The timing of the universe is impeccable.  As I wrote the piece about my son and his revelation with the clay, I was reading a book where the character turns to pottery as a way to ease her stress from her medical career only to find that making pottery is her happy place, her true calling.  No, I have no intention of being a potter, but the message hit home in a very real way that I need to do what feels right, that I need to find my happy place.  The messages have been clear and repeating with greater frequency that the call of my heart is the way to go.  Have faith that I am called that way for a reason and that it is time to trust that doing what I want to do will get me where I need to go.  Trying to hold on to this way of life is constricting the life right out of me—it isn’t a life that I’m living, it’s a life that I’m experiencing.  Still.  I’ve made SO much progress and I fear where I may have been had I not started these practices when I did, so for that I am grateful.  But now I’ve gotten to the heart of it, the heart of me and that is simply that I need to follow and follow through on what my heart tells me.

We have children, not to control them, but to guide them and shape them much like clay.  And in that process of transforming the substance, we too are shaped.  I learn more from my kid every day than I do from working with some of the people I do.  I learn more from his openness and kindness and his love and curiosity and his joy than I do from repeating the same patterns over and over again—all while knowing it isn’t what I want to do anyway.  I have something that most people would consider secure and a decent way to live.  And there are absolutely facets of it I love.  But the truth is I never feel alive while doing most of it.  Most of the time I feel like I’m trying to not drown.  The most frustrating part of it is that all of that mentality is completely avoidable: we create all of that stress and I know it and the less I try to feed into it the more I am sucked back in.  There is a status quo that most people have with chaos that I no longer want to participate in but I am constantly pulled back in because I’m viewed as the problem for going against the norm. 

But when these signs are this frequent, this persistent, and this clear, and when they fall together like puzzle pieces, that isn’t something to be ignored.  That is something to trust.  Regardless of not seeing the outcome, that is something to trust and to follow with all of our hearts.  We see the way by walking, not by guessing.  I feel the call, I feel the tingle, and I feel alive.  The excitement and the possibility flowing through me—and whenever we feel that, we should understand that we need to follow where that leads.  Stop sitting and waiting for what we thought would be the perfect moment and simply start living.  Find the things that make us happy and do that.  The world needs more people who are happy and alive than it does people who are miserable and calling the shots.  We don’t need more ego, we need more growth.  We need more time with humanity and less time spent finding ways to improve it.  We need to remember that we are how we are for a reason and the world needs our gifts more than it needs our control.  I have little choice now but to follow, and no, I can’t see where that goes, but I am happy to shift because the known hasn’t gotten me where I thought it would anyway.  I open my eyes and take the first step.  What signs are you seeing?