The Rising of the Tides

The inner tumult was abreast today, the churn of the unsettled seas coaxing me into their dance. The waves too strong for me to resist their undertow, i thrashed around in the confusion of the abyss once again. There is a war between two forces, one from the internal world and one of the external and they are loudly resisting their ability to co-exsist together. The path of integration.

It seems the last four years of my life have been concerned with de-constructing the external world that began to show holes in the face it displayed to me. This was a neccessary process to bring me into the illuminated spaces of my internal world. Yet having what feels like a good amount of time spent in response to the internal world, it is now time to bring them together. My friend jenn called it a couple weeks ago, the marrying of the earth energy with the light energy.

In one of Moji's recorded talks, he spoke about the deepening of conciousness, explaining that in some states of awareness, the concepts that meant something to the one who witnesses, would no longer hold any relevance, they would be dead concepts and not worth entertaining. I relate that to the strains on my relationship with social work. For the past few years, everytime I have sat in clinical settings or amongst fellow clinicians as they engaged in dialogue about client case scenarios, diagnosis or assessment, my internal world turns into scrambled eggs. I feel as if I am sitting in a room, with a crowd of people speaking different languages, quickly and relentlessly, that all seem foreign and overwhelming. Than when a silence intercepts and I am asked for my input, i feel perplexed and without comment just before the panic sets in that what used to come to me fluidly without question now seemed something I had only dreamed. The panic arose from the validation, skill and prowess i once delivered and was admired for. I had been evaluated as the top 5% across twelve schools of social work for my level of analysis in assessment. A case analysis was like a puzzle that i looked deeply into, examining the variance of threads that appeared to come together and reporting in good time a thorough review, analysis and plan to bring all of the peices together again. Yet the experiences of my own life in the last year demonstrated for me definitively that all was not as it seemed, the devisement of the intellect disillusioned if taken for reality on it's own, the answers to what was going on, no longer clear. Maybe that's what Moji meant, going further into the mystery drew massive crevices into what at first seemed real and now appeared no different than a cookie cutter, simple joining of dots created by a constructed lens. I suppose this heralds a success in soul step, but for me it has also meant the ripping of a well developed skill that promised a lining to the grey cloud of poverty and survival. I suppose simulteanously it also reveals the strength of my need for external validation is still alive and well....maybe just the right conditions to continue nurturing the seed of loving myself, a task that still requires work.

Yet my commitment to the honoring of my call makes peace with this sacrafice in the light of the following steps awaiting me. Except that part is never clear. There is so many threats to it's revelation, it takes real work to hold the space for truth to become known. That part...is also the difficulty. The outer world is noisy and demands time and investment in responsibilities, however few they might be. For me it's raising a daughter singlehandedly and constantly meditating the doubter who incessantly chatters about the realities of the external world, the conditioning, mindsets and governing values and how they intersect with our "modern ideas of childrearing". She taunts me with her insinuations of "bad mothering"...."get off your hippy head trip of fantasy and lore and living the questions that live inside of you, you may only be 26 but in ten years, you'll have a sixteen year old waiting to go to university on a tuition you swore you'd never make her earn". Than there's the soother who calmly steps into the chaos of the doubter and assures her that there is greater value in passing on the wisdom of engaging one's life and the honoring of her call, than discarding herself to the slavery of the herd in an effort to steep the child in excess. Madison after all, has always had what she needed, her dad and i devoted to providing that for her and in discussion tonight, he reminded me that on top of having her basic needs met, Madison was blessed to have so much community around her that loved her, people of so many walks of life that come in and out of our journey. She has been given exposure to sacred rituals and rites of passage and been raised in an openness that has allowed her to express herself in the ways that are of within her. Surely, this was the wisest path.

What seems so unsettling about following this journey with child, is that life born of the actualization of spirit leads one to avalanches with no certainty to what comes after, it could also demand sacrafices that upset the whole system of balance, but in writing it, i suppose what scares me most is the level of responsibility it demands from you. I could see as I was typing that a life born of ignorance would demand no less but would come in slower transitions and leave people free of the burden of carrying responsibility as their actions are more reactive than preemptive. But my journey has shown me that when one commits conciously, the tides move quicker, the stakes are higher and you can't really go back, however much sometimes you wish to.

Today was one of the days i wished to. There are parts of me that so strongly want to run back to the embrace of social work, to feel the joy of being there again and the passion of the struggle. Than there are stronger parts of me that know I can't. I hear the echoes of a reader that read for me 7 years ago in the back of my mind.."you will always need a place to grow and are a quick learner, you will only stay in places for a little at a time before you have mastered the skill and are called to move forward". I guess this is what she was talking about. But for a lone wolf always in search of community, it feels scary and devastating to leave "social worker" behind. It's possible as one of my teachers, Shadowwalker suggested, that growing comfortable living within the emptiness is the work that needs to be done and does not require my abandonment of my career, but for now the inner voice is insistent i take some space and i knew i had to leave the landscape here to give it the space it needs. But that doesnt mean that i am visited by the voice of fear at least 20 different points of the day....thats desperately devising a plan for my return, yet when i stop and breathe, i look back at the last four years of my life and see each step that has led me here and the small subtle quenching of every internal nuance that suggested i might need to look a different way.