Looking beyond...the past...

My need to protect myself from what I fear is part of who I am. ~Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets

I read that line right before I jumped in the shower yesterday morning to get ready to go back to work (after a much-enjoyed 17-day break). In fact, I stopped reading once I read it, because it hit me like a ton of bricks. I really do believe that there's no new information out there--that it's called "wisdom of the ages" for good reason--but that it's about finding writers, thinkers, friends, bloggers(!) who say things in ways that resonate with us. In ways that allow us to truly hear the truth of it. That line was one of those moments for me. I didn't even have to look up the quote in the book just now because yesterday morning I stood in the shower and said it over and over in my mind and really thought about it.

Think it applies just to me? Think again. Who among us doesn't do things in our relationships with mates, children, coworkers, family members, friends that are born out of fear? We might even be aware that we're doing them. But have we stopped to think about how we might have incorporated those fears into our very being? How they might have become a part of us?

The other day I wrote a post on California Fever about Andrea's "Mondo Beyondo" list. I even added a link in my right sidebar to her Mondo Beyondo post, right below my theme for 2006, “The Year of Manifestation.”

This morning I got up very early (Jeffrey stayed up very late and I basically got up as soon as he fell asleep). I turned on the tree lights (yes, we leave the tree up until my birthday), plugged in the string of Xmas lights draped across the bookshelf in the kitchen, lit my Mary candle on the table, and pulled out a fresh notebook. It was time to begin morning pages. I sat there in the warmly lit near-darkness and wrote…and wrote and wrote. I had much coming up that I needed to dump.

By the time I got to page 3, I was thinking about Mondo Beyondo--about how I liked thinking of wild, outlandish dreams. (If you’d known me a long time, you’d know that me and goals? Not so much.) So it was a huge thing for me to list some long-term, ‘wildest dreams’ on my blog (and on Andrea’s). Then it occurred to me: What if I started making a Mondo Beyondo list about past dreams? What if I could time-travel back to my childhood…what would I have dreamed for then? And I started listing some things. Things that, if I had been in charge, I would have allowed myself to be and do. I wrote several lines until I reached the end of page 3. It was only after I’d filled up the page that I realized how perfect the last line on the page was: “I would be creative.”