The last few months, I have been building up to an epiphany. Those of you who read these posts have seen the uphill steps; I'd be tempted to apologize, only I try never (these days!) to apologize for my life. Let's just say that when you are a mystic, awareness of your process is your daily bread. However, I do hope that I don't repeat too much...or at least that today I am speaking from a different vantage point.
The other night on "The Voice", one of the coaches told a contestant that they were using their God-given talents to bring joy to the world, or words to that effect. No doubt I have heard those very words on previous episodes of the show, not to mention in dozens of self-help and spirituality books. For the first time, the words really resonated. But when I asked myself, "With which of my talents am I bringing joy to the world?", I experienced a horrible, deafening silence. I haven't sung at all in five years, or painted seriously in at least ten or twelve. The purpose of this blog has been to record the steps of an intense spiritual journey, and I hope that a little joy has peeked through here and there, but spreading joy wasn't consciously my main goal. For a few hours, I found it hard to breathe. In my interpretation, the core values of the Goddess are love, joy, and beauty. If I wish to represent Her (no matter how imperfectly), these three qualities must emanate from me somehow. If it has been hard to allow them to emanate, and if I haven't always thought of how I was helping the world experience love, joy and beauty, clearly I have been seriously blocked.
It got me wondering, what were the "old" questions that propelled me forward in the past? What questions helped me define myself and my goals? Here are just a few: what do I need to do to get my Dad to like or even tolerate me? If I am perfect enough, will I get noticed or loved by my family? What do I need to do to enter the musical world of the men and boys' choirs? If I take piano and organ lessons, major in music at Smith, and get a master's degree in England, will it be enough? In my 20's, the questions became more "practical": what job do I need to get to earn enough to pay off my student loans? Then, once that goal was accomplished, where and with what skills can I forget about England, church music, and the career I will never have, and make enough money to live on? As my situation not surprisingly began to go downhill, it was, like, what belongings can I sell? Can I paint enough little paintings or do enough menial jobs to stave off starvation? Can I live without most of the things other people have? Eventually, my focus returned to, how can I get back into church music? How can I get back to England? What do I need to do to be recognized in that field? Most recently, having allowed those questions to lapse yet again, it has been more about, can I simply come to peace with invisibility and non-"success"? I think I said last time that it has been a heartbreaking journey, and it has been, and, with some exceptions, a largely joy-free one too. I've hung in there, and survived, but my well of actual "joy" sometimes seems pretty empty.
But now I get it! In the end, these defining questions primarily referenced our male-dominated culture and its preferences -- not who I really am. I had long since taken the focus off my inner joy and passion, in favor of looking outward for acceptance and a paycheck. I was trying, trying, and trying some more to find a home in a paradigm where I could never have been at home...and I mean this metaphorically as well as literally.
This week, it is particularly hard to imagine feeling joyful. Images of yet another war horrify and traumatize, almost off-the-scale. The black hole beckons, and tries to grab our full attention. But this does not invalidate the impulse to embody -- and spread -- joy, love and beauty. For a number of weeks, I have been feeling uncharacteristically depressed and wobbly, but I think I am experiencing a death, the death of my lifelong focus outside myself. My new question is, how will I, Liz, manifest my Goddess-given joy, love, and capacity to express beauty? How can I make those qualities my only work each day? Can I start to define myself by looking only at me? So very hard to do when you were brought up in narcissism's family net, and yet absolutely necessary when you are nearly 68 and single. Losing sight of oneself is a kind of death, and that will come soon enough as it is. I have no time to waste.
