Ready, Set, Go...and Keep Going...

Monday, April 3, 2006 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico

When I power up my cell phone this morning, I find a message advising me that my casita will be ready to meet its vacation rental destiny (and full rent potential) by mid-month.

Even though there have been false alarms in the past, this time it feels real.

Besides, I know I have outgrown this one-bedroom adobe, as great as it has been to be here.

That feeling has intensified in recent days, ever since the arrival of a new sofa bed, one that's disproportionately large for my compact living room. Every time I look at the sofa, I feel the walls closing in on me.

So it's definitely time, once again, to move on. I'm not surprised that the Ready, Set, Go! card turns up again this morning, as it did yesterday during my preparations for last night's Mastery teleconference.

Although I don't feel powerfully guided to do so, I scan the ads for a new home - someplace larger, someplace that matches the higher vibration I know I'm moving into.

Nothing feels right.

Regardless, I do some drive-bys.

Nothing looks right.

"Okay, Santa Fe," I say toward the end of the day. "If you want me here, you'd better house me."

Another phone call soon after that. This one raising my rent should I choose to stay beyond this week.

Now, just as you and I have been in flux over the past month, so have the owners of my casita. I say this in neither judgment nor anger, but I've been told so many conflicting and changeable stories about the unit and the fate of my tenancy that this call pushes me over the edge.

And then I get it.

It's not about them. It's about me.

Twelve years ago this month, when I first felt guided to move from Toronto to Nova Scotia, it was a vague, five-years-down-the-road kind of call.

Yet as I surrendered to that call and acted as though it would come to pass, I felt the time frame collapse and collapse again, until by the time I made a reconnaissance visit to Nova Scotia in July 1994, I expected to be moving the following spring.

When I returned to Toronto two weeks later from a magically synchronistic trip, I was surprised not to feel another shift in the time frame.

I didn't question it. Instead, I called the University of Toronto to check out registration figures for the noncredit writing course I was scheduled to teach in the fall term.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. Rien. Nichts.

Nobody had signed up for my section, even as sections taught by other instructors were filling up nicely.

"Oh well," I said to myself. "I'll just keep an eye on the numbers. If the course fills up, great. If not, maybe I'll go to Nova Scotia earlier."

Wait one minute! another part of me exclaimed. That's how you've lived your whole life: letting other people's agendas determine yours. It's time to break that pattern. It's time to empower yourself. What do you want?

What did I want? Was anything keeping me in Toronto other than this course?

Apparently not. Within 24 hours I had canceled the course and launched Operation Evacuate. Six weeks later on my 40th birthday, having dispossessed myself of everything that wouldn't fit in a Dodge Caravan, I drove off the ferry in Digby, Nova Scotia.

This casita and its owners' fluctuations represent for me another layer of what occurred a dozen years ago. As I realize that I have spent most of my tenancy disempowering myself by letting their plans rule mine, the genesis of clarity begins to form.

It's as though clarity was just waiting for me to step into my power before it stepped into my awareness.

What emerges is a sense, once again, that it's time to leave Santa Fe, if not for good then at least for now. I decide that whether or not I remain in the casita, I will stay in Santa Fe through Easter, long enough for another visit here with my daughter. And then...

And then I draw a another card. You guessed it: Ready, Set, Go!