Guided

I’m being guided.

I am one who cannot help but listen and notice. Perhaps it has always been this way. It seems so.

I read many books at once, all the time – fiction and non-fiction – and hold and match and play with what is painted by the writers. I note color and depth and texture in creation, and my own dialogue with the beauty or repulsion (last week’s encounter with a snake!). I am nudged by song lyrics, by images, art, by moments that come and go like quicksilver. Scripture and beautifully crafted honest prayer and prose attract me, annoy me, challenge me, feed me. I put pen to blank pages in my own journal and watch letters and words unravel, as they chronicle inner and outer worlds, visible and invisible – understood and forever unknown. I have conversations with this one, that one, another — joy, grief, everydayness, anxiety, hope, care for others, compassion, suffering, spirituality, relationship, the wonder and wear of life’s abundance. Memories of place and people echo impressions and messages too. The softness of CoCo’s fur, the taste of refreshing breezes, the heat of summer-coming days on my skin, the ache of muscles after mowing, the tiredness that comes sooner as years pass — all these tactile and physical items are memos too that come in.

And then there are the frustrations or fears. The car won’t start. The direction is unclear. The power has gone out (the electric company, or perhaps in other ways?!). I seem to be in a familiar circle. The sandpaper types of encounters and experiences that rub in ways uncomfortable or painful, small or large – these say ‘present and accounted for’ too. Annoyances or traumas – we all have them. These, as well, I notice and listen to, attempting to surround them with space and compassion to honor their murmurings on the way – to see what they too will teach.

I find in all this data coming in, flowing over and through me, guidance. There are themes. Sometimes they are embarrassingly repeated, like the fifth time in an hour a teacher has directed the students’ attention to the same concept or step on the way. Sometimes their presence is sensed, but they are still foggily obtuse – something is there, but what? And do I want to know? Or am I desperate in my longing to be embraced by whatever the new truth is, or for its healing or holding?

Whatever – I cannot NOT notice. Awareness, for me, is not something I strive for.

The experience is comforting. It is sometimes annoying, even unnerving. It is often helpful to me, helpful to others. I find that life and the God who wants us to have it abundantly are both unerringly consistent at speaking, nudging, initiating, inviting – sometimes looking to provide grounding, sometimes growth – and that these messages and dynamics are encountered within and without. And I must breathe into it all, relax into it, be gentle as the guidance comes and not seek to grasp or analyze or manipulate. It holds its own wisdom.

At this time of year when my garden SHOULD be up and running (it’s not yet), I am conscious again of seeds. In the smallest seed in our hand that looks like a fleck of dust or thread or dirt… inside of it is a dynamism and life that is all that it is now, and all that it will be. The mightiest of trees, the most fruitful of fruit or vegetable plant or shrub/tree — the yellowness of the marigold, the magenta of the snapdragon, the multicolor patterns of the pansies – all of what it IS is somehow in that little tiny speck we call a seed. And it too receives guidance and nudges and urgings and discomfort and wiggling breakthroughs in its life.

So, as I am inundated with data points which flow constantly in words, images, experiences, emotions, encounters; I take heart. I don’t need to be concerned with the ‘meaning’ or the ‘outcome’. Life is not about arriving at the last step in a geometric proof. It is color and texture and art, and I am the subject, not the artist.

I am being guided. And moving ever into and toward my truest self, already present, as unknown to me as the fullness is to the seed, and yet as truly already here in all its/my fullness. My job is to be and to become, gently and tenderly, surrounded by the compassion and the environment that Wisdom has knitted about me. Thanks be to God.

How are you experiencing guidance right now?