Diving into the Void

Tuesday, March 14, 2006 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico

It's midafternoon on a day that's shaping up to be my first in more than week not requiring at least one nap. (Sunday I took three!)

For the past 10 days, I've been living deeper and deeper expressions of the void I wrote about in my March 8 newsletter (What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?). Like a monster balloon, this void has expanded to engulf just about every aspect of my life and has left me with neither the energy nor will to do much about it.

No certainty has been spared by this marauder. Gone, for example, is the certainty of my departure from Santa Fe at month's end. Gone is the return to the road. Gone is a journey to the east and midwest in the spring. Gone is whatever sense I had of what staying in Santa Fe might mean. Gone, too, to my surprise, is the schedule of two to three teleconferences per month that has been a fixture in my life for the past two years.

Gone is any sense of fixture — apart from writing.

Whenever I connect with my higher wisdom, regardless of the question, I hear an irritatingly unchanging three-word refrain:

Write. Don't think.

It's one of those divine examples of karmic retribution that the identical refrain - writ large across a blackboard or flip chart - has greeted most participants in my writing seminars for the past dozen years.

And so I write. And, too tired, to think, I sleep.

And I write.

I write these blog entries when they demand to be written. And every day I write on my novel.

And I sleep...

In fits and starts at night. In naps during the day.

In honoring the call to sleep, I honor my body by allowing it the rest and integration time it needs. I honor my mind by freeing it from its desire to "figure it out." I honor my unconscious, which is doing double- and triple-duty in dreamtime.

I wrote in my newsletter about the period that runs from tonight's full moon until the new moon on March 29 as one in which we are laying the foundation not just for the next weeks or months, but for all the next years.

In that context, what I have been experiencing is perfect. I've been forced out of my own way to allow everything about who I am and what I do to be questioned, to allow what no longers serves my highest path to fall away in order that the fullest possible expression of my joy, purpose and mastery can be realized.

It's not always a comfortable process. But that's where exhaustion and sleep come in. There's simply not enough energy - or waking time - to resist it.

I feel like an antique table today, a table whose centuries of finish are being stripped away, layer by layer by layer by layer.

As the table, I have no idea what new finish will be applied, when it will be done, how I'll look or to what use I'll be put once it's complete. Even though I know I'll still be a table and will experience greater joy in my renewal than I ever have known, it's still a disconcerting transition.

As the restorer, that higher part of me that is returning the table to its natural beauty and highest function, I have absolute clarity about what I'm doing and about its outcome.

Perhaps I'll be largely a writing table. Perhaps other uses that I cannot now imagine are waiting for me.

About one thing (and perhaps only one) I'm certain: Whatever the outcome, as I surrender to this process I will be supported fully and in joyful ways that express my highest purpose. For that is the ascension path. That is the heart's desire.