This week, as it always seems to be, the week between my birthday on April 30 and Mother’s Day, a week or so after, always seems to be a place suspended in time, or time out of time, or a time when everything in me just stops. I’m not sure why, but it just always does. In year’s past I have felt guilty, I have fought it, I have feared that if I did not produce enough material to share fast enough readers/followers/patrons might go away. And then finally here you are, or rather here I am, at 67, and I realized, based on everything you have read about me here over the years, that the only thing that is acceptable, to me, for me, is to trust myself, and whatever is coming up at any point in time. Those who have followed me for long know that I am responsible, that I care, that I don’t ever disappear for long, and that when I do it is for a good reason. And then one day life begins again.

I told you in the last post a week ago that I listen closely to signs as they come, messages from spirit, incidental happenings, accidental occurrences, magical bits of this and that, mystifying conundrums, or uncoincidental coincidences, they all hold messages for me. A few nights ago, just as I was realizing I was in that same place I arrive at every year, that week or so between my birthday and mother’s day, and, despite my best efforts, I was unable to speed things up, produce, produce, produce, I watched one of the YouTube videos I like to watch in the evenings with spiritual teachers and one single line came to me as a gift…

“It’s safe to be still.”

I scribbled it down quickly in my little notebook and for the next couple of days I kept looking at it, thinking, wondering, if that could really be so, but as I was unable to do anything about it — something in my body just stops — I took a deep breath, relaxed, and though I was very very still the world did not come to an end. It is, in fact, safe to be still. I was amazed, and grateful. I keep repeating it like a mantra.

And so a day or two went by and I was working on my art, furiously, trying too hard, worried because of the stuck place I found myself in, and then I got very afraid, but then I remembered that it was safe to be still, and so I sat, and as I did a much loved haiku came to me, one I have loved for so long I can’t remember when I didn’t know it. It is my favorite haiku I have ever read perhaps because it resonates with me so deeply and is something so important to me to remember. It was written by one of the great Haiku masters in the 1800’s, Kobayashi Issa. He wrote…

“O snail
Climb Mount Fuji
But slowly, slowly!”

I am the little snail. My life has been an uphill climb, and though I have never given up, I cannot move very fast. It has taken me 67 years to accept that.

Finally, in going through my email yesterday I found a quote, it is a quote that is important for all of us now. It was in an email from a little homespun cottage industry I have purchased from in the past. They have really struggled during Covid, their business nearly came to a halt, and barely moved at all. They are just now getting a new start, beginning again. In the email the owner shared this quote by Confucius…

“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.”

I read that quote, reread it, and then wrote it down. I have been moving slower than slow motion but I have not stopped. Even knowing that it is safe to be still, and having taking pauses, they were just that, pauses, which is not the same thing as stopping. (I had to really think about that one.)

None of these lessons are new, we all know them, but we forget, and as I wrote last week when I got multiple messages from different sources that basically said the same thing, this week these 3 messages finally got through. It took all 3 coming fairly close together, but once I had written them down and read them a few times I smiled. The Universe will send us the messages we need to hear if we are quiet, and trust. I guess that’s that “still small voice within.” We are each born with this guidance system, we just have to get still enough, quiet enough, to hear it. And so I have, and now I shall carry on, up Mount Fuji, one moment at a time.