This morning I headed for the beach to do a morning meditation and my morning pages.
(This time I brought a pen.)
As I set up my good old mandala blanket, I looked at it from a few steps away.
I thought about its repeating patterns. Each individual motif connecting to the identical one beside it. Some are geometric shapes and some are images from nature. You can only really the beautiful symmetry and order of everything once you step back to look. It is a blur of colour in concentric circles. Each layer, on its own path, travelling around the centre.
Last year, I made a shift on my 36th birthday watching the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean in Nags Head, North Carolina. It defined my year. I reaffirmed this commitment and choice by choosing my word for 2015: FAITH.
For the last two nights, I have watched the sun set over the Pacific Ocean.
A full circle moment. I remember joking with my husband, as we watched that sunrise over the Atlantic last summer, that we should watch a sunset on the Pacific Coast. This trip wasn’t intentionally planned to complete the circle. My husband is here on business and I tagged along. Only as we sat to watch the sunset did it hit me, the full realization of how this amazing year-long journey brought me here.
Tomorrow it will be 13 months to the day that I made a promise to myself as I watched that pivotal sunrise on my birthday. Since that moment, every single day has felt like a birth-day. Becoming an optimist and actively choosing hope and faith, I can give birth to myself in every single moment. I can always choose again. I can always be something else. I give birth every time I create which has been every day for the last 114 days if we count my mayBE project and my last 83 days of scribbles. Faith allows me to remain open, to receive, and to give.
I never had faith in anything other than myself. I never asked for help. I hated depending on other people. I didn’t believe there was anything higher than myself to call on for help either. But now I have learned the flaw in that. I have learned it through what was at first an experiment and now an experience that changed my life. Having faith allowed me to connect deeply – to connect deeply with God, with myself, with my husband, with my children, with family and friends, and with countless people through this blog and through travel.
Being fully present and aware of the blessings of this moment, I have faith that it will unfold into another moment. That was the circle I began last year. This moment to moment connection that has led me to reaffirm what I have experienced this year – the belief that NOW is all we have to work with. What can I be right now – peaceful, loving, forgiving, abundant, grateful? Because if I am that right now, I have faith that I will find it in the next moment.
And if it’s waiting for me in the next moment, why am I waiting to live that life right now?
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100 scribbles…hurriedly writing the here and now.
#100scribbles
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