I want to fly again.
To make the dramatic step into next; to set off with bags re-stuffed with our belongings strewn now across five rooms and recapture the high of anticipating what is to come in the mystery of next.
The need to sit still and see this current journey of place live out completely is somewhat daunting and scary when I confess to it.
I don’t sit still.
I’d like to think I listen well; but perhaps, I am to learn differently….
How odd; to realize the idea of sitting still-where all our needs are met and we are comfortably cared for-is more dubious and upsetting to my psyche than to move on to the next unknown where what awaits us is tenuous, unrealized and unsure….
Yet perhaps it’s that sitting still, living in the listening, is the more frightful option….
The doing is so easy.
I can control that.
If I don’t get a move on now, become mentally absorbed in the physical responsibility of performing in our next move, will I simply have to be still and hear something I am scared to have to be told….? What is it I know, but have not let myself know…..?
We are committed here.
I’ve been set up to not be able to move this time.
Thankfully it hasn’t cost us getting sick, or breaking something, or falling ill and being put on bed rest, to find us at a place of being still and simply holding on; waiting.
It is so much harder-no, it’s nearly impossible-and surely completely impossible to the me from years gone by-to wait.
To not move. To not plan, schedule, organize, orchestrate. Even in this, the realization that I am in some place, organized by someone else, where I have been set up to listen, I am trying to create my own doing.
There is no escaping the listening. Unless of course I continue to create a false flurry of activity around my hours until the 21 more days here expire and I am left with no listening; and no lesson. Yet if not now, then I’ll have to live the lesson again. If not here, then it will catch up to me at our next….
I would lose……
I see it; this lesson coming. It’s there; just outside the front door in the evening. Just inside the pool garden during the day. Waiting by the studio windows, enjoying the fresh laundry fluttering-dry in the spring wind~
as I go about the doing…..so patient. My lesson waits for me with such patience…..
I’ve begun to get glimpses of what it is; what it looks like.
I’m getting to where I recognize it on the front walk amidst the after school children walking by. It’s beginning to grow familiar, even perhaps comforting, to find there each day, waiting. No longer a stranger; yet not exactly a friend. Yes a comfort, strangely enough.
In the anticipation; a comfort.
Yet I don’t really know it. I am not sure where it’s come from. We have not been, properly anyway, introduced.
And I am certainly not akin to know to what degree I’ll have to rearrange my time and place in order to finally acknowledge its daily, consistent, patient presence….waiting…..I don’t know if I have it in me, if I am brave enough to throw open the door and shout my
‘Alright already!
I can’t stand to watch you hold fast through another spring storm. I can’t ignore anymore the patient presence of you there… even as I sleep. Come in already! Come in! Tell me! Speak to me! Show me! What is it….
but please, assure me (once again) I will be held no matter what it is you have to say~’
I am. I am nearly ready to send out the invitation. Serve up tea and cakes if it calls for such;
I suspect that would just be a stall through which Lesson would patiently wait once again….
All I have to do is open the door and smile. Perhaps it would help as well if I made eye contact.
All that patience waiting on me after all, requires something more from me I suspect
I need to respond properly.
I need to open the door.
This time-yes there’ve been other and there’ll be another time-
I’m being asked to be accountable to more active participation: I must acknowledge I am here. I am willing. I can listen
and hear.
I see it
but I still hold-just inside my throat-just inside the palm of my closed fist-the final invitation….
I’m getting closer.
And it is being made easier for me. It is being made safer for me. I am being given just what I need to trust enough, be brave enough, to just
open
the
door~
‘The relationship between creator and created is such that by sheer grace, separation is not possible. God does not know how to be absent’~
_____________________________________________________________
As I stepped out to walk this morning I asked the usual-more of a morning game than a true request; ‘which way this morning Lord?’ My customary call for direction; even in this step out the front door in daily routine….
With no sense of direction I walked myself to the end of the jetty, picked up my pace and ran for a bit, continued on through the Quay-glancing at the other early morning revelers-sipping flat white and tasting scones or sausage rolls. Through the closed door arcades, over the sand-speckled slips where yachts nestle next to fishing boats, up to the kiddy park with blow up iguana jump house.
Across the car park as I became earnest; almost despondent with the desire to walk a new way
‘Give me something new!’
(what?! white sandy beaches, exotic plant strewn paths, intriguing animal bedecked courses are not enough?!)
I spotted two black-jacketed, baseball hatted women chatting in their own trodden way.
A prompt of curiosity mixed closely behind with a giggle-wonder that these Aussie’s actually thought 17 degrees Celsius was chilly (me in my shorts and tshirt) I followed them out of the car park, across the entrance and onto the roundabout crossing.
No.
They are walking too slowly to pace and the sense of curious follow has left.
Where am I?
Behind; a return to my customary way.
Straight on; walking along the pedestrian-path-lacking, off-to-work-traffic-littered street.
Kitty corner to my left; a footpath I’d discovered early-on led to a park.
So I go.
There.
Yet instead of to the footpath, through the park.
On the grass. Across the swingset bark chips and around to the right…..a path.
A new path.
A dirt entrance to the bush; the sand dunes. A wonder.
Like the Israelites asking for meat after having well provided for manna in the desert, I realize at this moment of spotting the new path that God has once again, unfailingly supplied. Despite my whinging, despite my seeking after more and change and another….when what I have is quite adequate….I am still supplied, abundantly, my hearts desire. Simply by following a curious prompt; even when it looked like nothing. That curious took me a step or two off my typical way, and miles and skylines into a whole new way of seeing.
I think I’ve just been given a new brave; and I’m almost ready to invite my lesson in to talk….
Perhaps tomorrow, once I return from my walk~
Who am I, that the one who made the mountains, would love me?
in love.
trish.