I've started and stopped this over and over. Days have gone by, weeks in fact. Write a line, make a sandwich for someone. Write a line, take someone to the toilet. Write a line, go referee the current issue. Answer a question, run through literacy work, get groceries, cook a meal, do the laundry, find pool towels, clean up, tuck someone in, soothe someone, over and over.
Domestic life never ceases to astound me at its sheer magnitude. I think "I'll have time when x, y, z happens." And yet the time never comes around. A decade of momming has gone by and I always feel like I'm just coming up for air when the next wave crashes down.
I look out the window of my borrowed temporary home and think where do I belong? I feel in my bones the homesteading dream and yet nothing has materialized. I try to comfort myself that much of the mundane goings on of everyday life is indeed what I'd experience on this fantasy homestead. But I can feel the grass underfoot, MY grass, I can smell the wildflowers and hear the bees that busy themselves there, I can taste the freshly churned butter. I mentally draft the books I'll write, fill the larder and pantry and deep freezer. My heart is near bursting with the images I've created yet none of them have come to fruition.
In the absence of my wilderness waterfront farm, I virtually construct the coaching business I've been meaning to solidify -- over and over, rewrite the copy, curate the images, set forth the programs. Examine the micro and macro of living a joyful life. But none of it feels like it's landing, I look over my new website pages and feel like it's all just a little bit off the mark somehow.
I'm on pause.
I've experienced great rushing phases of activity in my life; planning a wedding, planning a cross-country move, returning to school, creating businesses, planning home births, raising babies, moving abroad. A flurry of excitement and effort that overwhelmed me at times. And then inevitably a pause as the creation phase ebbs and repose sets in.
The trick, I've learned, is to not resist it. Any of it. The mountains we climb when we're in expansion mode or the contraction we experience when a shift occurs and what we built collapses. All of it has its purpose and we can learn to allow it, observe it, embrace it.
Resistance looks like complaining and wallowing when the expansion phase takes more strength than we knew we had (hello, birth). It looks like fighting our circumstance. It looks like constantly asking why something is happening to us. It looks like falling into boredom when we're being given a rest phase, or, worse, making up something to fill the quiet space.
I've done all of these things. I've had a hard time efforting when it was required and I've been miserable when things felt slow. I'm in a better groove with it all than I ever have before but I pray for the power to surrender almost daily. It's just all taking so much longer this time.
To be honest I feel like I took a deep breath sometime around the fall of 2019 and I haven't quite exhaled. This pause I'm experiencing now is so much longer and deeper and harder than I anticipated.
I've had a zillion ideas, so many great visions and I can get them coming pretty close but they won't quite land. Like an image that won't fully come into focus. I've gone on soul journeys with coaches and psychics and intuitives. I've consulted the oracles and tarot and runes, horoscopes and numerology. Prayed, meditated, journaled.
Still on pause.
For awhile I thought to myself, "where is my intuition? What is my heart whispering?" I thought I couldn't hear anything from within, that I wasn't able to access my own wisdom. I was trying to hear it in the context of clear steps, guidelines, uncovering purpose.
Silly me.
The quiet voice was actually very clear -- there is nothing more to seek right now. There is nothing you need to fix. There's nothing you need to do.
All that I desire exists, of that I'm certain. I remain present to the evidence that floods my awareness everyday, I remember to say thanks as I see it. I know that what is for me can't miss me, I have to trust that. I have to choose to believe that when a friend gets what I've dreamed of that it isn't a time to feel envy or lack, it's to remember that they're modelling for me what is possible.
It's helping me reframe my work. As I put together the offers and programs I remember that ultimately what I want to do is remind people that their wisdom is inherent and does lie within them, even when it feels dormant. And to assure everyone that purpose isn't something we have to seek and fight for and constantly strive to achieve. It's in the moments of our everyday life -- the mundane, the lulls, the pauses.
Now my attention is here. Sitting outside on a classically hot July day, an umbrella casting shade as I watch Edie ride her bike precariously yet skillfully around the pool. I'm comfortable in my body. A subtle breeze flutters my dress around my legs and brings the fragrant aroma of sun-baked basil. I think ahead to making toasted tomato and avocado sandwiches for lunch, barbecue chicken for supper. I know I'll write another line of copy for my Life On Purpose program. Probably delete some of what I already wrote. Play around with ideas, talk to the trees, dream of farming, anticipate our next temporary move in less than a week, create recipes.
Live amongst the pause. See it as not so much of a pause really, just another phase of life that is equally as full and purposeful as any other, just in a different way. Let go of goals and deadlines and just be where I am right now, as divinely intended.