What Has You Come Alive? (An Offering....)

What has you come alive. What has  *YOU* come alive? If you do not know this, stop everything to listen. Let your ears rummage through the chatter, for the voice that is saying the things which terrify you the most. “What am I listening to Christiane?” you ask. You’re listening to your soul. The voice that is telling you the things which terrify your ego the most is your soul. It says things like, “We are not supposed to be here, in this particular too-small place. We are meant to be there, where it’s unknown, where we will have to let ourselves respond without knowing the next move. This is the only way we get to know our true self, in the spaces where we can’t know the outcome. Where everything is at stake and nothing is assured and the only thing we stand to gain is everything we’ve ever longed for. If we die without knowing our true self we will die without having lived.” Your soul says even scarier things like, “We need to leave this job.” “We need to get ourselves to her front doorstep.” “We need to put this sword of protection down and instead, rip our shirt open and point Life to the very place where we long to be penetrated, pierced, brought alive.” It says, “We love everything....did you know that, self? We are built to love everything. The wind in our face. The cold rain. The silent stories within the striated desert wall. This impossible heartbreak. The space behind the kneecap of the man who delivers our mail. The way our lover gets small and goes away. Love everything. Anything else will simply not be enough for us. We are so big. We are voracious here.” Only do this if you’re prepared ..... prepared to have everything you thought you knew about yourself fall away, leave you like it never mattered. The small stories have no roots. They have no hold except the mirage of their importance concocted by your small dayworld mind. Entire cities will evaporate under your pale hungry feet. Entire systems, structures, iPhones, iPads, Facebook accounts with thousands of friends, all this will simply vanish. What will be left before and within you is the pure brilliance of what you carry. The genius of your own particular heart’s rhythm and the way it finds its unique syncopation with The World. What will be left is the thing most beautiful and necessary about you. What will be left will be the you who knows how to make love with The World. Hesitatingly at first, but then with an abandon from which you might not recover, you will throw yourself at what you love like it’s the first day of your sight and the last day of your life. You will not survive this. Over and over, you will die to this.

This will require a few things you might not currently possess. First, it will require the understanding that you are not merely ‘ok’ but actually necessary. It will require the understanding that there is an intelligence guiding everything around you that has roots in the earth, beating wings and thundering hooves. It will require that you betroth yourself to this intelligence before anything else. Before your fear of failure. Before your fear of poverty, of exile, of playing it small so you can stay safe from harm, so you can merely survive. It will require that you make an enemy of 'survival'. Survival, as a goal, is a death sentence. It will most assuredly demand that you betray the very people who brought you into this world, who, from their own impoverishment,  told you stories about yourself that weren't true. After all this, what is left of you is the only thing that matters. You are not frail. You are magnificent.

What has you come alive? What has *YOU* come alive? Tell yourself the story of the thing you long for most. Now, tell it again. Now, slow it down. Go frame by frame. Look for the hidden shadows, the partially visible clues. The places where You are peering, from between the cracks, at you. Tell this story with the certainty that what is lying within the spaces of each thread is the thing most beautiful, most important, about you.  Nothing else here matters. I’m telling you the truth. Nothing else matters. If you do not know this story you will never feel whole. Once you know this story, your wholeness will weave itself into the fabric of The World. You will be found. Everything will be possible. Start talking, even if the words don’t come. Just start talking. They will find you. The World will find you and it will take you back.