Reflections on Receiving

I haven't written here lately. I haven't been motivated to do much lately, which has really been botheing me. Winter has traditionally been my most creative time of the year. Sometimes in summer I can't write at all because there is so much going on out here///so many social events and the money has to be earned and the ocean is so glorious who could stay away from it? Today after I finished writing I was in the shower and I realized in one spray that it was the feeling that writing gave me that was more important than what I created. I've always had a hard time of letting go of poems, books, etc., feeling I had to keep working on them to get them to a point of perfection where they can be read by others, hopefully published. I know people are always saying create just to create, don't worry about the result or what people will think, but we have been so conditioned to achieve that it is really hard to get beyond this as an intellectual construct and feel it,especially when one's ego identity becomes involved in what one is creating. Well today I did just this. I was jubilant when I finished writing and for a moment I thought how great what I was writing was and how I couldn't wait until this book was published, but then the water washed that thought down the drain and I felt all of a sdudden, dove back into the feeling. I can share this feeling now, people don't have to read what I wrote in order to know who I am, to know what's inside me, to see what I have created. What I have created is me wherever I go......and it's a feeling, not a book. And I don't have to be around people to communicate this feeling. I can share it with the gulls, with the waves, with my sofa, with dust molecules and mites, with whatever comes into my awareness--with California, with whales breaching off the coast of Maui! Alleluia I say! One of th egreatest sounds ever uttered! Wow. This is what happens when one lets go and receives....which is what my inability to do anything was trying to tell me. I usually associate not being able to act with being depressed, and beat myself up for not being strong and centered enough to resist the slough, but the other day I chose two Medicine Cards to see reflections of what I was receiving and giiving. In my left, I drew the black panther, reversed. In my right, beaver, reversed. I have felt very lonely lately (a normal state). I have felt for along time that I will be lonely as long as I resist being lonely, but when I saw that upside down panther in my left hand it all came together for me again as a feeling....panther signifies the mysteries of the void. Reversed, it means one is struggling against the void. I understood that. What I hadn't understood, is that the void is a blessed state--there is nothing to do, nothing to achieve. Exactly what I want. Being alone is the closest we come to being back in the Void! The beaver signifies activity, building. Reversed it means one is either not doing something one should do, or in my case, meaning one should stop trying to do. So I took a few days off from work and set my intention to receive. The earth was blanketed in a surprise snowstorm. I read and took baths and stretched like a cat on the blue rug. I felt grateful for the house I've been allowed to live in. I didn't try to do anything until yesterday when my friend Abby and I walked through Rodman's Hollow . The first humans to do so in the fluffy snow, but we were not the first to pass through the trails. We followed deer tracks and wondered about all the other tracks we saw--were they birds? Rats? Feral cats? Wondering at the secret life of the island we couldn't notice usually, too focused on our own minds to perceive.....and twice I saw an actual live rat scurrying off to the side to disappear in stone cracks. Amazing, to be able to disappear in a stone. Amazing, to finally receive, to feel, to mindfully walk and breathe.