The Experiment: Day 124 ~ A Journey Alone…

“Anything you fully do is an alone journey.”
Natalie Goldberg

And so here I am. I have set out on a journey of 365 days and I am roughly 1/3 of the way in. I have come far enough to be able to see significant changes in my life but I am not far enough to see the far distant shore. There is no way I can foresee what the outcome of this journey will be. The only thing I can do, the only thing I am able to do, is to show up each day and do this blog post. And sometimes I feel very alone, and sometimes it takes me all day and I really struggle with what I need to write, just how to say a certain thing, how to say it at all? But I show up and I do the post and then it is as if I fall back in my chair, take a deep breath, and am grateful that for one more day it is done. This is my job now and it’s important for me to do it. And I don’t know why, and it doesn’t matter, but I am doing it, alone, and I have a deep faith in the process. (I keep hearing something I heard so many years ago I don’t know where it came from, “Trust the process, it’s larger than you.”) And I am doing it fully, and I shall continue on.

In years past I would have been very afraid. I set out this year with the intention to find a way to make money, to create a business. I sorely need the income. But more than that I need to regain my health wholly, and completely. I need to feel an inner radiance and wellness I haven’t felt perhaps since I entered this life journey nearly 64 years ago. I need to know and trust and experience the absolute joy of living in this body on this planet right here and now. That is something I have never known, ever. I wonder how much any of us really do? And I have to do this blog post everyday. I have never been more certain of anything in my life. This matters and it is leading somewhere. I do the ketogenic diet and other physical and mental health practices, and I show up here and do this blog post. These things are my job this year. And they are huge, and somewhere deep inside I know that it is time, that it makes perfect sense, and that devoting this year to these two things is going to bring the absolute right thing that I am supposed to do into my life. I keep trying to make it be a certain thing — hurry up and do this and you can begin to make money — but you can’t do something just to make money and expect that you will be fulfilling your soul’s purpose. And that’s exactly what I intend to do.

I am supposed to stay here, to stay open, to do what I am called to do each day, and then to let go of any ideas of right or wrong or outcome. How much of our lives do we waste trying to force a thing to be instead of letting it become? I am beginning to trust every moment as if in that moment if I stay wide awake and receptive I will receive the next piece — I am as if a monk going out with her begging bowl each morning and being happy with whatever is put in her bowl, being grateful, and knowing that what she has received is exactly perfect for that day — and it might be a quote that I come upon, a person I encounter in person or online, a phone call, or a message from deep within. I am here, I am present, and I am open to receiving the guidance that I need to go on.

There are so many signs just now. I had to laugh out loud when I drew my card from The Angel Tarot, by Doreen Virtue and Radleigh Valentine, today. I draw a card each morning to meditate on and they are always so amazing it can be rather startling. Well, today, after shuffling a great many times, as I do, and cutting and shuffling and cutting and shuffling, I drew the exact same card I have drawn 3 out of the last 4 days! There are 78 cards in this deck and they were shuffled so long and so well there’s no way this could have happened, and yet it did. Coincidence? I think not, and you’ll never convince me otherwise. These are the kind of things that are happening now every day and the thing, the important thing, is that my job is simply to hold the space, allow what is to come to come, and what will be to be, and gently take it in and let it be part of what I need to see and know on this journey without judgement. It simply is, and I embrace it.

It is like the Rumi poem that I have loved for so long…

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”

And yes, the hardest thing about this journey is that so much is happening it is like that last line, “the world is too full to talk about.” What is happening now, to me, is so deep, it is as though it is changing me, shaping me, in unseen ways, and the changes as they come and flow through are almost “too full to talk about.” But I have set myself this task, 365 days of showing up and talking about what is happening, and so I do my very best. Some posts receive a lot of comments and some receive none and that used to worry me thinking that if no one commented the post wasn’t any good but really that’s not my job or my concern. I love it when people respond, I love to answer those who do, but my job is simply to write the post and put it out there, to share what I am doing on a particular day. And sometimes, from day to day, the subject of the posts seem disconnected from one another, and sometimes I don’t understand why I’ve written a certain thing but you cannot understand what I am doing here, I cannot understand, without seeing this whole experiment as just that, a whole. No one day can pinpoint what this is all about, these posts will have to be taken collectively, read from the first day to the last, to see what it all means. It is a fascinating, mysterious journey and I have stopped trying to understand it and I have stopped being overly invested in what the outcome will be. It will be what it will be, exactly what it’s supposed to be, and it will set me on the next leg of my journey. That is all I know, and it’s enough.

So here I am again today, as I was yesterday, as I will be tomorrow, and I will carry on. The only way you can do something like this is to do it alone. I am exactly where I need to be. I am ready, my soul stands ajar

“The soul should always stand ajar,
ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.”
Emily Dickinson

The Experiment ~A 365 Day Search For Truth, Beauty &
Happiness: Day 1 ~ Introduction To The Project
“Do or do not. There is no try.”
Yoda