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Merry's Musings
The Gathering Inn recently staffed a booth at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts UCC church. We were situated right next to another conference/retreat center's booth, and two doors down from a third center's table. One person stopped at the booth down the way and got information about their offerings, then stopped at the booth right next door and heard all about their programs and opportunities, and then she arrived at our booth. Her questions was, "And so, what do YOU do?". And after a few moments, my response was "The Gathering Inn is not about doing, it's about being!"
While it is true we offer retreats with various themes, and yoga classes, and meditation circles, and workshops, our primary purpose for "being" is to support women in their journey into their own "being". What exactly does that mean?
What that means to me is that even though I am looking back a few years now on the moment when I officially became a senior citizen, in some ways, I still am discovering myself. Who was I intended to be when I arrived newly minted into this arena of time and space? Where has that person gone? Can I find her again? Who am I when I am not being someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's daughter, someone's employee? What is MY truth when I am not following someone else's doctrine? How will I fare if some new experince or teaching or revelation causes me to change my sense of what I hold as Truth?
What things bring me joy, what things feed my soul? What gifts do I have to share and what lessons do I need to learn?
When I say I want to live..to "be".. from my authentic core, do I even really know what that is? What connects me to all that is Divine? What do I know beyond a shadow of a doubt to be true and holy? Where are my undisputable anchors?
Many of my previous anchors have not held fast recently and I have discovered that in a time of extreme transition in my personal life, some of them were false anchors. As I have let go of the false ones, the true ones have become clearer. And as I have let go and detached, my life has distilled down to just a few "givens":
1) I am healthy (a big statement for a breast cancer survivor)
2) I have a roof over my head and a safe place to lay my head each night
3) I have soul satisfying work to do
4) I have people who love me
5) I am a beloved daughter of the Goddess, safe in Her care.
How blessed am I? What more could I possibly need? The rest of it is just window dressing.
As I think about transition, I realize that every moment of our lives is a moment of transition. All we really have is this exact moment, this holy present. We are always in a state of transition from this exact moment into the next exact moment (some more dramatic than others), and we need those anchors we can rely upon.
We may change jobs, change relationships, change health status, change homes, change our reality, but one thing remains True. We are all on the way to "becoming" a continuously evolving, growing manifestation of the Divine and our job is to live as authentically into that as we can in each newly arrived moment. When we live with that awareness, we too will find life is much more about "being" than "doing".
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