad people I might run into, once I left my little Vermont bubble, from breaking into my car. But she wasn’t tall enough (you know, not having a body and all)  so I relegated her to the back of the car where she sentried all my belongings. I decided she would be even more effective back there with the startle factor and her rather standoff-ish expression. Meanwhile Sacred got the passenger seat, where he emanated calm and presence as I negotiated I-80 and the tractor trailers.

I posted my journey on FB and the questions about them started; but I really began paying attention to these 2 as I saw how different their experience of the trip was. Sacred basically had the cush - a whole seat to himself, the most spacious area of the car (including mine). Nothing ruffled him - fortunately, because that was his role - to be an anchor of serenity. Sassy, on the other hand, kept falling between the containers and out of the back of the car every time I opened the hatch. The first time that happened, I had just pulled into a rest area that said Welcome to Indiana.I had no idea where I was. I opened the hatch, and a head fell out onto her face just as some man was walking by.  I felt like I'd been caught in a crime. This continued to happen, again and again, no matter how or where I situated her, until I knew it had to mean something - more on that later but it definitely caught my attention and brought the two of them into focus as having a more important role on my journey than the simply protective companions of a slightly eccentric woman exploring what David Whyte means when he says:
....You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in......

I clearly felt their protective power grow as the trip progressed. I assigned that power to them but they also took it on. I knew they had become my mascots and the connection began to grow between them and me, who I am and what I'm most interested in. Now I have invited them to become my guides as I try to put into words this question of what it means to be spiritual and human, as well as everything else I have been thinking about for a while.:-)

Dancing,

S + S

* I wasn't sure about Sacred's gender, and I'm still not. I actually thought he was a she on the trip but he feels more gender neutral than anything. I will continue to use he for now because it feels like it might be useful.