For so long, I have been dreaming about a particular way of living. I have courted it and longed for it and prepared myself for it.

And now finally I realise that I could die of old age doing that. What I really need is to focus my efforts and create that life.

I am dreaming of a life of true connection and co-operation with the living beings that surround me and on whom I depend for life. When I am working on making my house into a home, I want to work alongside the spirits of the house and the wood and the tile. When I cook, I want to be sensitive to the character and properties of the ingredients. I want to work with those beings rather than just do things to them.

It doesn’t come naturally to me. I have been saying and writing for so long that this is the life I want. A life aware of every moment, bringing the sacred into the everyday. I want to slowly but surely build that into a reality.

I am of course not starting from scratch. I have years of courting the sacred behind me. And from those years, I have learned quite a few things about where to find it and how to connect with it. The place of connection is in the here and now.

When I am fully in the moment, my senses engaged and connected to the place, I feel the sacred present in everything. I have a few days of getting there: prayer, meditation, shamanic journeying. In that place of grace, I have a vivid experience of the spirits I live with.

And then I disengage from that heightened moment and get lost. Before I know it I let that world go and get locked into my tasks. I am riding roughshod through that delicate world of spirit, as though those beings, so vivid a minute ago, don’t exist. My interaction with things becomes a blundering stumble rather than the graceful dance I long for.

The question before me, the question I have been struggling with for years, is this: how do I bring the grace of awareness to the practical activities that fill my day?

I’m going on a quest. I want to work out if I can do this in the first place. Past experience is not encouraging. I will have to identify my blockages and work around them or with them. I may have to think about building more moments of deliberate connection into my days.

And then, in the end, I might decide that it doesn’t work for me. It would be a disappointment. I would have to accept that that’s just how I am and work out a different way to work with the spirits around me.

I write because it’s useful for me to express my experiences this way. It helps to bring them home into the everyday world. If what I write is useful to someone on a similar path, that’d be wonderful.

I have a feeling that my next post might resonate with a few people, because the first person you meet in the here and now is yourself…

Image from Pixabay.com