No definitions, no explanations
I met up with a good friend today who has just gone through having cancer and we talked about our lives and where we are at right now. She said she remembers a quote from Lance Armstrong’s book where he said fighting cancer was easy, living with it is hard.
I was telling her that the hardest battle I faced was coming to terms with radically changing my life because I was clinging so hard to the past to what was supposed to have been – married, bearing children, a house with two cars in the driveway and a retirement plan – that I couldn’t see the life that was waiting for me – unconditional love, a gifted child, looking forward to and creating work, travel.
It takes a lot to break out of the chains that bind you and there is a great Tarot card – the VIII of Swords – that depicts a woman bound with swords sticking in the ground all around her. The interpretation is:
At best, the VIII of Swords will indicate a period where nothing goes quite the way you want it to. At worst it will indicate an obstructive and difficult period where serious damage can be done to our material environment, our emotional balance and our overall sense of well-being.
Breaking free to the other side involves a will that you have obviously lost along the way, and summoning it again takes some creativity, because you will not be able to go back down the same path that brought you there the first time.
I told my friend that it’s interesting that I have been with atheist partners all my life and despite having been raised pretty religious and Jewish, I have not felt a connection to my religion in my adult life that was meaningful, but that my spiritual life has come alive with such alacrity that at first I was making excuses for how I was feeling and thinking (feeling that I needed to be forgiven or I needed to define it), but I find lately that I don’t give a rat’s ass how people perceive the mystery in me, I have no need to define or explain it.
That my dear is evolution.