This Journey Called Life

Life's Journey. This is an unusual entry for me in our blog. I've been thinking a lot of life and all the places I've been, the roads I've traveled, the changes that I've been through in my life. How I arrived here where I am now. I'm 54 years old, I have two grown sons in their early 30's and five grandchildren from ages 1 to 11. I've had a hard life, it has not been easy. I guess I've always escaped my reality by dreaming and living in fantasies I create in my mind. At the age of 35 I went through a profound spiritual experience. I won't go into all the details of how that came about or I'd need to write a book. Let's just say I arrived at a crossroad and had to decide if I was going to continue down the hard road alone or accept some help from something greater then me.

Out of sheer desperation I made the decision to accept help. So I began a new way of life and developed a spiritual belief system that I believe will help me get through any other obstacles I may have to face as I continue my journey in life. First let me say I believe we are spiritual beings having a human experience. I am human with all my faults and vulnerabilities just like everyone else. I shudder to think what my life would have turned out like
if I had refused the help that was placed in front of me. All I had to do was bend over and pick up the bag of spiritual tools and start. All I had to do was be willing, just willing. Since then I have realized some of my dreams I had never accomplished, I have learned that all that really matters is love and that we are here to enjoy life. For me art and gardening is how I enjoy life!

I feel a profound need to write this entry and I am going to quote from a book called "A Return To Love" written by Marrianne Williamson. Because she says it better then I can.

I've changed a couple of words so that it will fit anyone's spiritual belief system, rather they are Christian, Pagan, Jewish or any other faith.

"You will never lose your way for something greater then you leads you."

"When we surrender to something bigger than ourselves - to a universe that knows what it's doing. When we stop trying to control events, they fall into a natural order, an order that works. We're at rest while a power much greater than our own takes over, and it does a much better job than we could have done. We learn to trust that the power that holds galaxies together can handle the circumstances of our relatively little lives.

Surrender means, by definition, giving up attachment to results. When we surrender, we let go of our attachment to how things happen on the outside and we become more concerned with what happens on the inside.

The experience of love is a choice we make, a mental decision to see love as the only real purpose and value in any situation. Until we make that choice, we keep striving for results that we think would make us happy. But we've all gotten things that we thought would make us happy, only to find that they didn't. This external searching - looking to anything other than love to complete us and to be the source of our happiness - is the meaning of idolatry.

Where we have an attachment to results, we tend to have a hard time giving up control. But how can we know what result to try to achieve in a situation when we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow? What do we ask for? We say "My desire, my priority is inner peace. I want the experience of love. I don't know what would bring that to me. I leave the results of this situation up to the Universe. I trust it's will.

To relax, to feel the love in your heart and keep to that as your focus in every situation - that's the meaning of spiritual surrender. It changes us."

So once again I am at a crossroads. I want to hold on to my idea of what will make me happy but I seem to be being led in another direction. So its time for surrender again as I continue my journey through this experience called Life.