I sat down this morning in front in my new she-shed writing room in our home. There’s 12+ inches of fresh snow on the ground outside the window with more falling every second. It’s heaven. Time standing still making space for knowings to arise and be felt without the rush of everyday life to squander their intelligence. Of course, I expected to use this time to embark on a new endeavor inspired by my beloved. Just a few days ago while walking around our neighborhood lake, we talked about our mutual struggle with participating in all of the buckets of life we each want to participate in. For Mike, they differ slightly then mine. Where he wants to take a certain kind of action, I want to settle more into being. For him, buckets of adventure, exercise, nature and success. For me, buckets of creativity, flow, stillness and romance. For us both, buckets of travel, growth and rest.

In the past, when I’ve bucketed aspects of my life, I’ve color-coded the shit out of what I think matters to me. I’ve relied on bullet points and organization in order to create a carefully coded script to follow that would put me squarely on the path to wherever it was I thought I should go, only to usually leave the map where I created it and float unknowingly in another direction. Today, as I was working through my first two bullets, I paused with growing anxiety. Each bullet, yet again, just another colored-pencil attempt to control and systematize what doesn’t want to be controlled or systematized. It wants presence, willingness to be in the experience and not describe it or plan for it.

Everything, I am realizing, is an opportunity to dive deeper into experience just as it is occurring. I can list what I believe is important to me in hopes that I will better prioritize it into my life or I can make it a sacred exploration in the very moment I’m exploring it. I can bum-rush the supposed destination or I can make each experience the destination. I can continue doing without being, or I can learn to truly be while doing. This, I believe, an initiation into sacred territory. A holy pause, an opening of the heart, a waiting for God to join me, so I can cease doing things alone, and instead, endeavor to do anything, and everything, with God flowing through me. On rare occasions, this is easy, but most times, it is not. Inertia, monotony and unconscious pattern all take over. They know the destination well, even though they know not the sacred way. They ensure a means to an end rather than a meaningful end. For me, this is the cusp of something quite new. A new era that doesn’t have a map, but rather a simple invitation let nothing go by without a check-in of depth. When it comes to my map of what matters to me, I already know the key destinations, now it is simply time to go with more of me in toe.

I’m grateful that my old ways of doing still take hold but now dissolve quickly before I’ve gotten too far down the road. The listening is subtler now, yet also louder than ever. Even though I’d like to fight it, nothing is as important as what wants to be heard. While I’m not particularly practiced at creating heat with my well-placed logs of life, I do know that the sacred fires of life ignite most powerfully after the settling and after the beautifying is complete. They happen after I’m willing to open the door for God to enter, and stay a long while.