the shadows of morning and the luminous night ::

A pilgrim must be a child who can approach everything with an attitude of wonder, awe and faith. Pray for wonder, awe, desire. Ask God to take away your sophistication and cynicism. Ask God to take away the restless, anxious heart of the tourist, which always needs to find the new, the more, the curious…

We go on pilgrimage so we can go back home and know that we never need to go on pilgrimage again. Pilgrimage has achieved its purpose when we can see God in our everyday and ordinary lives. (Richard Rohr)

muir woods, north of san francisco

my propensity to dive passionately into life sometimes finds me plunging headlong into darkness, looking for light in the dark, looking for sacred in the dark, and fumbling around only to realize that i

... am barely breathing.

if i'm honest, i battle fear. fear of being wrong. of sinning big (as if sin can be measured?). of hurting others or making bad choices. of wasting my life. of really going after what i want, because what if what i want is wrong? for that matter, what is it that i want?

right now i sit in silence, listening to skies rumble. i vacillate between abandon and restraint. between faith-like-a-child and put-away-childish-things. between living passionately and passionless. always one to decry extremes, i very much live them out in my everyday. you know, discontent ... or too content, sliding towards apathy. how to live fully in the cross-sections of a life? to live, even to embrace the tension, and upon that invisible yet palpable line, dance to all the colors of living?

sometimes i feel like a frustrated little babe, all wriggly and unable to speak; newly born and overwhelmed by brilliance, not knowing where to look first, squinting in the afternoon sun with arms waving, clenched fists in the air. i try to uncover what is clutched within my hand. what do i hold so dear that the losing of it whips me into frenzy? and what do i need to grasp, so that everything else falls into peace?

in this truly inside-out world of the spirit, how often to i live outside-in, where conformation trumps transformation? why do i want sin spelled out in clean crisp lines that say do not cross rather than to close my eyes and run forward in faith? what is sin?  the moment we define it, maybe, we see it, we label with it, and it's plain, and cold, and rigid and in the light.

in the light.

but faith walks in darkness. faith makes peace with the unseen, the unknown, the passion that moves us into the crux of living where everything is daring and we aren't afraid to live and aren't afraid to love or get messy or mess up. where we let ourselves feel so keenly that our very hearts bleed for feeling. and where we let ourselves become the Other until our soul weeps and sacred becomes us and we reach the end of life, satisfied.

but here's a big secret:
owning, really owning your own life
:: your own freedom ::
can be terrifying.

soul resonance ::

“And when I passed by you and saw you struggling in your own blood, I said to you in your blood, 

‘Live!’ Yes, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’” Eze. 16:6

live, he says.
live.
it's urgent, this call.

:: but i didn't know
that i didn't know how. ::

how do you really live? when blood pulses hot with spirit, when spirit burgeons with fierce determination to really do this thing called life and to do it well ... what does that look like?

i admit i've been a little scared. living well takes commitment ~ a kind that, for a while, i wasn't sure how to give. or if i even wanted to? when you're exhausted all the way down into your soul, sometimes living is the hardest thing ...

i spent some time recently with those among whom my soul loves. i left my life; i entered theirs and came away with quiet resolution. sometimes we need to step outside our world and hold it gently high and ask for eyes to see what we need to see ... and ask for courage when we do see it, then hold on for dear life. for dear, sacred life. because sometimes, in this paradoxical inside out and upside down other-world that we're part of, in order to hold onto life, we need to let it go.

through this process i've discovered what i want and need. it's a little surprising, to me at least. my challenge lies in learning to trust myself and overcome emotional and psychological obstacles that scream and shout and ultimately try to drown out that urgent, loving plea to live.

what does living mean to you?

this ... this is what it means for me:

“I realize I don’t have one final thing to say. I think this is because I’ve been saying things for a while now. I’ve been spilling my guts. I’ve been writing down my truths. I’ve been facing my questions with open hands. I’ve been searching for beauty. I’ve been accepting my dark moments, my flailing moments, my angry moments. Maybe that is all that needs to be said: To live a good life, a life to the full, their must be grace for your messy parts and grace for your scared parts. Grace for the realization that you’ll never get “there.” The journey always begins again in each moment. This doesn’t mean you give up living, this means you take the pressure off of yourself to live it “right” so when it’s time you can die regret-less....The living I haven’t managed to do in this life will just have to pour out in some way in the life to come because I can sense I’m not finished yet. I was not created to end. I was created to begin again and again and again.” ~ by Mandy Steward at Messy Canvas