Have been doing a lot of thinking about what I have to do to be ready to move forth from the act of commitment so recently made. Everything hinges on really coming to grips with and letting the creative part of me — the part I want so badly to access and the part, quite frankly that scares me shitless, yet yearns to be liberated. I say that because, for me in the past, I have been terribly restrained and constrained in what I allowed myself to do creatively. I have sensed the force, the wild and unpredictable power of The Awen and all that it brings with it to be dangerous, and at the same time beguiling and compelling and oh so tempting, and thus I’ve gone to the brink and always pulled back.
Now, however, pulling back is no longer an option, I have stepped into tomorrow, stepped forth to meet my yet. I have opened up so much in recent months. Slowly, my hearing has sharpened so that when I am outside I hear more clearly than I ever have done. My aural sense is almost as strong these days as my visual sense — one reason I am now taking music lessons. I feel confined and cramped indoors and I have to be out lots because that is where The Awen lives and moves and has its being most strongly for me. And I have to be out there with it to engage, though it feels sometimes like I’m also running away from it, playing tag. Flitting and flirting with it, but never letting us get close enough to merge.
I desperately want to open myself up fully to this power and to discover what I can do when I do that — it’s just that last step over the precipice that up to now eluded me, or I evaded.
I realise that no one can tell me how to do this, no else understands exactly how this challenge shapes for me, let alone what happens next. Some would just say, ‘Jump!’ And I don’t see why I find that bit of advice so difficult to act upon. But that is not my way. I take the path in steps of believing not in leaps of faith, which sometimes I see as shortcuts, bypassing experiences vital to the journey. Yet both ways are based on trust, reveal different sorts of truth.
Well, part of it is has to do, no doubt, with loss of control. Part of it is that I don’t have any real experience of myself as truly creative and creatively focused woman. I guess it’s the last step in some ongoing integration process, integral to my very being, enabling me to live with integrity . . . and yet the hardest part, the part that really matters.
Another part of it may be throwing off the last vestige of the old learning about what art is for and what creativity means that I got from my father, corrupted by his limited and limiting views of the proper roles for women, principally his wife and daughter.
I am so, so close now having made the commitment, to accepting the invitation with my whole being. In some ways The Awen is the lover with whom at this point I must engage — if that language is even appropriate here; but I sense that it is in my case, and given my history and challenges that it is exactly the right language.
I can see now to the beyond the edge of this for here I am . . . all I can be and all that I desire and could ever want in the way of fulfillment awaiting and me embracing it with joy and relief and abandon stretches out before me. . . and maybe that’s some sort of key. I have to see a hint what I KNOW to be my path forward and the frame that will shape my journey to the end of this occurrence, and in some way sensing in the mists those I hold most dear and who are yet to join me on this sojourn.
Gray Bear in the Middle 