Grace and Ease

A few years ago when I was living with Cindy, I struggled with various aspects my life. Cindy, in her wise and motherly way was always so open to the moving of the universe. I always though of myself as open. Until lately, that is. Perhaps starting seminary has something to do with it. In many ways I feel more open to anything that may come my way than ever before. In other places I am finding that I am simply not confortable being open, that its just not right for me; and I am learning to accept that I have bounderies of thought and I am trying to be true to myself by respecting them. The funny thing about this though is that I am learning that my boundries are tremendously liberating. The more bounderies I want to put into my life, the more focused I become on what it is that I really want, the easier everything seems to become.

Cindy used to tell me to imagine it happening, or to just simply do it, with "grace and ease". That was three years ago! I had trouble undertsnading at the time, but now . . . . I am just now getting it! I am enjoying and delighting at my own suprise over this. School is challenging. Trying to descern who I am and what I want to do is extremly challenging. Maintaing marriage and other life long friendships when life is so full of the chaos of new creation is a new challenge. But what I am finding is that in all the challenge, the worry, the struggle, the concern, the whirlwind--in the middle of all that I feel a calm. A silence and stillness in the eye of the storm. And as I stand there, focused on my needs and taking small steady steps toward them. It is all happening. Almost as if by magic the needs to do this new thing, the steps to traverse down my new road are all there. It is almost as if they have been there all along waiting for me to find them. And the beauty of these steps and slience is that suddenly they are all happing with grace and ease. Not that it is all suddendly easy, because it is not. But it is suddenly do-able, doing, and done. Sometimes I wonder if I have been lifted up, because in the stillest of moments I look down on my life and am overwhelmed with amazement watching the whirlwind and seeing that, yes, indeed, I have embraced and been embraced right back with grace and ease.