The soul can’t be explained or understood. Is it, after all, your divine Self, and divinity is wild, untamable – more vast and magnificent than our minds can grasp. Whatever idea or image you hold in your mind of the soul or the Divine is by definition too small. That’s why we feel so compelled to explore these fields of the soul. We long for the mystery. – Janet Conner
There were always all of these wonderful things I was going to do once I had time. I was going to walk more, and do more yoga, and meditate more, and eat better. I was going to do all of those things because somehow I thought that they would make me more spiritual. They would bring me closer to the Divine, to God, to that best part of me who was nice and made really good decisions and had a great attitude most of the time.
Insert giggle/snort here.
Turns out that when I packed for Costa Rica, I packed myself. I packed the me who gets grumpy, and wants to eat Nutella more than she wants carrots, and the me who has a lot of yoga to do before yoga makes her feel blissful (right now it makes me feel angry), and who is a little afraid of walking because walking is a bit scary. There are things lurking under the fallen leaves both in reality and in my imagination that want to nibble on me.
So until a few days ago I was getting really frustrated. I was wasting time. I hadn’t landed in Costa Rica and then morphed instantly into a glorious Blue Morpho. I was getting grumpier by the day, reading in great gulping novel-sized afternoons, and wishing that I could somehow be different.
And then it happened.
I got up on Friday morning, picked up my pen and a battered notebook, and I started to write. And within one sentence, I remembered: Writing is my spiritual practice.
My simple connection had gotten lost in the sparkle on my Instagram feed, the gloss on my Pinterest pages, the bendy-holiness on Facebook, and my need to be different than I am. Yes, I will continue to meditate and do yoga – movement and stillness are as important to my growth as words – but for me, my doorway to that connection and my worship happens on the page.
When I arrive at the page, say a prayer, and pick up my pen, I slip easily into a conversation with my Soul, with The Mystery, with God, with whatever you think It is. And it is a conversation that is most definitely two-sided. We contemplate. We argue. We breathe. We bend. We talk. And I come out the other side different. Connected. Motivated. Altered. Writing doesn’t magically make me a shinier, nicer, better behaved version of myself, but instead I emerge a more grounded, honest, clear one. I’m the me that remembers that she is deeply, truly connected, so all of the rest of that ‘stuff’ can be seen with perspective and a lighter heart.
It’s magic. It’s a miracle.
How could I have forgotten? I was so busy comparing myself to other people’s spirituality, that I forgot about my own.
And so I will return to the page again and again, because writing is my practice.
It’s my holy.
It’s home.
xo
The past few days have apparently hosted a huge planetary dance: the end of something which began in 2012, the end of a 19-year cycle and the beginning of another.
Two years ago, Mark and I were on holiday on the island of St. Vincent, and I was moaning about the lack of local fruit available. We could have strawberries and blueberries and apples – apples?! – but there wasn’t very much tropical fruit. Apparently the bulk of their customers wanted fruit that they knew. So rather than fill the buffet with local fruit, the company would ship fruit in from Mexico and the US.