You know those maps at the mall with the arrow pointing to a singular spot amid all the rectangles and squares with the words "you are here"? Even people like me who are directionally challenged when looking at maps take comfort in the simple idea that their 'position' in space has been declared.
Having noted what is around the arrow and matching the information to the intention for being at the mall - voila! - the path from point A to point B becomes obvious. Well, over the past month (since the last time I posted a blog) the arrow on my map disappeared.
Yup, the arrow indicating where I was in time and space was suddenly gone. It disappeared as though a cosmic hand had carefully placed the cursor over the arrow and hit delete. I had lost my bearings.
Bearings is an interesting word rarely used in ordinary speech which is also interesting because bearings indicates both our position and orientation to living. Since we are generally both simultaneously somewhere and headed toward something, you'd think that thinking about where one is and where one is headed would be a common part of our thinking. For most of us however, routine gets in the way of awareness.
Routine is a form of the word 'route'. Routines are our routes through our days and our weeks. People often grouse or complain about the sameness of their routine but truthfully, most of us like - in fact prefer - what is familiar and therefore comfortable which is exactly what a routine is: familiar. Grousing or not, routines allow us to feel safe and secure because we 'know' how to experience the paths they place us on.
One of my cherished routines is my early morning time of quiet and meditation. I have begun my day by deliberately placing myself on this path for over twenty years. While the experience of 'placing' myself on this path is familiar and comfortable, as the years passed, the experience of 'being' on the path has never been especially predictable.
One of the reasons for this lack of predictability is because one of the effects of daily quiet time is awareness. Daily quiet or meditation is a form of cultural sensory deprivation. When I take my coffee out onto the patio and sit in the waning darkness there is really nothing happening except me: just me and my thoughts. I sip my coffee and stare into the sky.
I say hello to Venus always shining brightly and almost always muse on the fact that this planet we associate with love is what shines most brightly in the early morning sky. Venus competes in brightness only with the moon which is the orb associated with feminine energy. I muse on how these forms of light are generally missed in life because they occur before the sun wakes most of us to the day.
I 'see' these thoughts of mine in the early morning as there is absolutely nothing to distract away from the awareness of myself as the one creating response - there is no other person to absorb my chattering mind. I am, in this early morning, forced to either listen to myself or to sink beneath the noisy chatter and 'hear' the whispers of Life beneath the noise of my self.
One of the 'whispers' I heard about a month ago was from the end of the Christmas/Epiphany story. It's the part of the story little attention is paid to because in many ways, we become emotionally exhausted from both the story: angels, pregnancy, doubt, travels, rejections, birth, shepherds, more angels, kings and gifts, not to mention the festivities we surrounded this story with, that we pretty much don't pay attention to the true ending of the story we celebrate.
The story of Christmas ends with King Herod getting all paranoid - jealousy is the most destructive of emotions - about a 'King' being born that he issues an edict that all boy babies under a year are to be killed. Horrifying. It is a horrifying aspect of the story and very difficult to hear and therefore respond to. Joseph however had a dream and was told respond to this awareness by 'returning by a different route. "Do not return the way you came."
We - today - know the wholeness of the story and so if we listen to the story and hear our response, we tend to say 'well duh! of course you need to return by a different route. Well duh, that's how you keep the baby alive.'
Joseph however was like we are in life, he was in the middle of the story and so the totality of the story was yet unknown. Joseph simply had to trust the words of the dream - or not. We always forget the option Joseph had of the 'or not.'
It is not easy to take a different route. Different indicates not known. Possibly longer. Definitely scarier. Unknown and frightening are not choices most of we humans care for: we prefer routines with their known streets of familiar potholes, messy intersections and series of lights which we learn, if timed correctly will synchronize for easy passage.
We prefer routine - our expectation of knowing our experience - so much that it is actually difficult to pay attention to the whisperings that tell us that if we continue on our familiar route through living the 'child' may be killed.
What I have come to believe in this past month of feeling lost is that we are occasionally asked to return by a different route as a means to letting go of the storylines we have unconsciously placed within our true story - within our actual experience of living.
Storylines is a Buddhist concept of understanding that the human mind tends to fill in what is not known with hypothetical if - then storylines and the bigger the unknown, the more scenarios we tend to create. The problem with creating storylines is twofold: storylines remove us from awareness of experiencing now and by removing ourselves from the now, we become incapable of living creatively.
Living from the creativity of our possibility is NOT like the map at the mall with blocks of living clearly labeled. Creative living is much more akin to the emptiness of early mornings on the patio with Venus, stars and the moon faintly glimmering in the dark. Creative living is always about possibilities lurking in what is not yet known. It seems that periodically we need to willingly lose our bearings in order for the creative unknown to reveal itself.
I did not enjoy losing my bearings and feeling lost as it was very lonely.
I felt lonely not just in terms of relating to other people but lonely for the pieces of my story, which had not actually been experienced and yet I had unconsciously filled in with various storylines. As I slowly let go of my expectations of the future of the experiences which had birthed my spirit-child, emptiness began to expand around my self.
I would love to say that this emptiness was pleasant, but it was not. It was difficult to remain on this path and not create storylines for what was happening. All I could do was allow what was, be.
The dictionary says that the word be when used with transitive verbs creates the action of effect. I know this to be true: awareness - consciousness - creates response. As long as I believed - trusted - the emptiness I was experiencing was in fact fertile with what was coming from the Source of All Life which is goodness, then I could live with what my human mind perceived as emptiness.
Losing my bearings was in fact, not empty but a transitive experience of that word be: I was becoming - coming into a new sense of Being.
This is already ridiculously long so I will save the next chapter of this story for another post. Thank you for remaining with me not only through this lengthy post but through past month - it is impossible to grow beyond the familiar without the energy of relationship surrounding and upholding us even when unseen. It is in fact, the unseen inlets and outlets of love that are the transitive verbs - energies - which allow for each of our becoming. Thank you for your invisible energies of care.
