I am entering a season of Unknowing. A consistent theme for humanity, rising up menacingly over the last few years. However, I’m not running from this tidal wave – I want it to swallow me whole. I want to learn to trust myself deeper, to learn to trust the world again after a global period of despair. I’m seeing many others do the same and its beautiful to be on this journey, together.
On the surface, my life now is what a lot of people aspire to. I have a gorgeous, loving and emotionally aware partner. We live in a home with all the space we need, financially secure. I have (now, had!) two jobs that I enjoy, working with people that I feel connected to. I have some good friends in the city that I currently live in. I am in deep gratitude. Yet, there’s so much more for me. I cannot ignore the call of my heart, my soul, to be exploring the world, working in service, on my own terms, living with conscious community. This is what freedom looks like to me. I have tried to create that here, but it doesn’t feel aligned. So, I’m going. Alone. Into the Unknown.
While I am certain, and a sucker for personal growth, this is not easy. A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, The Man Watching, has encapsulated this sense of initiation that invites surrender to a greater force (I’ll insert below). It is triggering my soul and it makes me cry every time I read it lately, especially that first stanza.
How it’s going…
Deconstructing my life here feels like a spiritual process. Every other time that I have moved I have known that my things that I treasure – the things that bring me joy to surround myself with – will come with me, or that I can come back to them. This time is different. I am really examining my attachment to every little thing that I’ve collected over my life and whether I want it to represent me going forward. Whether I love it enough to allow it to take up space in storage, or whether someone else will love it more. There is a lot I am letting go of. There is a lot I am struggling to let go of…
The deepest love of my life – my current partner.
Old friends.
Books that I let sit on the shelf for years and now want to desperately read before I let them go, otherwise, what was the point in having them take up space in the first place?
Potential.
Clothes that I barely wear but love to think I will.
Potential.
Gosh, we get so caught up in potential – we fill our lives with it. I think it will be refreshing to only live with what is on my back again; what is in front of me. On the road, you can’t accumulate potential, it only weighs you down. The kind of potential that you fill a house with weighs you down, too, there’s just the illusion of more space to hold it. I am creating space – for experiences, for new connections, for practicality, to explore my identity without all these things that start to feel like ‘me’.
Where it’s going…
I have a one-way ticket to Australia. I have my backpack, a 6-week rough itinerary, and a vision for my future. I’m open. I don’t know if I’ll stay there, I don’t know where I’ll go if I don’t. I don’t know if the money will run out.
I am trusting. Trusting myself and what I have to offer. Trusting the universe to place me in safe places with people who I connect with on a soul-level. Trusting that following the call means taking a step forward so I can hear more clearly where it is coming from.
The expanse beckons.
Join me on this journey, if you like. Or judge me from a distance. Either way, I’m rooting for you. I hope you show up for Life with courage, in your way.
Let’s face the Unknown together, hand-in-hand, heart-in-heart.
The Man Watching
By Rainer Maria Rilke
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.–Translated by Robert Bly
