When Everything Goes Flat: Stasis on the Spiritual Path

I found myself not sitting at my altar. A day turned into days turned into weeks that became something like months. I used to sit at my altar daily. For years.

I knew something was going on. I didn't know if it was death, birth, or loss but I knew it was something. So I waited.

I didn't force, or trip, or make-up stories. I waited.

My sweetie would ask why not then tell me why I should then say I needed to.

And still I waited.

Then a series of unfortunate events took place. Nothing catastrophic, just bad. Like unusual for me bad.

That was the first signal it was time. I was being placed in a position of need of Them.

So I listened for dreams. I listened to my inspiration. I listened to my hunger. I listened to my aversions.

And something began to take shape, like a figure in thick fog and you can't quite tell what it is only that it's something.

Then all at once it popped open. It was time to return to a particular path mapped in my blood.

So I went to my altar. I was flat and distant. But I went. I asked. I offered. I said hello to ancestors and others. I wrote in my altar journal.

By the next day the ice had melted and a cool, rushing river scooped me up and carried me North.

As I sit in contemplation and study, new understandings are opening in me. I have earned a new layer of access to the mysteries buried in my bones, the earth, the stars. It is all as if new, these things I have known and sat with and studied for so many decades.

Sometimes hard stops and blocks are necessary pauses that are needed to get us to stop so that what we are chasing can catch us and get us to face the right direction.

Otherwise we run nowhere. And we don't even know we're doing it.

There is wisdom in the silence of stasis if we allow ourselves to be still with it.