Sometime toward the end of the week-long retreat I was guiding a couple weeks ago, I suddenly heard within me the answer to something that’s been bothering me for months.
Backstory:
Though my current book is fully drafted, and a good portion edited, I have felt the call to pause on it. I have removed wide swaths of text. Added new words. And still felt the need to wait for – well, I wasn’t sure for what. Clarity, perhaps. Courage, maybe.
Instinct, probably; this happens to writers. And any of us who write a lot know that from time to time we’re called to pause - and we just trust it, go with it, flow through it. Until the answer comes.
Which it did near the end of six intense days of holding the space for others’ (and my own) prolonged creative practice (visual arts) and immersive nature healing. All that generative inner soil had been well-tended, tilled, watered. So, when I was walking from one room to the next in my home the day before the retreat ended – and not thinking about my book at all - the answer arrived.
As soon as it spoke itself to me, everything that had been unsettled within just reorganized itself into coherence. Into a pattern. Into a tantalizing, bling-shiny, dragonfly of inspired movement. A huge project I had completed just prior to the retreat suddenly fused itself to my book.
All I can say is this: noticing the subtleties, nurturing ourselves along the way of pause, and trusting that what we need will be birthed in its miraculous and divine time is the path. It is going with inevitable change.
