Now please understand something...I was in the Well of Grief for quite some time, and I had many people telling me to be at peace. Nothing wrong with that where Grief is concerned. Yet now that I'm out of the Well, and have found myself on this empty page of possibility, I'm excited. And I still have folks telling me to be at peace. I'm not sure what peace looks like to them, but in my humble estimation peace is a state of being which is very much alive. It is a state of acceptance for all that IS. For me, it's not really the absence of anything in particular, it's an inclusion of all parts of life...good, bad, or indifferent. My purpose all along has been to find a place within me where I am at peace with life itself. ALL of life...not just the bits I find to my liking.
That said, pressure, or discontent, or discomfort, aren't necessarily a bad thing to experience as long as we are willing to take a look at why they're showing up in our kingdom at all. It's our avoidance of these feelings that tend to get us, or me anyway, into trouble. Mother Earth, after all, has no problem venting the pressure she feels deep within her. And for the most part, in light of what She's truly capable of, and in light of the level of hate heaped upon her, Her fits are rather mild. She holds Herself in check, holds herself together in the midst of her storms. If she held it in, avoided it for whatever reason, she'd most likely implode, taking us right along with her.
So I've been feeling a pressure building. I think about a chick in an egg. I know that sounds random, but hang in there with me. A mother hen will wait until she hears a chirp from her chick within the egg. She will then answer with her own soft call to begin stimulating the chick to start breaking it's shell to reach her. What drove the chick to make a sound? I think about the journey of a chick, all comfy for awhile, snug in it's own quiet little world. Yet after a time it begins growing too big for that world. How uncomfortable it must be for them, with no room to move, all cramped up. I think I'd start spouting sound too, and the discomfort and discontent of being in tight quarters would be a driving force to break free.
It can take up to two days for a chick to finally finish breaking out of it's eggshell. Oh sure, it takes coffee breaks now and then, but not for too long, because it instinctively knows it will stagnate and die if it doesn't break free. For the chick, it is literally a life or death situation. Avoiding the pressure to be free of it's small world can be dangerous. What if it said to itself and it's mother, "Ya know, I don't really want to let go of this cush apartment, because I don't know what's out there. I'm afraid of the unknown." It dies.
And something important dies within us if we ignore the same signal calling us to break free from a world we've made too small. Sure it's scary to think about, and I can experience feelings of being a fish out of water, self consciousness, but I can't let that stop me from making a break for it. I cried out, and something out there unseen in the Universe answered with a call of its own to get me to start pecking at the hard shell I had encased around me. It can't do the work for me, I have to do it. I have to choose to do it. The closer I get to freedom, the louder the call I sense, and the more excited I feel about this new way of life that now feels like a promise. Now I have to check myself for impatience, because I'd like nothing more than to skip to the good part, and put the cart before the horse. I'm recognizing how important it is to take a deep breath and pace myself. I don't want to allow impatience to get the better of me, or what I feel coming.
I have a friend who reminds me all the time to be deliberate. As I tremble with excitement and anticipation, slowing down in deliberation, staying in the moment instead of trying to leap into the future for the outcome, is becoming more of a challenge the closer I get. But something tells me it's going to be oh so worth it.
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