Keep on walking for yourself

The sun is shining brightly today, it's a paradise-like kinda day. My spirits are lifted, they have been for a few days now.

Not so the first half of last week. It was a low level depressed murkiness that I listlessly waded through. The weather played a part in that, not that I'm in any way averse to rain and moodiness and Mordor-like storms darkening and threatening my particular view of The Mountain.

I've also promised myself not to be hard on me: I've been a cruel taskmaster to self for most of my life. Enough of that now. That ended with last year's breakdown.

A year ago I was preparing myself for my - major - move to Salt Rock. Last August this time I was barely walking on extremely shaky legs, fear ruled me, the ashes were still smouldering. There was hardly any belief in the return of a phoenix. Although I am, eternally, an optimist.

One thing is for sure: last year this time I could not have ever forseen myself living and working in Cape Town a year later. My plan did not extend that far. Nor did it need to.

What I have let slip these last few months - for the first time since early 2001 - is my daily Morning Pages excerise of writing three full scap pages upon waking.

I wrote them this morning though.

The cost of not meeting beneath the tree, at the centre of the pages before taking a walk with my Creator - through our secret garden - is extremely high: the second I commit my heart and pen to the pages is the instant that I'm connected and intrinsically know their invaluableness; never a second before.

The cost is an awful disconnection that clogs my life and aliveness, veins and arteries, with the stagnant green muck that mosquito-owned Dead Sea swamp soups are made of. I become my descent into the living-dead.

In that space, like 99.9% of the population,  I am open to the God-awful influence and seduction-pressure of, for the one, the media. I move into a space of struggling, striving and pleasing so as to carve myself a space.

That's as opposed to remaining centred and calm - praying daily for peace, for enough, also for wisdom and understanding - and faithfully trusting that I'm on my life's path.

Trusting that everything will be taken care of, that like the veld flowers or the wild birds, I can cease striving and struggling, that it is safe, and right, to live fully in the moment.

Fully seizing this day, for - wonderfully - it's truly all I have.

Photo: On 9 August I took a drive up the West Coast to spend a wonderful day with family in Hopefield.

Snow capped mountains in the near distance, and a country sand road beneath a blue sky, does things to me.

Like exciting me to start walking, with just a pack on my back, and to never stop.