I posted this quote on FB yesterday – from my Blackberry – while sitting in Starbucks – on a quick break – reading a few more pages in Women Who Run with the Wolves
Beyond desire and wishing, beyond the carefully reasoned methods we love to talk and scheme over, there is a simple door waiting for us to walk through…Go there. Crawl there if need be. Stop talking and obsessing. Just do it.
“Stop talking and obsessing” catches in my chest.
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Forgive me (please!) for going all ‘devil’ here (because I’m not really…you know)…but something made me re-read the Screwtape Letters where C.S. Lewis has a senior-devil writing letters to a new-devil working to trap a ‘patient’. (I know you’re familiar, Ronna. But for those who might not be…..
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In one place he says one of the greatest things ‘they’ can do to keep us from being who we are and what we’re meant to do is to get us to *think* we’re doing something…..when we’re really not. Thinking, talking, planning, outlining, organizing, obsessing.
It made me take a look at a couple of things and get busy.
‘Trackin’ Deb. It’s seductive: thinking and obsessing. The activity fools us into thinking we’re actually accomplishing something. And sometimes we are, of course; but all-too-often, at least after a while, we are doing nothing but spinning our wheels – undoubtedly afraid and therefore unwilling to move to action. Yes…time to just do it!
Thank you.
I can’t tell you how vitally potent this post is to me. At the end of a vile period of trying to think my way out of the mire–not writing, not painting, I even stopped reading others’ posts and stayed away from FB and tweeting. And still became more and more caught in the tangle.
But yesterday I received this in as an email. No particular reason, nothing other in the message but the subject line was: “You are a Tutubi” and then the message: “The main symbolisms of the Tutubi (dragonfly) are renewal, positive force and the power of life in general. Dragonflies can also be a symbol of the sense of self that comes with maturity. Also, as a creature of the wind, the dragonfly frequently represents change. And as a dragonfly lives a short life, it knows it must live its life to the fullest with the short time it has – which is a lesson for all of us.” The friend who sent this is a Filipino-American artist who discovered in early middle age that he is severely dyslexic, and so began painting a series of canvases that the viewer can, and is encouraged to rotate on the wall until she or he finds a good view.
And then this morning, I began opening emails–yours was the first.
I’m packing for a week at the Outer Banks. It was on that beach a calendar year ago that I was gifted with an epiphany that told me “what” I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I have a positive sense that if I can silence the committee in my head and simply ask, there is a door there for me.
Thank you Ronna. I hope you don’t mind, but I’m packing you in my walking pack–the one that goes to the water’s edge before dawn with little more than my camera, and returns filled with clouds and sand and glints of light off the waves.
Julianne: So much I could say, but words feel inadequate. What I want you to know is that my very favorite thing in all the world is the sun glinting on water. The providence and beauty of you naming that scene and including me in it, combined with Estes’ words, and the dragonfly email? Nearly undoing. I am humbled, grateful, silenced…
Oh yes. Yes. Yes!!!
‘Thought it might resonate… Thanks, my friend.
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