I’m listening to the smooth hum of the ceiling fan, feeling my heels against the rough fabric of the footrest, noticing the dryness of my lips. I hear a distant roar of a truck and high-pitched bird chirps. I’m surrendering to this moment, to my heart's glow of satisfaction at being present with sensation and feeling, without agenda or expectation. In this ease, I search my heart for shadowy goldmines so that I can extract the familiar nuggets of old fears, stories or beliefs. A breeze picks up outside. Life makes itself clear to me as a series of moments, each one pulsing out into the next. What I choose here affects there, and so on. Ripples into infinity. Yet the beauty of the ripple is that it can expand, shift direction or change momentum when it makes contact with other choices, other now moments, which make new ripples. The soul is not like stone. It is like water, a shimmering essence of creation, nourishment and change. 

I’ve been expecting myself to feel a certain way in these solitary times, anticipating that this quiet will take me back to ancient places that I’ve already mined for jewel and shadow. Yet what if a new birth is taking place and this solitude asks to be experienced differently? What if the tidal wave of a new life is integrating the fading ripple of my old world, and as it washes over the completing patterns, it asks me to become something else entirely? What if instead of going back into the old emptied mines, I shut them down? Then, with deep gratitude for the treasures found there, I can make my way, liberated, into the unknown.