Closing the Books on the Past To Make Room for the Next Adventure

If you followed my previous long journey when I went to Europe a few years ago you may recall that I kept hinting at a Large Story that I needed to figure out how to write...a story that was the climax of that trip....far too grand a tale, I felt, to wrap up neatly or blog-style.

Well, over the last few years I have been struggling and struggling to put it into writing.  I have no trouble telling the story to friends over bottles of wine, with an hour or two to really flesh it out.  But writing it.....I just couldn't.

After I bought my ticket to India I hired a wonderful life/career coach, Denise Barnes, for four sessions to be spread out over two and a half months to guide and cheer-lead me through the writing process so that I could close the books on the "old" story before setting off to discover a new one.  Funny thing was, even though we got the writing juices flowing pronto and I found a solid voice for the story after the first session, I still couldn't navigate my way through writing the whole tale.

However, Denise did coach me through quite a powerful mental block: she helped me to finally feel confident in my abilities as a "light worker".  With her energetically holding my hand I took the first steps towards believing that I have something unique and valuable to give to the world by virtue of my exploration of it and reporting on it.  All I have to do is trust my gut, take one step at a time, and keep careful notes.

Over the same few months, I made the long-distance acquaintance of another wise-woman, Victoria Pendragon, who has a site that I've followed for the last few years called sacredearthsevenelement.com. I introduced myself because she was looking for free images to replace the copyright protected photos that she used for her cyber tarot deck in order to make a sellable hard-copy deck.  I had a picture that I took on Iona that had always reminded me of her Tower Card; I wrote and asked her if she'd like to trade my image out for her old one.  She did.  This led to several of my travel photos being incorporated into her deck...a high honor for me, as I feel she is a very gifted healer and light worker.

On Sundays Victoria doesn't post her usual daily readings, but sends out tutorials on the meaning of one of her cards.  Yesterday she highlighted The Tower; naturally, she included my photo.  She was gracious enough to give me a shout-out at the end of the post and I wanted to repay her with the history behind the picture.  

Lo and behold, in a matter of minutes I found that I had written The Story.  Granted, it doesn't have all the back-ground I thought it needed in order to be impactful, but it is The Story.    (If you'd like some of the history I might have shared in an oral telling, you can root it out by sifting through the blog posts from the spring of 2008).

So, to close the books on Europe 2008...without further ado...I give you: THE Story (as told to Victoria Pendragon).

A different shot of "The Tower" 

I built that tower at the end of a very long (3 month) quest around the British Isles....a quest I was called to go on, without being given the reason, by the universe.  The night before had been a full moon....I had spent the new moon, two weeks earlier, in Glastonbury casting wishes for clarity and a sense of purpose into the Holy Well....and I was sure that my long awaited epiphany would come to me on the full moon on Iona...I mean, if you can't expect an epiphany there, where can you???

But none had arrived.  No prophetic dreams.  Nothing.

So I'd slogged through the rain and sheep poop across the island to the beach where pilgrims have gone for thousands of years.  This beach is famous for it's pebbles and it was, indeed, covered with millions of the most beautiful pebbles I have ever seen.  

I sat amongst them all, in the rain, building that tower feeling very much at sea and forsaken and at the end of my energetic/spiritual rope.

And I gave up.  I started to walk home.  But then I turned around and decided to walk out into the water on some big boulders (so, surrounded by water, but not IN the water)...

....and I yelled into the surf, "What's it all about?" and I found myself saying out loud, "Love."  

Well, this didn't surprise me because all along my trip I'd been followed by hearts....heart shaped leaves, flowers, wads of gum, puddles, rocks, I had been photographing them for months just to make sure I wasn't going out of my mind:

So, somewhat petulantly, I threw back to the universe, "LOVE...OK...LOVE...I give.  LOVE....".

At the Holy Well I'd "received" a mantra: "Weaving a tapestry, putting in light."  Now, the mantra expanded to: "Weaving a tapestry, putting in light.  Weaving a tapestry putting in LOVE."  I stood on that boulder arms wide open yelling that into the sea.  And then I thought, that's all I can do....my epiphany will obviously come after I get back to the states...maybe years from now...

I began to walk back.  There was a little tidal pool filled with a thousand pebbles, shallow and warm.

So, I decided that the one thing I hadn't done was infuse a prayer into the water....a practice taught to me by a wise man in Australia.  Its a simple practice, you just put your hands in a body of water and say a prayer and by being clear and open-hearted, you infuse that prayer into the water which takes that prayer and sends it around the world.

I said the juiciest prayer ever.  I prayed for peace and love and harmony for everyone I could think of by name and then everyone else whose name I didn't know, as well as for the planet and all its critters.  It was a long long prayer.  Upon occasion my eyes would drift open and I became intrigued by three particular rocks...and when the prayer was done and I was sure that there was no more I could really do to incite an epiphany, an epiphany that was OBVIOUSLY not coming anytime soon...I indulged my curiosity and picked up the three rocks, one at a time.

The first was tiny and white and irregularly shaped with pin prick orange and blue spots on it....I pocketed that one for a kid I nanny upon occasion.

The second looked as if it was going to be heart-shaped....of course, knowing my luck....but it wasn't.

The third was a very ordinary egg shaped rock...grey...with a pink line running down the part I could see...and I love a rock with a wishing line on it.  I picked it up and slowly turned it around to make sure the line connected on the other "side", because we all know...the line has to connect on the other side to be a valid wishing rock....but as I turned it around I realized that it did not circumnavigate the stone...instead it appeared that God had taken a pink sharpie and drawn the outline of a slightly irregular, but Hallmark worthy heart onto the pebble.

I stood up and tried telling myself that that was a perfectly normal thing to find.  That there was nothing at all extra-ordinary about finding a rock with a perfect heart drawn on it amidst millions of other pebbles that don't have hearts...and to find it right after I said a prayer for love into the water right above it...."PERFECTLY NORMAL!"

But as I walked away I suddenly felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach...I doubled over and collapsed to the ground and started sobbing....and I knew in a flood of insight that the Earth had been speaking to me all along the way.  It had been speaking AND listening to me..the whole time.  It had been telling me that Love really is the only answer.  I also believe it was telling me that it can be healed...we can be healed....and the healing starts with love.

Now I don't think I'm special...I think the Earth is speaking to all of us..listening to all of us...I just happened to be in a space where I could pick up on the signals...