Elusive
Illusions
The journey started last August, a journey toward something. The thought of mortality, of shifting reality, prompted us to close up shop, prepare and embark.
If I think back to my self last August, who I was, what I felt in my skin-it was very anxious. The kind of anxiety that creeps into everything. Every moment it grew, at times threatening to overtake me. I practiced yoga every day, went running, meditated, got acupuncture. These things shifted me a bit but it was always temporal and I’d go right back to anxiety. My new set point.
Understandable! My creaky childhood and young adulthood coupled with huge life changes would seem to point me in this direction of consciousness. My children we no longer mine, the epicenter of my center. So like many of my cohort, I was cast adrift on the shoals of “who am I”. I was going through menopause which can cause a myriad of shifts that our culture ignores or attempts to obfuscate.
Adrift is a realistic place. It put me into the center of my being and my fear. As we drifted along, trying different activities, countries, missions, the fulcrum was myself and my place in the universe.
The universe puts me into here now. I recently started a meditation and movement practice with my partner though sometimes we don’t practice together, sometimes we do. It comes and goes, in fact everything does these days. My children come and go, on different currents though we might meet each other our waters are only loosely connected.
I found myself the other day listening to a song I love and looking up and feeling a deep sense of connection and being. Something I hadn’t had for years. In the constant movement of the past I learned never to rest or settle.
Now I have time I can stop and be even while I’m working; something I feel so grateful to be doing, even as before I wanted to not be engaged in work of any kind I am now excited-and joyful. I feel a deeper certainty and self knowledge. Through my fear and deeply painful anxiety, I encountered myself - she can be fierce, she can be quiet. I walked through a doorway of self encounter and I will not return.
I would say if one is struggling or in some kind of pain and looking at things in the same way; a moment of leaving a time of surcease, a space of nothing - might be a choice to shift. Perhaps.
To find that moment you could travel far beyond the constraints of your daily life. Or you might, possibly, find it just now, just here, breathing gently.
If you listen the quiet will tell you all you need to know.
