Erica Staab

There has been a lot of learning happening for me lately (Note To Self- that is what happens when you ask for seeing where you can grow).  And as always life is happening despite my best efforts to catch it, quantify it, name it, control it or stop it, it keeps going.   Themes keep popping up as they often do even though it is different places, different people and I don’t have to fear because if I don’t pay attention there are always other opportunities to learn, relearn, remember and re-frame.

In the midst of relearning a particularly difficult lesson a friend wrote a blog post that spoke straight to my heart.  When I had asked if she had written it just for me she responded with this:

It’s the most magical thing about blogging: every post is like a message from my wisest, kindest self to the soft and confused animal me, but when I publish, it also seems to be just what someone else needed to hear.

From the beautiful and brilliant Jill over at A Thousand Shades of Gray.

How often do we assume that we are the only ones struggling with something, to wrestle alone with our thoughts, fears and doubts only to hear when we finally gain the courage and bravery to share we hear “Me too.” (one of the themes that has been in several places)

When I write I am able to be wherever I want or need to be.  Writing allows me to go to the spaces I haven’t yet claimed for myself, it allows me to play with new ways of being, new ways of thinking about things.  It reminds me that even in the midst of my deepest doubts there is some wisdom to be accessed, some new way of looking at things.  I believe that we all have that wise self within, some call it a Higher Self, some call it God… that little voice that travels along with us for the journey.  For me the best way to access it is through my words.

At one point I struggled with that… shouldn’t I be writing what is true?  What is “real”?  And yet, it occurred to me after rereading Rilke’s quote one day:

…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet

For me that is one of the most beautiful gifts that writing offers the ability to live (or in my case- write) into the answers. There are so many times that I have reread journal entries knowing about who I wanted to be, what I wanted to have for myself and I find myself now living those things as my truth.

And perhaps that is what true friendships do as well, they allow us to try on new ways of being, little changes to see what works for us and holds us gently as we do that.

Treat your friends as you do your pictures, and place them in their best light.

– Jennie Jerome Churchill

My prayer for you today is that you put yourself in the best light, and allow yourself permission to be exactly where you are right now, knowing that you are living your way right where you need to be.