The Road Home Inside Us

Just the other day my niece sent me a copy of a little book I had written and illustrated for her as a child. I had no memory of it at all. It was amazing to see pictures I had no recollection of drawing and read a story I had no memory of writing. The story was really about me– of course! It was about a little girl who takes a walk, leaves the trail, talks to the earth, and then makes her way home. In a very sweet way, without all the gory details, that has been my story. I couldn’t help but write it, even when I thought I was making up a story for someone else.

I left home, went seeking, found my deepest relationship (when I was young) with Nature, and then had to come down from that mountain and create a home in real life, all on my journey Home.

Why do I tell you this? Because it seems so clear that the blueprint of our lives, the map for our journey, is there from the beginning, and given half a chance and the right compass, we can read it. Like Hansel and Gretel, we have left a trail of clues that can be followed.

I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. That was one of the big clues on my particular road. I didn’t have any idea what I would write. I just knew writing called to me. What if someone had told me, Listen to that calling. Writing is your path– both up the mountain and down again. That is your part in this human play and your place in God’s Love. What you are most called to is exactly how God and Soul want to manifest on earth through you. Some part of you knows this. Listen. Don’t let anything stop you.

I wrote poetry here and there since early adolescence. Start/stop. I wrote children’s books in my early twenties and then again for my own children in my thirties. Start/stop. And journal writing opened the door to all the healing work I would ever do in this life a few years later. But it wasn’t until my late 40’s that Writing grabbed me and would not let me go.

And She held on even when I took a few detours, or maybe they weren’t detours. Maybe there was a lot of living I had to do in order to fully walk Writing’s road. Maybe our paths don’t always run in straight lines. But I didn’t know how it worked. I doubted my path too many times. Or I wondered if I had what it took. What if you knew — without fail– that if you are truly called to something from within– to being an artist, a seamstress, a plumber, a teacher, a homemaker, a salesman, an engineer, a manager, someone who feels called to take care of just one person or someone who is called to be Mother Theresa, that that is the path your soul and God chose for you this time around AND that following your path is your way Home to the Creator? What if you knew, without a doubt, that all the obstacles you would meet along the way–all the resistance inside and out, including those crafty naysayers inside your own head– what if you knew without a doubt that all the obstacles were a necessary part of the journey, the fuel you need to burn for your internal engine to run? What if you had no more doubt, no more second-guessing, no more looking outside to someone else to tell you what you should be doing.

That was the guide I needed– the one that said trust what calls you, torch that urge to crawl when you know you were made to walk upright and evolve beyond what you ever imagined possible.

Not that any of us is called to just one thing– I’m a mother, a wife, a psychotherapist and I’m called to painting and nature as well as writing. So I really mean all we are called to. But in this world where “bigger” is often seen as “better,” what if we really don’t have to be anything more than we are or other than we are? AND, what if we could give ourselves and everyone else full permission to be all that we are?

I have come to believe that that is the foundation of the spiritual journey. Yes, the foundation– not overcoming who we are or rising above anything, but recognizing that through the fullest development and expression of who we already are in our unique individuality and our unique circumstances, that the Divine is actually seeking to manifest here on earth.

A Divine Voice came to me in writing. That was my ultimate “story.” That was what I was opening the door to with every word I wrote. What if every human being knew from the start that listening to the call of soul and all the steep slopes we have to climb to answer that call, is the journey we came to make, and that it is just as mythic and just as meaningful as the journeys of our greatest heroes? Because it is. Coming here to earth today in any form, with any calling, may be the biggest gauntlet any soul has ever tried to run. And we need the light of all our souls to run it.

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In The Road Home: A Light In The Darkness, soon to be published, I share how my journey to answer the call inside me opened into a journey anyone can make.