I could have blamed the limes and avocados that I had ingested the night before. Instead, I gave consideration to my dream. Freeing the mermaids to swim in the night sky was my way of cracking heart’s door and listening to deeper rumblings within.
My experiences begged me to take a boat ride on a tributary, lined with extraordinary rock formations. Mermaids have taken blame for all sorts of calamity on the sea. And like the sailors of folklore I too, am able to blame with the best of them, only to find that I keep Soul from doing her transforming work.
At first, I stayed onboard, safely wrapped in my blanket of ascribed beliefs; for fear that I might find myself tossed over to unsavory danger with no crew to save me. But with extended hands, Courage waited to walk me out on the sea, under the dark night sky where, together, we dropped such fears. In spite of uncertainties, there I found a truer relationship with Life and with Love.
“Forget your dreams,” a trusted other said to me. I flashed back to childhood when my Aunt Renee´ visited. She asked me to tell my dreams each morning. Some mornings we laughed until we cried in our breakfast plates. On other mornings, I watched her eyes enlarge, as if she were saying; we will have to watch and see how that one unfolds. Then there were the ordinary mornings when there was nothing.
Isn’t it just like life? We easily explain one thing and find another equally perplexing, like naming the attributes of Loving God, only to face a situation that we find impenetrable. And most often, we find ourselves waiting. Life is both straightforward and wildly mysterious.
In our impatience, we go back to “doing it” again, only this time, we will do it much better. Or we re-think it, hoping to outsmart the emotions that have us snagged. “Doing” and “analyzing” are as necessary as they are fulfilling to life and work. Spiritually, they can disguise their enabling qualities, keeping us from walking into a fresh vision or facing wounds that have long waited to be sacred wounds.
Faith is the exhilaration in life that we crave, the thing we pervert with our addictions. Two prevalent addictions in the Western World are the need to prove one’s self and needing proof.
Loving relationships require trust. What makes us so afraid of freeing the mermaids and trusting Sacred within to guide us through the beauty of an obscure offshoot of the sea, lined with the magnificent cliffs and rocks of not knowing?
Sacred Ruminations*