fear

Alignment

In the Gap

August 21, 2017

Maybe I’m in the black, maybe I’m on my knees
Maybe I’m in the gap between the two trapezes
But my heart is beating and my pulses start
Cathedrals in my heart.

~ Coldplay, Every Teardrop is a Waterfall

Not long ago, there was a full solar eclipse. It was on March 20, 2015. Why do I know this? Because I was in the middle of one of the biggest changes of my life. We had left England and we were staying in Canada for a few days before taking the first flight to Costa Rica.

We were literally in the gap between one life and the next. I remember driving somewhere with my music on shuffle and hearing Coldplay singing about the gap between the two trapezes and feeling like that was exactly where I was: dangling in mid-air, hair flying, hoping beyond hope that there was going to be something there when I reached out my hand.

The last one? March 2016. How do I know that? Because we were in the middle of the final, final pack. The decision had been made that this was forever and we had to go back to the UK to deal with everything there. That particular time was, for personal reasons, one of the hardest of my life.

Athena Perrakis of Sage Goddess taught me that one of the ways to understand this eclipse is to look back at where you were during the last one.

Well, during the last two, I was in the gap; in the middle of leaping headfirst into a new life. And since then, I have spent time in some dark places and some very bright ones. I have moved through being proud of myself, afraid of where I live, ashamed of not ‘living up’ to my plans, coming to terms with what I saw as the excess light here, becoming more balanced as I found more darkness, letting go of some dreams, opening up to new ones, being lonely, being more in love with my changing husband, and finally beginning to create my business. I have faced some fears – both real and imagined – and let some things go. So much of what happened was because I was not conscious of what was happening, and looking back, I can see how much of it was actually of my own making.

So what does that tell me about this one?

Well here I sit again, in the gap between one life and the next. We are in the last months of building our house. We are about to move and finally finally unpack. Most of my things – what’s left of them anyway – have been packed since just before the last eclipse. I have just recently begun showing up daily to my writing (I’m on 24 days in a row), and I have learned to really pay attention to what is going ON, not what I think is going on.

Jason Miller wrote a great post about this eclipse. He offers a few suggestions but the one I like the best is this: “The moon and the sun are off the table, leaving a wide empty space to be filled. Fill it.”

During this eclipse, I am looking towards the next one. Where do I want to be then? I want to have healed my inner program of threat and fear. I want to have healed my inner program about being afraid of money. I want to have opened to more visibility, be writing another book, and be happy in my home. I want a labyrinth and a loving community.

I want to feel FULL; prosperous in every way.

So I’m committing today, under this eclipse, to focusing on clearing up everything that is in the way of that. To focus on building the cathedrals in my heart.

Bring on July 2, 2019. I am ready.

Back to the Land

Into the Unknown

January 7, 2016

The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else? – Rebecca Solnit

Tomorrow we are going to go for a ‘proper’ walk on our land. I’ve only done the shorts-and-flip-flops and the slightly more difficult Keen sandals version of getting to know it. Tomorrow we are going for the rubber-boots-and-long-pants version. (Rubber boots because: snakes.) I am so scared of how hot I am going to get, and how much climbing there is to do in those rubber boots. I caught myself making an excuse not to go, and then I remembered: it’s our land. Ours. I GET to do this.

Somehow I have managed to create a life that means I have to look at and face down all of the things I am most afraid of, all of the things I don’t like about myself, and all of the ways I am not living up to my potential all at once. I didn’t really get that until just this moment.

People ask me all of the time, “So what are you going to do?”

I guess my answer right now is: first we are going to be very lost.

I don’t know how this is going to turn out. We have no maps. I have no-one to show me the way. I have no HR department and no advisory board. There isn’t a single e-course out there that can help us. We get advice from others on a daily basis, and we are very quickly learning how to sift the good advice out of the thick layers of fear.

Everybody’s afraid. Everybody. And the clearer I get about myself and who I am and what I am here to do, the more I want to understand this piece – all while I am repelled by it. I want to believe that it will all be okay, that if I just hold the happy thought, I’ll be able to fly. But it is in our nature to be afraid. My practice, it would seem, for the foreseeable future, is to feel the fear and then venture into the unknown with as much faith and as much brains as possible.

Look for the light, but bring a flashlight.

Open your heart, but lock your door.

Enjoy your land, but wear rubber boots.

fear

Angels Riding Shotgun

June 22, 2015

meg miracles

I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 18, and then it was only because a new system was coming in that meant it could take up to three years to get a ‘proper’ licence. So I got one.

The day I got my permit, my Dad and I practiced in the parking lot of Portage Place mall. Convinced I was ready, he coached me out onto the road to home. Within 5 minutes I had hit a squirrel. Within 10 minutes I had hit a rabbit. Within 15, a raccoon had also gone under the wheels. I am not making this up. I remember apologising to them in my head while trying to keep calm enough to drive.

It has been a love-hate relationship ever since.

My other car exploits have found me: once stranded on the side of an icy cottage road for hours, once with a chest bruised so badly I couldn’t sit up or cut my own meat at Thanksgiving dinner, and once (my favourite) strapped to a spinal-board. (And my friend has just reminded me that I have also been submerged in a car. Submerged!!) I wasn’t driving all of those times, but all of them had an impact on me (pardon the pun).

When I moved to the UK and found out I would have to take a test to drive a manual car, it just made sense to me that I simply wouldn’t drive while I was in the UK. So I didn’t. For 17 years. I did drive whenever I was in Canada, but mostly that was daytime, summertime, straight-line driving. There are no roundabouts in Canada and no single lanes with ‘passing places’ surrounded by eight-foot hedges. What I was afraid of was driving in another country.

The trouble is that if you stop doing something because you are afraid of it, it gets bigger and scarier and more powerful.

Fast forward to the day we moved to Costa Rica. Many of the roads here are hairy, to say the least, and the drivers like to pass – a lot – whenever they feel like it. I knew I was going to have to drive, but I put it off for nearly two months, and I thought maybe I could do that forever.

Then my husband got really sick, and over the days he was sick, we quickly ran out of everything, until I was in danger of becoming a very bad wife. He needed ginger-ale and some sort of food and I knew I needed to go to the market, but the thought of doing it led me to the edge of a panic attack. My fear of driving had become its own energy, and it was big and scary and stood in my way, but that morning it was me or it, and I had to choose me.

So I put on my bravest t-shirt, armed myself with a couple of crystals, and I even went so far as to ask the Archangel Michael (naturally) to ride shotgun with me. Because if you are going to be afraid, it helps to call in the big guns.

And then I drove to the market. And I was fine. In fact, once I was behind the wheel and doing it, it got less and less scary, and I went from being afraid to being just a little bit proud of myself.

Fear is funny, and just like a leap of faith, it is all relative. Quitting my job and moving to Costa Rica? No problem. Driving 15 minutes down the road for ginger ale? Big Problem – or at least I thought it was. But fear is like anything, it was only as big and scary as I had given it permission to be. And now I am left just a little bit sad that I let it control me for so long.

But the best part is that now I know how to deal with fear: suit up, power up, and ask the angels to ride shotgun.

Just like a superhero.

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