WAITING TO WAKE UP

What happens when a life is so full of one thing there is little room for anything else?

Life is not about doing more. Just maybe life is about doing less! Perhaps life is about being in a relationship with yourself, with God and with others. Maybe it isn't about working ourselves to death ~ almost literally.  

The saying goes that on a person's death bed no one says, "I wish I had worked more." 

But what happens when you are so deeply entrenched you can't get out? What happens to those that depend upon you, are waiting on you, are needing you?  What happens when you feel frazzled and depleted and empty.  How do you keep the pain at arm's length? Do you go left, or right, or up or down?  Do you stay still and exist in this quagmire or disappoint yourself or others?

What happens then?  You ask for help.  You reach out.  You get to to the point of screaming in your sleep, please someone understand.  Someone help me.  Someone get the ton of bricks off of my chest.  And that someone doesn't come.

It is then that you have to start removing the bricks one at a time, until you can breathe again.  Until you can sit on a log in a forest and remember what it was once like to feel the sun coming through the branches and the cool clean feeling of the vibrant green moss between your toes.  The little things.  The simple things.  The things that once held you in their grasp and you have lost along the way.  The distance between who you are and who you have become is emphasized.  You find that time when you start to look inside at your own hopes and longings and dreams that haven't come true. It is in these moments of introspection that you find the empty spaces with no words needed.  You remember how to feel.

But somehow the process between who you have become and who you are deep inside is a long one and often lost.  It is as if you are waiting.  Waiting on something or someone or some time.  Waiting to wake up.

I am in that place.  I recall a line from Auntie Mame, 1953 ~ "Life is like a banquet and some poor suckers are starving to death ~ Live, Live, Live."

What comes from our hearts has been given to us as a gift.  We must give it honor.  But what if that gift is devouring us? 

I understand that taking a risk puts us in a place where there is more to be gained than lost.  And I understand that staying stagnant is a bigger risk.  It starts in our minds.  It is a step of faith to move into something much larger.  We never know what is around the corner.

So today I pay homage and respect and attention to my indecisions, my quandries, my questions. 

You see love of life has its own smell and it is never wasted.  Today I remember that remembering is an act of grace.  And I know for a fact that our most powerful memories are sensual ~ touch and smell.  I can almost smell the mountains, and hear the movement and harmony of the trout stream and the cool moist softness of the moss under my feet and the closeness to a place where I know I belong.  You see with change something opens up within us to possibilities we never dreamed possible.  But somewhere along the way you have to take that first step.