The Sublime Passage

Lately I’ve developed a habit of waking up in the wee hours of the morning – around 3 or 4- being up for a while and then falling back to sleep. Today was no exception, except that when I fell back to sleep I had a vivid and slightly bizarre dream – which I actually remembered. (Not always the case with my dreams). I had my laptop right next to me so I started writing immediately. Although in the 10 or so minutes since I woke up It’s already started to fade. I remember the gist however. Read more

One of my current reads is Cheryl Richardson’s, The Unmistakable touch of Grace. It centers around the understanding that the events of our lives happen for a very specific reason. These events – whether its a  chance meeting, someone recommending a book, or reading a bumper sticker on a car- are proof that  “a benevolent force of energy is available to guide and direct our lives.” This is what she refers to as the unmistakable touch of grace.

Its not a new idea. It’s what Deepak Chopra talks about in his book The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire and what he refers to as synchronicity . Some of us think of it as just plain old coincidence and most of us reading nothing into these kinds of things, other than that they happened.

The important thing is not just to notice these events of synchronicity/coincidence/grace that occur in our lives, but rather to understand that they are signposts or guides. Perhaps even the answers to our questions.

I’ve realized that like me, most of us have been programmed to discount coincidence as just coincidence. We don’t read anything into it, and we downplay any possibility that seemingly random events could be God or the Universe in action in lives. Giving us guidance and support. How depressing not to believe in miracles of this kind.

I have to admit that I’ve often been a disbeliever. It’s really easy to believe this kind of stuff happens to other people, but so much harder to believe in miracles for myself. Maybe grace gave me a little nudge when this book caught my eye. I knew nothing about it, had never read any of Cheryl Richardson’s work and it hadn’t been recommended to me. On a visit to B&N, I glanced over, saw the book and felt compelled to buy it. So I did.

In the beginning of the book, Cheryl points out that focusing on and being open to  grace are essential elements if you actually want to see when this energy is operating in your life. She also suggests that as you become more aware of this, you track what you are noticing in a grace journal. I confess that other than using this as an excuse to buy yet another very pretty journal, I haven’t done it as conscientiously as I might like. I have however, been more aware and on the lookout for incidents of grace. Here’s an example.

Once a month or so I attend a FABULOUS writing workshop run by the even more fabulous Deb Cooperman. There’s so much I could say about how wonderful these workshops are. Perhaps I will say it all in another post. Anyway, at a workshop I attended a few weeks ago grace paid me a little visit.

We were given a prompt to “list all of the questions you keep asking yourself”. This was easy for me.

For several years now I have been grappling with my sense of identity and finding true purpose and meaning in my life. (Does this quest ever end?) I’ve been asking God, the Universe, my family, my friends and anyone who would listen to help me to find the answers to the questions. “Who am I?”, “What is my true purpose?” “What do I really want for my life?” “What do I want to be, do, feel, have?

In a few short months, after 11 years I’m walking away from a secure job, working with people I love and getting paid very well to do it. I’m not 100% sure what I WANT to do. I know its something else. I’m just not sure what. So I keep asking the questions. You get the gist.

These questions feel like they have become permanent fixtures in my life. I often feel like I wear them around my neck, like a very heavy necklace.  In spite of lugging them around for long, no answers have been forthcoming. So I continue to walk around decked out in questions and my frustration with the lack of answers grows daily.

Fast forward to our next prompt. We get to pick postcards out of a basket. One or more, whatever feels right, and then we have at it writing in response to one or all of the cards we pulled. I pull several cards. None of them inspires me to write anything. Even the one which features a drawing of a woman sitting at a table with the caption ” During a coffee break, Mary paused a moment to reflect on her life. True she had never been truly loved or traveled the world, but she did have sex with a dozen sailors once. And to Mary that counted for a lot”. Now one would think I could do a lot with a prompt like that… but nothing.

So I pull one more card. On it, this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke.

“Have patience with everything that remains unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the questions. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

If ever grace tried to hit a girl over the head I think we can all agree that it happened for me that day. However, since I am a work in progress, I started out discounting the whole thing. I told myself that it would really have been grace if I’d pulled that card first. Or it was just a weird coincidence. Downplaying the miraculous. Now had that happened to someone else, I would probably have been the first to point out the grace in this situation. What can I tell you?  Opening to and seeing the grace in your life takes a little practice.

Upon further reflection and as I continued to read Cheryl Richardson’s book in the days after this happened. I started to get it. I had been asking a bunch of questions and I had been answered.

“Where the hell are the answers? When will I find them”. “I am so tired of the asking. When does the answering begin”. Those are a few of things I’d written in response to the first prompt.

I got my answer. Live the questions and you’ll get the answers when you can actually live them. When you’re ready for them.

I find this very comforting.  I feel a sense of relief, that the answers haven’t appeared yet. They will. When I’m ready. In the meantime, the questions remain, and that’s OK. In fact that’s great.

When I moved into my new house several months ago, I discovered that there was a bird’s nest in the eaves outside my front door. I first discovered it when I came home one night, and I was startled by something flying out from underneath the roof as I opened the door. It scared me half to death and my first though was that it was a bat. After this happened a few times I realized that it was in fact the bird which lives in the nest by the front door. Pretty cool -especially given that my last name means bird in Ndebele (my mother tongue). I took it as a sign of welcome to my new home. Read more