living the questions...12-24-18
Tis the season of opportunity to turn outward, celebrate, connect, share the bounty. And also, ironically, tis the season to turn inward, take instruction from the darkness, hibernate, reflect. In this pause, feeling both possibilities and how this newsletter, ending fourteen years of offerings, is a weave of the two, the internal and external. Before 2005, I was an avid journal-keeper, writing for personal edification from my early twenties onward until this chapter of public writing began.
I simply write what I’m musing about and often those musings become basis for classes. And here, year-end, there is something working in me about destiny. About how most of us spend a lifetime clarifying what that elusive term actually means for us. And how for me, integral to living my destiny is this unification of the personal and the vocational, the inner and the outer. I used to don both an inner and outer uniform to go to work and promptly shed it when I returned home to live the rest of my life. That separation has faded. Somehow that synthesis feels destined.
Destination: a place to which one is journeying or to which something is sent
Destiny: the inevitable or irresistible course of events that is to happen
We move toward many destinations over the years, sometimes with clear focus, sometimes willy-nilly. We have particular goals in mind, point our arrows in a specific direction and move toward our targets. Destiny is entirely something else.
In hindsight I trace the patterns of this rambling journey toward living my destiny. Starting with this mortal body, the joys and challenges I have worked with over this lifetime have been so fundamental in shaping my destiny. This latest one, this recovery from surgery, continues to influence and mold me physically and energetically. It is the same for you. Every one of us can trace a fascinating odyssey of the body.
And our unique minds are molded by a myriad of influences from the get go. In particular, from this vantage point, I realize how important education was in my family, how grateful I am that this active imagination was intrigued with spirit from an early age, what a landscape opened when I began meditating at 35, how understanding and making friends with this incredible ego changed my destiny. It is the same for you, this life of a mind is a big factor in determining our destiny.
Body and mind were really paramount in my story for a long time, with the vitality of the heart trailing behind. And so I just had to live long enough and spend time with some incredible teachers for this tender emotional world to unfold more completely. This has been my destiny. You have your own version, your own timing, your own stories about the soft swirl beating away inside there.
Destiny refuses to manifest from a pre-determined plan. Destiny emerges from the sum of our existence. Somehow, tied to the integration of body, heart and mind, our soul’s purpose for being incarnated, the paramount reason we’re living on this planet begins to reveal itself. Yes, I suppose a few are born into knowing their destiny. Most of us spend the better part of a lifetime living this mystery. For some it eventually becomes clear.
Rilke says it way more eloquently than I ever will:
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
And so as the year draws to a close, instead of resolutions about destination, my wish for us all is to consider destiny. Am I living the life I am meant to live? What remains hidden in these bones, this tender heart, this wandering mind? Where can I delve more deeply and how might I wing my way toward my destiny?
Here’s to the infinite ways we live the questions and may 2019 support us all as we wing toward our destiny…love, bella