Cusp of Metanoia

Wow, I just looked up when I last posted a blog, and I was surprised to see it had been a couple of months. This last summer has been tumultuous — I totaled my car, an enormous amount of paperwork with that, I broke a couple of bones in my hand that are just now healing, and the day-to-day things we all must do in life. All things considered, I let things slip.

So sorry I fell behind. Now, on to the blog.

Where I live in Arkansas, USA, we had a drought this summer, but the humidity never stopped climbing to 90%. I know. That sounds like a total incongruity, but that is what happened.  That situation primed the sweat glands to overproduce, and the unrelenting heat and lack of a breeze were stifling.

The first thing most people said was, “By God, I wish this heat would go away.” We had a visitor from the Pacific Northwest who thought he was going to die every day he was here. Without air conditioning, he might not have made it. He wasn’t here long enough to acclimate to the weather, and he couldn’t wait to fly home.

Have you ever been in a place where you need to spend most of your energy just to live? Most people will say yes, remembering extraordinary times when they first moved out of their parents’ home. Some have been that way most of their lives. Very few will say no. It doesn’t matter, though, because we all struggle daily. An untold number of things happen to us.

Those little irritating things that grow exponentially in a nanosecond into a holy shit experience happen to all of us. Have you ever noticed that the biggest things that bother you aren’t the ones you might stew on, but are the ones that sneak up and slap you on the back of your head with no warning at all? Things like a storm dropping a tree on your house, a loved one falling ill, or your dear loved one suddenly dying in a car wreck or having a heart attack. All those things are far more disastrous than the ones that keep you up at night.

The everyday things we worry about produce stress, and that stress matters for personal growth. It does. That is how we develop as people and mature our souls. Your high school coach was right: you need stress and hardship to develop; they usually talked about physical development, but the general rule holds. Going through hardships strengthens us.

It’s just such a pain in the butt. It just grows too fast, and we let it hang around too long.

I discovered an amazing thing not long ago.

Recently, my personal life got caught up in the kind of things we all experience–those horrific little disasters I just talked about, and we all made bad decisions. You know what I’m talking about. When life takes a hiatus from the peace-of-mind scene, when tranquility squeezes away, and bumpy roads appear—the little disasters that rumble our lovely plans.

Anyway, while enacting, reacting, and playacting for myself, my friends, and my family, a slow, consistent, situation-bourgeoning subliminal thing took hold.

I can’t really tell when this different thing started. It snuck up on me. It was quiet, stealthy, and didn’t trip any of my personal alarms. I was like a mushroom — the Universe kept me in the dark and fed me dung. Still, I had those hauntingly familiar feelings of impending … something, but nothing ever made sense.

This thing sprouted slowly. Then the other evening, the sensation opened like a flower, revealing petals that let me see better and gave me a sense of what was transpiring. It was like an early-morning bloom, its petals unfolding wondrously as they searched for sunlight. Within it, perhaps behind it, I discovered a space I hadn’t known existed until then (see mushroom above); it was an invitation.

There was no alarm to it. What it did have was calm steadfastness. Then, like a new day, it dawned for me. I was on a cusp of a different flavor.

I’ve written about cusps before—how they appear at an intersection of paths, and it isn’t until you accept a new path that any great change sallies forth, bearing the associated challenges. Did I explain that, just before the cusp is reached, before a choice is made, a vision appears for the briefest of instances that explains the character of the needed choice? This explanation may not give all the information, but it usually gives enough for one to decide. Some might describe this explanation as educated guesswork, but I think of it as more of an ethereal awareness.

Remember, all things are connected.

The human brain is remarkable and can make sense of many things in an instant. So does the Spirit.

Now back to what happened. This time, I knew with profound certainty that I had come upon something that opened a pre-ordained place or situation. Woah. This was unusual. Somehow, I wasn’t going through what I have come to think of as a normal cusp; instead, I traversed one of a different sort, a striped leopard. To me, these situations are rare, perhaps once or twice in a lifetime.

There are times when a person knows, from their inmost center — where they stand is exactly where they should be, like an etheric bullseye. It’s as though both the vibrations within you and those without all pause for an instant in a most harmonic way, totally right for the occasion. When it happens to you, you will fill up with metanoia (a profound change or spiritual development) characterized by having a distinct rightness about it. That correctness is how you recognize it, regardless of the subject matter, intellectual, emotional, physical, or spiritual. Each is different.

If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it will, and when it does, you will discover something about yourself. Without any form of stress, you will have grown, or at least have something confirmed for you. You will be changed in some way, and you will know with certainty that you are exactly where you need to be and that you belong in this moment.

I wish you well.

 

 

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