Soul Searching
During this season I have been doing some soul searching. I have been feeling small and constricted. Even my efforts to branch out feel like they are bouncing off the walls of a sound-proof room. This has been discouraging, my life on pause.
It’s been awfully cold and rainy here in the Pacific Northwest. Discouragingly so. And yet, even in the cold and wet, life finds a way. I am always delighted by the new growth. Plants, trees, grasses, sending out their baby buds and seeds into the world for the renewal that sunshine and warmth will bring. Eventually blooming things everywhere!
A Giant Pause
I am a dreamer by nature. I see infinite possibilities when I look around me. For myself, there are so many ways I would like to shine in the world. When I was a child, I had very high hopes for myself. As an adult, I feel poised on a path to manifest those dreams. As a healer of souls – human and animal. A bringer of light and hope into dark spaces. A teacher – of kindness, wellness, goodness. As a child, I wanted to be magic – and as a Reiki Master, I get to have this experience! And yet, this dreamer really struggles with the “rubber meets the road” moments. So, when I say I feel poised upon a path, that poise really feels like a giant deafening pause.
In my life right now, there feels like very little of the forward movement I crave. My hopes and projects seem to be in a holding pattern despite my efforts to move things along. I don’t like it. It feels disorienting and discouraging.
If you’re a fan of poetry at all, one of my favorite poets, Jack Gilbert, describes this pause beautifully:
To See if Something Comes Next
There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence, and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.
In this giant pause I find myself in, there are still signs and buzzings and buddings happening around me. I notice them. My desire to move forward now gets overwhelming. And yet the pause. During this pause, though, there has also been great releasing of patterns and thoughts that have restricted me throughout my lifetime. The pause has given me time to recalibrate my intentions and hopes moving forward. After all, I did fall in love and get married within the last 8 months. That’s a big amount of shifting and revising that’s happened in a very short period of time!
A Higher View
When I can be still and take the higher view of my life, the pause begins to make sense. Slowly I can see that even though spring feels late in blooming in my life, there are little baby buds beginning to open. Frustrations and discouragements begin to fall away. And though it feels like there is nothing here at the top of the valley, I’m thinking, it is like the Noh: whenever the script says dances, whatever the actor does next is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.
And so, from this poised place of pause, don’t mind me as I learn to dance~
For a paused moment of Zen, enjoy the Noh.
If you would like to take a higher view of your life for clarity and peace, schedule a session with me today!
