In a few days I’ll honor the completion of the 45th rotation of the earth around the sun since I emerged as an embodied soul into the life of the world.
As in, it will be my 45th birthday.
I relate to birthdays as a time for deep review, reflection, and prayer. Where was I a year ago, five, ten, fifteen? What’s changed and what hasn’t? What am I honoring in myself and what am I grieving? How have I grown and how have I stagnated? What stones am I still carrying that could be put back on the ground? What embers from the sacred fire are mine to carry forward? Have I stayed close to what matters? Have I expanded in love and care for myself and my kin? What am I celebrating? What are the refinements to my essential prayers as I continue the dance of Living? What are my new prayers?
This one seems particularly weighty in these realms of contemplation. Not in a bad way: in a meaningful way. I am, essentially, half way through being what I am this time around. When I look back on the journey I’ve made thus far, what I see is a collage of beauty and challenges to which I related in ways that I feel an extraordinarily diverse range of emotions about. And whatever I behold of that journey in any given moment, on a factual level, is it: that’s what happened. The past doesn’t change.
How I use this moment of reflection to refine my vision as I cross this threshold into the next phase of my journey, which will include my ultimate movement down towards the ground at its end, is a matter of great importance to me.
There’s this: I’m learning about aging. Not physically to any grand extent at this point (I’m grateful for that), other than that my hair will probably be fully grey by the time I’m 50 and the lines around my eyes are here to stay. But emotionally. Energetically. And in regards to perspective.
I’m wondering about values and beliefs: I think it’s good to review these things on the regular, especially now that opinion has super-imposed itself on knowledge and wisdom in the public spaces, spaces I inhabit a lot. I’m curious about what mine actually are and why, the gulfs that can exist between those things and real-time behavior, and how to rectify the places where the actions of my personality and the truth of my soul are out of alignment. I’m deep in the contemplation about how to hold and represent my views, beliefs, and values honorably and beautifully as I spread my voice ever farther (You know, the simple stuff).
I’m drawing the word Legacy into the center of my being and infusing myself with the witness of the wild and coming generations of all kinds to keep me on point as I progress along the path of the teacher and in my own cultivation as an embodied Soul.
I’m coming close to the very nature of Life by immersing ever more deeply in the work of becoming a true elder in a world that is tearing apart at the seams.
And I am committing anew to deeply and fully recognizing the miracle of Life in every moment as well as I can.
Here is something of my journey that I own with pride:
At the expense of all of the outward measures of progress and success held by society, I have chosen an inward path of healing my psyche and heart, deepening my relationship with wisdom, beauty, and the mystery, and cultivating my Soul. It has been, in equal measures, a glorious and harrowing adventure. I have done this instead of pursuing worldly goals because it was necessary and true for me to do so, and I’m glad for it. Knowing where I was when I began this initiation and where I am now, there could have been no better way to “spend my time.”
There are things that I wish I had also done along the path of this journey, but as I said before, the past is done: it can be learned from, not changed. I believe I have done the thing that matters the most, and while I’m still here there is yet time for all the rest (like my new cello :))
A central work now is to make of all that I have cultivated a refuge and a resource for others on the path of rooting into Soul, embodying the truth of who they are in this world, and coming home to the wild earth as kin.
A central passion now is to help whoever I can on their version of this quest, should they so choose it.
And a central prayer of my own is to continue to live my way into ever-deepening expressions of beauty, wisdom, power, and integrity while moving ever closer to that which matters most: beauty, the Soul, and the wild earth.
I’m grateful to be here, rough seas as they are. What a blessing to walk through one of the hardest times imaginable on the path of becoming! If that won’t make the soul a radiance of pure sunlight, I don’t know what else would.
I raise my glass to you, Soul walker. May you find your way with grace and the right support, and may you know that you are a miracle, rough spots and all.
Blessed be
MW
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