The Heart Knows...

Sometimes direction and answers to life's questions come from surprising and unexpected sources...even from within ourselves.
Ever since my return from Africa in early August, I have been finding myself strangely ill-at-ease within my life, within my own skin, unsure of what this means and what I am to do with it. As I have tried to put this into words with friends recently, emotions have risen to the surface of which I had not even been totally aware...and I have had the discomfitting sensation of my heart being broken open again and again...though I was not even sure why. Each morning, each evening, my prayer has been for direction...for clarity in the midst of all this uncertainty, this discomfiture.

And then, this morning, as I opened my book, Life Lines, to today's entry, written several years ago, I found myself staring at words which spoke to my heart in ways both wonderful and terrifying, coming as they do from my own chaotic past, reminding me that life is mostly lived, not in the answers, but in the questions...not in the orderliness I so frequently think I would love but in the chaos- which is REAL life.

And so I take one more tentative step this morning, putting one hesitant foot in front of another, but confident that even these hesitant steps will lead me to where I need to be going...to the service and purpose which will mark this next phase of my life.
Let it be so!

Discontent and disorder are signs
of energy and hope,
not of despair.
 -Dame Cecily V. Wedgwood

chaos theory
CHAOS is the price of change…
          reigning for a time as
          old patterns are broken…
          old beliefs & ideas challenged…
          old paths disappear in the
                   darkness of confusion.

CHAOS, a period of disorder,
          will happen when the
          old, familiar, safe is
            left behind and
          we careen along the
          road of life uncertain of
          direction or destination,
          seemingly at the mercy
          of this capricious,
          sometimes malicious imp
          who threatens our stability
                        with unpredictability.

But behind the CHAOS- or
          from within its surprisingly
          tender grasp- new order
          comes, a new pattern
          emerges, life takes on
          a different shape, and
          we can see that CHAOS
          is not the enemy, but
          clears the way for
                                 new ideas
                                 new birth
                                 new life-
                                    as we begin again.

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