go big or go home

Wowsa on the learning curve these days. After getting verbal agreement to a longer leave of absence, my shorter leave request was formally approved. So I had to think through the entire process all over again, and dither around the decisions, and feel all the doubts come up--oy!

Well, I've been praying a lot. Not just for guidance around this, but for some clarity of what it is all about, what's the path right now, how do I heal my confusion?

And a lot has come through. It is very powerful and real--I know because one of the largest pieces of information coming through is personally painful. I would not have imagined it this way, but I am nevertheless grateful for the immensity of the clarity, and for the forgiveness and healing within myself that is following.

I could write all day about personal process, dreams, world events, and a whole lot more. I am not using any stimulants whatsoever for weeks now either. There is just tremendous karmic quickening going on.

So let me just say that intuition and psychic phenomena and spirituality are all much more real than we usually give credit. It is not simply how blissfully we vibrate that matters; in a lot of ways it is how cleanly we manage our affairs. Humility is underrated. Was it Buddha or Jesus who talked about keeping your feet clean--in other words finding your humble work--and everything else would take care? I think both said something similar.

I understand much more about that wild ride in dreamtime a couple months ago. I understand much more about my personal work now. My entire trip plans were released and then came back to me, with a rather different focus now--which happens to fit perfectly with one of the communities I am visiting.

Often when I have thought I was behaving most altruistically, I have been surprised to learn how self-centered I'd been. And vice versa. This is one of those times wherein healing myself is a clear, single step on the good path to healing the world. And I have heard one clear action is more valuable than the most magnificent imagined journey.

Still, today it took all I could muster to re-request the longer leave. I was still floundering, not perfectly clear as to whether it was worth it and so on. Yet as soon as I took action, even in the not knowing, my energy shot up tenfold. I was stronger, attuned to an entire new set of unknown challenges I'll likely face, and wowsa that is good medicine.

It came to me after: the whole gift of taking a chunk of time to invest in myself and my healing, in gaining skills that will likely be useful in the world--permaculture sure, but the empathic also. And so much more--even if the trip flops, I will come back with renewed clarity about the world and my place in it, renewal and focus.

It also came to me I want to do this because my sister Martha, in her debility, cannot. We share work on some level. Celebrating the life we are granted, while we can, is something that she is teaching me. It sounds selfish, but I don't think it is really. It is done with tremendous gratitude for all the shared lessons I cannot begin to describe here.

Gratitude to Trader Joe's too for instilling a sense of physical competence in me over the last three years. And for the saying often tossed around, which also came to me today, after requesting the long leave:

go big or go home