On Guidance

(Image is Silent Winged Prayer by Susan St.Thomas)

There are days.

Days when the daily grind seems fruitless. Days when the routine, the responsibilities, the paperwork, the bills, the deadlines, and even "the work" as a novice therapist - yes, the work that one hopes will be sustaining and fears will be all-consuming - just don't seem to pan out, make sense, fit together.

On these days, I find it difficult to make sense of purpose and meaning. I stumble over wondering about how and how come and why and why bother. I ask myself how civilization evolved into a pile a junk mail and money owed notices. How consciousness and spirit co-exist with VISA, Target, Exxon, the Consumer Way, and the timely death of the American Dream.

On these days, sometimes I'm on it enough to turn towards meditation, to call for my guides and ancestors. On these days, I ask for Guidance.

Perhaps this is akin to reciting the Lords Prayer...of laying in bed on silent nights murmuring those lines long memorized, while fears and hopes traipse about the living room of one's soul seeking a sturdy, comfy recliner to rest upon.

Maybe my practice of calling upon guides and ancestors is really a call for my own Guidance, the intuition and wisdom that's inherent within me regardless of external factors.

In any case, in my lifetime I've finally and thankfully learned to ask for assistance, and whatever the mechanism may be (i.e. something totally cosmic or absolutely sans cosmos) I'm finding that usually I become privy to some sort of tip or clue. As if a flashlight temporarily illuminated a fragment of the dark side of the moon.

This is how I'm coping right now during this precarious and explosive era of human experience - and certainly not how I would have chosen to cope five years ago. Five years ago, I was reticent to surrender to faith. Five years ago, I rejected the idea of religion, dogma, and trust in the Divine. Five years ago, I believed in the paranormal and synchronicity, but stopped short of attributing these phenomena to anything remotely reduced to declarations of human certainty.

Today, some of this still holds true. I do not blindly trust and I am wary of the fogginess of blind faith. I understand there to be such a thing as spiritual bypass, which can be a tempting road to follow. I'm observant of the different flavors in which humans relate to religious systems and structures.

What is different is that I somehow found for myself that delicate balance of trust vs. mis-trust and faith vs. discernment. I don't pretend to know the secrets of the Universe, nor do I feel a pressure to. That said, I also don't need to sequester myself from attuning to a particular spiritual tradition for fear of colluding with the certainties of an Ultimate Dogma. It just doesn't have to be this extreme.

What I can do is hold both; that is, to open myself up to the support and enrichment that a spiritual system can offer without ascribing to it the ego-fed notion that it must be the only Way, the end-all-be-all of Universal Truths.

Lately, I've felt lost career-wise, path-wise, spiritually-wise. Recently, I asked for Guidance and spiritual support. I stated my openness to the process, and assured Them/Me that I would receive such Guidance with intentionality. A series of synchronicities and intuitions led me to a spiritual path and mentor (who seems to be psychologically and spiritually healthy).

So this tale of a Neophyte's Search introduces my journey into the world of the Craft. I'm participating in a year-and-a-day apprenticeship as a solitary through the Order of the Sacred Grove here in the Bay Area, which practices Modern American Witchcraft through a shamanistic lens. The sub-grove I'm apprenticing with, the Laurel Grove, focuses nature, green witchcraft, community practice, and the Grecian pantheon.

There is more I wish to write on this, specifically around the butterflies I feel in my chest around "outing" myself (especially given the fact that my social networking accounts are connected to this blog). And I will write more on this, as I'm sure others in the community have experienced this to one degree or another.

But for now, I leave this post with Trust.