a toast to the verdant & soulful woods…

How do you know the call of the soul, the call to spiritual adventure, is truly a call & not a momentary disorientation, a mood, a rogue feeling, or an excuse for fleeing responsibilities? How do you know it’s not just a need for an overdue vacation?……… It is numinous, suffused with the sacred or holy, accompanied by enormously powerful emotion. It is unexpected, a feeling of being summoned by destiny. It is profoundly familiar to the unconscious, yet frightening to the personality. It feels the opposite of avoiding responsiblity, rather a facing of something difficult with something essential waiting for you on the other side. Look hard at yourself in the mirror & decide whether you will cross the threshold. Act on it……Bill Plotkin

most of us will not receive a call….& even less will act on it….frightening indeed….we live our lives on the surface…..confused by the ego’s demands, not quite understanding the archetypes which present themselves…..

but sometimes it need not be so dramatic….it’s just a spring cleaning, complete with a few new things….

maybe a cry in the night or a sudden feeling of profound loss in the middle of the day signals a need for change…maybe not earth-shattering blunders (I’m sure we all have memories of such moments in youth when ‘change’ was actually ‘avoidance’….), but the soul’s natural way of leading us down to our depths…..asking, not telling us to make a little room in our life for whatever means ‘something more’ to us….

standing at the crossroads….

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through

there is always the risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

& you must look back

& let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself

makes no promises.

It is only a door.

…Adrienne Rich (r.i.p.)