We keep racing ahead to what lies before us – the tasks, the goals, the dreams. But without stopping to engage what lies within us: it’s like hiking the Grand Canyon blindfolded allowing someone else to chart our course. We begin to forget why we are doing it all. Before long, we dread every step. We miss the Ponderosa pine forest and the Tassel-eared squirrel. We arrive fatigued, exhausted and unable to appreciate anything other than it being over. Don’t we want more than to simply survive life? Without exploring what lies within us, the journey ahead is empty. Inner vision is what makes what we see meaningful. But in our race to get it all done, we forget about the us that is doing it.
If you feel like there are not enough glasses of red wine to take the edge off … not enough miles you can run to escape the feeling something’s missing … and it might be you… If, under a relatively flawless, well-balanced, highly functioning, gregarious façade, you experience dueling undercurrents of spiking anxiety, paralyzing fear, extreme irritability and plummeting sadness – this is the path to what lies within.
The pages ahead offer multiple ways to see, what we see, differently – a veritable toolkit of lenses to open the aperture of possibility; shedding new light on the magic embedded in our mundane, manic lives.
Part cultural trend analysis, part linguistic conscious raising, part wake-up call to our inner selves, this book offers the skeptic and poet alike a raw, honest look, at how we cannot not just survive our world, but rediscover ourselves within it. How we can slow down enough to find ourselves. How we can move beyond the life-sucking “Productivity-Efficiency-Accomplishment Paradigm” of success to find what makes us feel alive again. What you hold is a field guide to self-discovery.
Before setting out on a scavenger hunt to find our true selves, it is important to survey the landscape of where we live: our empire of disruption. The pings and dings of breaking news are like muffled gunshots the way they kill our concentration, assault our sensibility and cripple our chance for meaningful connection. The relentless blinking, buzzing barrage of headlines, notifications, pokes, pushes, requests and reminders is deadening. The breaking news breaks and breaks and breaks, crashing waves of information through our awareness: until we are broken.
Under the guise of being more connected, we are less. There is more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before but it has lost meaning. We have eaten the modern day poison apple and byte-by-byte we are becoming desensitized, disconnected and distressed. We check our cell phones on average 150 times daily, with high frequency users checking once every six seconds. We are so terrified of missing incoming messages that we are missing the inner messages – from our heart, our gut and our soul.
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away from the news and break open our hearts.
I did not know her. Had never even heard of her. And yet, I could not stop thinking about her. I felt relieved, I think, to know that someone besides me, was searching that intensely too. But I felt gripping, frantic despair that I would not be able to talk with her about that, like I had lost a kindred spirit. I searched the Internet to find out who she was. I walked down our street, with flowers and a card, over the rocky shortcut that leads to the train station a block away from her house. I had walked this same path hundreds of times, usually running, late for my train. I was still running, still feeling like I was late, still feeling like maybe I could get there in time, knowing I couldn’t but not slowing down.
I needed to know she was real, to knock my knuckles on her front door, press my feet into the soil of her front yard. I needed to ask her neighbors if I could help, if she had family, if they were okay. I needed her to be more than a blurb on my I-pad. I needed to make her death a physical part of my life.
I found out when her memorial service was and I went. I sat in the back, knowing no one. Her father spoke for a long time about how she was an artist, a rebel, a free spirit, how she suffered as she got older and didn’t like to take her medication, how he met her every morning for coffee, except this last one.
He, she, we are all doing the best we can. We cannot be reduced to a blurb. Not in a newspaper. Not at a memorial service. Our struggles, our stories are complex. Individually beautiful, troubling and mysterious. I left the service, quietly humbled but still wild with questions.
Was it 4:44? Surely, it was not exactly 4:30. Was she cold? It was cold out. Was she cold? She was known to pray on her knees in the street, but what was she praying for? Was it what I have been praying for? You? Are we now one prayer short? Where do our prayers go?
She was known to walk all hours of the day and night. Where was she going? Did she get there? Where are we going?
She was not known by many, directly. People knew mostly of her. A troubled soul wandering, the streets, kneeling to pray, day after month after year. For what? For it all to come together? The selves, the fractional elements of soul that get splintered along the way to reconnect?
Alice, her dad, the 239 souls on the Malaysian flight, you, me – we are each the architects of our identity, the artists of our life. Every day we chisel away what doesn’t work and shape what does. We mend what’s broken and mold what’s new. And we try, if we are mindful, we make space for beauty, wonder and mystery. Because deep down we know that it is in these spaces human connection thrives.
My personal search to find these spaces is now four and a half decades long. It has been a circuitous path that has taken me from quantum physics, archetypal mythology and Qigong to metaphysical theology, creative visualization and past life regression therapy. It has inspired me to record two albums, earn an MFA in Creative Writing and become the Chief Creative Officer at a boutique ad agency. It would be fair to say, on the subject of searching for meaning via circuitous paths, I have experience.
Along the way I have discovered strategies for how to survive the world. How to feel safe inside myself, how to navigate authority undetected, how to walk through darkness with faith the light will return. Yet, still, I live in gripping fear for a part of every day that I am not present enough for my children, my husband or myself; that I am not focused enough on what matters most; that I am missing what really feeds my heart and soul. Under a fairly serene surface, I am terrified that I am not getting it, that I will wake up one day and will have missed IT altogether.
This fear along with my unrelenting sense of hope and tenacious search for meaning has led me to three truths, which inspired the writing of this book.
- Magic is found outside the margins,
- Spirit is present inside everything and
- Freedom is felt beyond the borders of thought.
