Go to the places that scare you. –advice from her teacher to the Tibetan yogini Machik Labdron
Losing my way ... and finding my way back again. A time of transformation, changes, releasing, becoming. Holding on as life’s current pulls me away from the familiar, feeling my fingers slipping off. Straining to see what’s up ahead.
In her book, Open the Door, Joyce Rupp describes this as the liminal space, the in-between space of a doorway. No longer here, but not yet there. A place of grieving, but also of mystery and promise.
A place of extreme discomfort. It’s very hard to stay, to tolerate the restlessness, to abide in the unknowing. My instinct is to escape, to choose something, anything, to get relief from the waiting, from the fear.
But my spirit says to wait. To trust. To be willing, when the time comes. And to remember the angels. I wrote before about an experience I had at my cabin in the mountains (Falling into Now). I fell off a ladder, and as I fell, I had the most exquisite experience of being held by angels. I understood that they were there not to protect my body from harm, but to give me a priceless gift. The gift was knowing that no matter what happened to my body, everything was perfect. Exactly the way it should be. This moment, this holy instant, is always perfect.
Down by the waterfall, Amanda pitched her tent–it was made of willow sticks and the wool of black goats. Having filled the tent with her largest and softest paisley cushions, Amanda stripped down to her beads and panties and fell into a trance. “I shall determine how to prolong the lives of butterflies,” she had previously announced.
However, an hour later when she awoke, she smiled mysteriously. “The life-span of the butterfly is precisely the right length,” she said.
--from Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins
So I wait. Willing, at least trying to be willing, to go to the places that scare me. Trusting, at least trying to trust, that angels surround me and that everything is exactly the way it should be. Perfect.
Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared. –Exodus 23:20
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