There are the small crystals you left as blessings, tucked just beneath the earth.
There is the love you have for everyone you feel separated from.
And there are the invisible arrows that keep you on the path, your path, all your life, so that when other people try to yoke you with their doubts and question what you’re doing, you know enough not to listen.
The learning seems to come geologically slow, but you do eventually learn when to forget them and pay attention to the voice emanating from your center. Through deep listening, through the acknowledgement of that voice, you come to know your center, and you come to hold it. And the things you expect from yourself begin to change.
There are the great vertical stones you have glimpsed in dreams, and also the smaller, more rounded ones along the shore.
There are the bells on the necks of all the ponies, the raindrops, fall as they may. There are the trees, connected – like all of us – in unseen ways by unseen roots. There is the road, the path, your shoes, yellow rice, steam rising from a bowl of soup.
All the prayers you hold inside are on display in the world around you, before you. You don’t need anyone’s advice to learn how to see. You only need the courage and will it takes to look – that which you already possess, but do not always choose. Its only requirement is that you choose it above all else.
There are places to rest along the miles of all your days, if you will only sit. There are ferries to take you across all the rivers, if you will only board them.
There are ways to remember you are not your body, if you will only forget about your clothes and your appearance.
Allow yourself to sleep. When you wake it will still be there: this yearning to bring all knowledge inward, this thirst to move on, out, through, up, into, from all the trials you’ve undergone.
Take your time, that’s what it’s there for.
Love returns to your heart as you walk to the ends of the earth.
Now, choose something to burn. What will it be?
C.M. Rivers 