My thoughts, and a quoted passage that I love, for the start of a brand new year.
Two keys for bringing your new vision into form:
- WRITE DOWN YOUR DREAMS! Write your grand ideas and passions, your goals and your plans, and keep these love letters to your Future Self safely stored IN A JOURNAL.
- Commit to being who you came here to be, and to doing something wonderful that GIVES YOU LIFE. Once you have made this commitment, BE TRUE TO YOU by creating a SCHEDULE to bring it into form, a structure. HONOUR THAT STRUCTURE, and you will create magic…
Over the holidays I pulled out the journal pictured here. I began making entries in it years ago, in 2011, imagining that one day when my novel The Shining Fragments was published (and back then I had no idea how that would happen), I would write a sequel; the journal you see in the pictures is dedicated to that sequel. In fact, it’s completely full. And there are more journals in the same series which I have now returned to.
My own inner guidance has led me back to these books at the perfect time.
Your inner guidance can do the same for you! Trust it.
The vulture feather in the picture had been tucked away in one of the journals, a reminder of that bird’s medicine. It speaks to the Law of Sacrifice: being willing to trade the lesser for the greater. The vulture is a bird which literally “picks the bones clean,” reminding us to release what no longer serves and in so doing, nourish the New Beginning.
As I read my years-ago notes and maps for the story now coming into form, I came across a passage which had so moved me in 2011 that I wrote it out in longhand back then. I share it with you now, so that whatever your dream is, you may derive inspiration and come to see you that dream as worthy of your full devotion.
From Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook:
“Writing a poem … it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Or, they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.
“The part of the psyche that works in concert with consciousness and supplies a necessary part of the poem – the heat of the star as opposed to the shape of a star, let us say – exists in a mysterious, unmapped zone: not unconscious, not subconscious, but cautious. It learns quickly what sort of courtship it is going to be. Say you promise to be at your desk in the evenings, from seven to nine. It waits, it watches. If you are reliably there, it begins to show itself – soon it begins to arrive when you do. But if you are only there sometimes and are frequently late or inattentive, it will appear fleetingly, or it will not appear at all.
“Why should it? It can wait. It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live? But we do know this: if it is going to enter into a passionate relationship and speak what is in its own portion of your mind, the other responsible and purposeful part of you had better be a Romeo.”
Give yourself the gift of allowing your own unique calling to be expressed through you. Love it into expression! Commit to it.
You are poetry.
Happy New Year.
