your soul senses the world that awaits you.

"We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started 

And know the place for the first time."

~ T.S. Eliot

For a long time, I've been repeating patterns. Reusing the same phrases and template for love and abundance over and over again only to awaken and find myself in the same damn hole. And, I have the nerve to ask how I got there? 

One day, we just awaken to our lives and realize: my god, what I have been looking for is right in front of me. It's been here all long, why oh why didn't I recognize it? Seize it? Jump on it and run away with it? 

Because what I was looking for requires change within me. Work. Effort. And, to do nothing, while painfully familiar, makes my soul cry out, why me? 

It's easy to do nothing. At least I know it. Nothing is familiar. Comforting, in a bazaar kind of way. It's like my favorite pilling, too small sweater. It gives me warmth but just doesn't quite look right on me. It fits but only because I'm forcing it to do so. 

Time to make radical shifts in my thinking in small increments. Change is cumulative just like compassion and laughter and hope is. One thing builds upon another and then, before you know it, the elephant before you has disappeared. Diminished entirely in the wake of the new habits created day by day by day. 

What needs to be pruned, changed, altered? Everything, I say which of course, isn't true. It just feels that way. Starting small. Just altering one thing at a time. Just one thing. Starting now.

Leaving sadness and sameness behind, my soul is thirsty for more for adventure, more joy. And, the fullness that I have found within me. 

For a New Beginning

In out of the way places of the heart
Where your thoughts never think to wander
This beginning has been quietly forming
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
Feeling the emptiness grow inside you
Noticing how you willed yourself on
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the grey promises that sameness whispered
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

~ John O'Donohue