Are we there yet?

Patience
I am the first to admit that patience is truly a virtue. In my younger days I recall being told many times "You just have to learn to be patient". Whatever it was I wanted to have or to have happen in my life, if it was not happening when I needed it to, would cause me extreme frustration. My father was the one who always managed to convince me that it just wasn't time. "Things happen when they are supposed to happen" he would say. Not because I wasn't good enough or didn't do enough but it just wasn't the time. That philosophy carried with me all my life. It has enabled me to learn to wait for things to happen on their own time and not on my time. It allowed me to be a visionary, a dreamer and creator but not hold on to my expectations for the outcome of things.
Often, if something did not manifest in my life when I prayed or asked for it, I would soon forget about it anyway and decided it just wasn't that important, at least not for that point in time. Like when I wanted to learn to sew as a young girl, and had no patience for the process. My projects would always turn out a disaster. My Mom taught me the value of taking my time, and being patient with myself and the process even though her methods of teaching were far less "patient" than my Father's. Other times, I learned that if something didn't come to me when I asked for it, then perhaps I had not put enough of my own energy into the project to make it happen. We are responsible for what we manifest or don't manifest in our lives, it doesn't just appear there on its own. Well, some things do but that is rare. Like the person in my town who last week won a 32 million dollar lotto ticket! "That was supposed to be mine!" I shouted at the TV!! Well, I forgot to buy the darned ticket last week!

Seriously though, other things percolate in our heads for years, distant desires, dreams, things we want to make, things we would like to learn, and bigger dreams - that we think and dream about but do not actually take seriously. Dreams about who we want to be and what we want to accomplish in our life. What about those things? When do they manifest? On their own? or does it take our true intention to make it happen and taking action to help it along and then waiting to see what the "Universe" brings our way?

I have been reading the book "Heart of the Visionary" which I mentioned a few posts ago, and realized that yes I do still have a dream which I have not taken action on for years. We get stuck in the "traffic" of life, literally, and just don't have time. Or worse, we forget to dream at all. For me, that "dream" is my vision of a Creative Arts Center for developmentally disabled adults. I wrote a preliminary vision plan several years ago and had attempted to get it started a few times but not with a lot of enthusiasm or perhaps the timing was all wrong, so it would go back on the shelf for a later time. This has happened several times in almost ten years. When I received the vision workbook for Christmas and started reading, I realized that perhaps the timing was now for me to take down my vision plan, get off the road, and have another look at it. In doing so I realized that indeed many of the parts of the plan were already in place to finally make this dream a reality, and I had done nothing that I could consciously recall to actually make them happen. I am sure I did, but not for the purpose of creating my dream. Or did I take certain actions on a subconscious level without even realizing it? Isn't that how the Universe works anyway? We create an idea or dream in our heads, create the plan, create the vision, and then let it go into the ether of space and let go of the outcome? Weeks, months, and even years later, circumstances then fall into place within the Divine matrix of life and create our dream for us. One day we wake up and realize that almost all the parts are there, it is only up to us to finalize the details. Sometimes it happens by changing our awareness of things. It is a very exciting concept.

In reading Shiloh Sophia McCloud's book one of the poems she quotes says this:

Be Patient
Toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and 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.
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
Letters to a young Poet...

This so beautifully puts the concept of allowing the questions in your life, the unknowns, the mystery, to be loved as much as what we know. Keep them in our hearts as though they were books written in a foreign language..so aptly describes how some things feel when we are trying to conceptualize a vision we have. It is not always so easy to put it into words or a picture we are trying to paint. Once we can illustrate that dream, it makes it easier to see it. Once we see and feel it, it is almost there in the palm of our hands. As she says, live the questions now, and someday in the future you will live your way to the answer.

I cannot say for certainty that this time my dream will definitely manifest in my life, but it is my intention to do what it is I have to do, and can do within my power, to make it happen, and truly my hope is that the Universe will combine forces with me to put in place the necessary people, places and things, to make it manifest. If so it will be the directing force in my life for the next few years at least. It would be another example of patience becoming a virtue and also creating the dream of putting my art to use for a greater good than my own ego. It' all part of imagining our lives with vision, purpose and possibility.

Pleasant dreaming....