Space to Breathe

Oh my what a week!  Two full days of writing, and my final spiritual direction project- a writing portfolio, including Rule of Life and Pilgrimage, is finally completed! Well, sort of completed... the writing part is done, but the journey has only just begun.  A contemplative walk is planned to my favorite woods and river, and the space has been cleared to fully step into my call. The living of this contemplative way will happen in the every day. I know now where my walls are, my fear and anger; and more than this I know what it will take to face them.  And I believe I have the courage and the support to do so.

I had no idea this work was hanging over me so, until this moment when it was finally done. A full year of intense processing now packaged neatly into a binder.  And now there is space, and I can breathe.  I am excited because the spirit has been moving in such new and unexpected ways lately, into directions I hadn't anticipated....and each moment now I am free to respond.  

Returning to prayer tonight, I sang one of my favorite Jesuit hymns, Take Lord Receive. It would have been so easy to go straight to sleep after a movie with my kids; it would have been easy to opt out of the movie and curl up alone with a book instead.  But keeping to my commitments- time with my family, time with God in loving silence, and time now with my writing- has brought me back to a graceful flow.  Reflecting on the past year's journey-- oh how I have longed to return to that state of grace, as I experienced it last summer and fall. It has been a difficult past few months with many transitions, and there are going to be more I know.  I have been standing at the diving board knowing I must leap but seeing only the empty pool below.  I've started to see my current situation like a cancer I must learn to live with....as something too impossible to change.  

But it will change, I now know.  Already, moving more into my commitments, I see small shifts.  The humid air of this past few week has been broken, and the rain has cooled us down.  Smile, this is a wonderful moment, a moment of peace.