Journey

What is my journey? We spend so much of our time and our lives searching for just even the spot to get on the trail, so much time can pass between our fingers like sand, smooth and rough at the same time, as we search for just the place to join the stream of grains falling down.

I am an old woman now, or at least I am well on my way, the crone is not the distant image in the mirror anymore, she is now coming forward morphing into a center stage position as my youngest self and my intermediate self begin to recede. I am not afraid of her, this wiser self. I am not leaning into her either, I am no longer afraid of the self, but I still do not know if I am ready for the journey. Do I want to pick up this basket of woes, heartache, sin, redemption and try to make sense of it, unravel it, learn or grow? Though I have traveled this trail for years, forging a trail as tidy as the forest service, through years of waiting and wondering, doing and trying, and I still do not know if this is my trail. It makes no sense to be so unsure today, so unsure tomorrow, so unsure still, so unwilling to risk being wrong. At this stage being wrong, I should realize, above all else is not, should not, will not, be a deterrent to moving forward. In fact, being wrong is practically my divining rod, it is the way with which I move forward in the world, the way I learn.

It isn’t merely that we take our path, it isn’t just as Joseph Campbell said, that we follow our bliss, for that lends validity to the notion that we know what our bliss is, or that a single bliss is all we get, or all we might need. Perhaps, bliss isn’t meant to be the journey, it is just one of many tastes along the way down our particular path. It isn’t enough to find what it is that we should be doing, it’s that we find enough of it to be willing to take the next step.

Along the way there could be hundreds, if not thousands of missteps, so many places where we can lose our hold on reality and simply slip into the underbrush. So many places where life is slipping between the cracks of our selves, but maybe that is where the good dirt is, maybe that is the clay that fires in our particular kiln, we have to find all the juicy bits, all the wormiest pieces of ourselves before we can begin to know what is discard-able. We spend a lot of time looking outside of ourselves, picking up random this’s and that’s, random ideas and people, we let plans, ideas, people go without another thought, sometimes with a lot of thought, but still we let them go, and all for what reason? We couldn’t say, only that it wasn’t right or he wasn’t the one. How can we know who is the one if we have never looked under the concrete surface of the very journey we are on to see what oozes underneath? Just as shoots of grass find their way to the sun through the slimmest of margins, through the tiniest of fissures in the cement, so too must we dive deep and then after taking a good swim in the toxic soup of inner-selves look up, search for that tiny lightning bolt of light then shoot straight up, go for it, reach with all our might, push out from the inside, bursting forth from our total inner bliss to that slim ray of light, it is there just for us, just when its needed. I believe this and someday soon I’m going to look up and start searching for the light.