Searching

No doubt you have been told or have experienced that we are all born with at least one gift to the world. One talent or skill that rises to the top and makes the world a better place. Many have been blessed with several. (Overachievers. LOL!)

I was given the gift of searching. I am always looking for patterns and studying habits. I was the child turning over rocks, crawling under bushes, counting how many bugs I could find in a patch of grass. I have been a spiritual seeker since I was 10 years old and read an age-appropriate book about a young girl’s walk with God. I can’t remember the title, but it struck a chord with me that still resonates to this day.

I have bounced back and forth with an all-consuming devotion and then painfully turning my back on God. I experimented with what worked to manipulate God into providing me with the life I desired, a life of buoyant love and no suffering. A life of a full education, marriage, children, like minded community, and a peaceful passage into old age and death. If I do the right thing, if I am a good little girl all will come to me, right? So naïve, so silly, so wrong.

My life has been far from that. LOL! It seems from the very moment I totally committed myself to God was the moment my life derailed from my utopic dream. Deep sigh.

I won’t go into details but now, 50 years and many heartaches and failures later, I see that was the path all along. I was busy filling my cup with corporeal things under the illusion that is what was necessary for me to have a life of my desire, the American Dream.  Wrong on so many levels. Truly I can laugh now at my absurdity.

Having gone through all those experiences I see the more I was filling my cup with stuff and accomplishments, the less room there was for God. But I had to go there, (because that’s who I am), in order to be here. Here is where I see that by being empty, by being broken wide open is where I find all manner of spirituality, all the Holy Communion with the Divine, with God.

Empty. Raw. Untethered.  

So, in this place where I can step back and see if this decision to empty my cup will bring me closer to awakening… or further away. There is fear in this place. It means many common activities like being on committees, in groups, gathering titles, and even some relationships will have to be released back into the wild from which they came, maybe to serve another being. I just know they no longer serve me. I’m letting go. I’m done, but truly I have joy in my heart. There is no heaviness, no regret, no angst; it’s more of a beautiful lightness.

The only way I have been able to do this shedding, this release, has been through my constant searching. Tami, searching for what? I’m not sure, but I’ll know it when I see it. I get the feeling I have searched diligently for love. Love in family, careers, possessions, titles, education. All to temporary satisfaction. Temporary because as is true in all of life, nothing is permanent, the sands are always shifting. It is in layering on then slowly and sometimes painfully shedding those layers that I found not only growth but love. I’ve had to die so many times only to be reborn into another way of life that yet again was wrong for me.

In my never-ending quest I am starting to understand there is birth, there is death, there is rebirth, and there is also resurrection, and this resurrection is a choice. Every day it is a choice to be reborn into my habitual patterns or to be resurrected out of that fire, that hell if you will, and into a life of complete emptiness and yet complete love. Every day the sands shift. Even though nothing is permanent, doesn’t mean it’s shifting towards bad. All my shifts, all my searching has had pain and turmoil, but always in the direction of good. My good.

Ugh. I hate that, but I’m learning, through stillness on my yoga mat and meditation cushion that searching brings treasures and rewards that are not of this world. So, I’m gonna keep on looking