It is usually about this moment in one of my visits -- about a week or so before returning to the US -- that I begin to realize I will be leaving. Exile is looming. Once again I will be "cut off" from the music, the architecture, the historical context, the landscape I love only to return to a place where my life energy seems to dribble down to nearly nothing. And, of course, with what Abraham-Hicks calls "pre-paving" like that, this is what has usually been my experience. On a certain level, I've given up my power and happiness to a very specific condition, and looked to even narrower conditions (getting into a certain choir or educational program, finding adequate research material for a specific article) as a path to achieving the larger happiness I want.
Of course, I haven't been studying law of attraction material for a decade for nothing. I know in my head that it is necessary to work on inner happiness so that you draw to you more and more happy outward conditions (not to mention to present a positive gift to the world around you.) Mike Dooley's "Matrix" material offers a compact explanation of why trying to achieve a specific condition for happiness (a certain job, house, spouse, financial or health situation) so often yields only that condition, not a larger sense of peace and happiness. My life has been an illustration, it would seem, of trying to "play the Matrix" from the wrong end of the chart! And yet some of us have passions that are genuinely site-specific. An oceanographer might not be able to do his or her work effectively in Oklahoma. An astronomer needing the clearest possible views of the heavens would be unlikely to spend an entire lifetime based in Manhattan. We all try to gravitate eventually to the condition where our passions have the easiest time of it.
I had kind of a double "aha" moment Saturday night. First of all, I took responsibility for having created a scenario where my conditions for "happiness" have largely been an ocean away. I didn't try to understand or explain it, I just accepted that this habit came from within me, as a first step towards moving forward more unconditionally.
And it was at that moment that I think I took my passion for this place into my heart in a way I never have. I just fully embraced and loved it. I realized all of a sudden that wherever I go from now on, it is coming with me. I am not going to leave it on the other side of the world or see it as separate from me. If at any given moment I don't happen to be standing on England's "green and pleasant land," then I still have the power, creatively, to express what this place means to me through writing, art and music. I can turn this condition inside out and love my passion wherever I am. I have that power.
Not surprisingly, I was much calmer Sunday morning as I headed out to Hampton Court Palace to attend choral matins, an organ recital, and choral evensong at the Chapel Royal. In between events, I sat in the formal gardens and wrote in my journal. I can't remember ever being happier. I was utterly, utterly, in my element. I was proud of myself for not comparing it to the past or the future. I just know I will take that day with me in my heart and draw on it. The inner feeling of happiness was, in the end, more important than the specific outward condition. All the spiritual teachers say this, but wow, isn't it fascinating, the individual journeys we all have to take to really get it?
