Learning a lesson

Woo level: 3.5/5

Today, for the first time in a while, I struggled for a long time to find my energetic connection to Spirit and the living things around me (which in my current worldview excludes... well, nothing, actually).

On my walk/run home this evening up and over Te Ahumairangi Hill, I was taking pleasure in a sunny day and being in the ngahere. I felt happy, and I even richly and consciously enjoyed sights and sounds and scents. But it was a superficial pleasure. I reached in and I reached out, but I couldn't find that golden soul magic I can usually access more or less at will, that fluttery fizzy elated calm feeling of vital forces flowing through me, forever welcoming me home.

My meditation earlier in the day was similar. I didn't feel scattered or distracted, and it wasn't hard to be mindfully present. But in being so, I recognised that I felt disconnected from the living energy of my surroundings.

As I said to a friend last night, one of the things I love most about consciously living in an animist world is that I am never alone. But at times I felt alone today. I knew I wasn't, of course, but I felt like I was, and that was unsettling.

I chose my own path, and it turned out to be a toll road

I came to realise this evening that I interpret today's sense of disconnection as, if not a punishment, then at least a just and necessary atonement for having got high last night.

Not, I hasten to add, because it is intrinsically wrong to get high. It absolutely isn't. Context is everything! My context, though, is that I wasn't led to the drug journey in question by my heart or my soul. It wasn't Spirit who wanted that for me or asked it of me. I was led there by my novelty-seeking and curious brain, irreflectively hungry for a new experience and to create a special memory with someone I love.

And if I'd stopped to think about it at all, I'd have known and recognised the nature of my motivation. But I didn't stop and think; I acted like it didn't matter, and that was a mistake.

I now see that, for me, getting high last night amounted to turning away from what is being asked of me right now – which is not to have a delicious new experience, or even to figure out or solve or discover or decide anything. It is just to stay open and to be as intensely present to my experiences as I can, and give the world as much as I can of my loving attention. And, crucially and above all, to trust Spirit to lead me to anything and everything I need. As they have so powerfully and unambiguously – indeed blatantly, shamelessly! – done to date.

Maybe getting high will be part of my journey in future. Probably! I hope so! And if so, I'll know when. It will, like so many important "choices" in my life lately, be something I realise, a clear and compelling truth to which I awaken, rather than something I deliberate and decide on.

Take me back

Toward the end of my walk, 20 mins from home, something wonderful happened. Out of nowhere, I thought of this song ("Take Me Back" by Sonia Dada – clearly a medicine song for me!) and started to play it in my head. And all this beautiful emotion suddenly swelled up in me and it is like the living world came rushing back into me, or like I dissolved back into it. My eyes filled with tears and I felt so happy and grateful. It was a sublime moment. Thank you, I said aloud to the trees and birds and the sky over Cecil Road. Thank you, thank you.

Utu

Sometimes the things we do are not wrong, but they are also not free.​ As of tonight, my understanding is that my inability for most of today to feel the nourishment of the universe was the toll I had to pay for the choice I made last night. It was not a cruel or petty withholding of affection; not a punishment imposed in anger by an emotionally reactive god to soothe their bruised ego. But it was deliberate. Spirit was teaching me an empowering and respectful lesson about accountability and responsibility and consequences. A beautiful and precious teaching, by a powerful and loving teacher.

I talked in my last post about tauutuutu, mutually beneficial and nourishing reciprocity. Well, today's experience feels like utu. A restoration, a making-right, a specific and necessary exchange of power to restore balance and harmony in a relationship.

And with that understanding, it also feels like a blessing.