But what are we actually progressing to?

Thunder rumbling. Flying ants dancing in reverence of the coming rain. Children screaming in pure delight on the trampoline in the building humidity. The 14 year old cuddling my 3 year old. The 4, 5 and 8 year old singing ring o’ roses. A stillness, a warmness and the increasing pressure in the atmosphere. The pressure of peace expanding, like a ripple throughout the bushland. One of my dearest friends pouring her love into me, as she gives me divine massage in the stillness of our humble home. Listening to pure and innocent love songs from our younger years. The presence and contemplation of another dear soul sister sitting under the Sheoaks, watching the children, trustingly tending to them whilst I’m being adorned inside. A rainbow contrasting against the black tropical storm clouds. A bottle of wine afterwards, amongst chatty hens, devoured on the porch at sunset. Bucket baths for the children who have spent the day in the real earth. The evening routine, shared between mothers. Cuddles with my children, as the lightening flashes.

Last night, a moment in time, that etched into my brain, like a timestamp.

Remember this moment.

Remember how you felt, I tell myself.

There is no where left to go in this life, but here.

* * *

At the end of last year, we had plans. Big plans.

We’d spent the entire previous year dreaming, preparing, building, deciding…

Of “a new way”.

We were ready to create it, with all our motivated energy.

But the thing about new ways, is that they cannot be created with old ways.

A short month or two into the “jumping off the cliff, and growing our wings on the way down…”. We realised, that wings weren’t actually what we needed. In fact, we didn’t know what we needed. But apparently it wasn’t wings.

So we decided to free fall, like those wild and crazy base jumpers instead. We landed, thankfully, in a little lifeboat that took us down the river of purification.

* * *

My birthday is always a reflective time of year for me. It’s 6 weeks until Christmas and the next year. It’s the turning point where I go from “being in the year”, to transitioning into the next year.

Not that life is defined by years, months, days, linear time at all.

But it’s cyclical.

My solar return marks the end of another cycle, Christmas marks a time of returning to the root chakra - the birthing of God + Family, and the New Year marks the renewal and recalibration. Refreshed.

Every year it’s somehow exactly the same experience.

Contemplative and renewing.

Everyone who knows my journey this year only has one way to describe it — “oh, you’ve had such a big year”, they say with a sort of sympathetic yet proud honouring.

Sure, there’s no reinterpreting that.

* * *

I want to somehow jump to that magic point in the story where I share how I’ve triumphed this year.

How I’m healed, purified and all that jazz, and how I’m not. I want to share about the delicious sweet spots of inner liberation I’ve experienced throughout the year from deconstructing myself and my life. I want to do a recap. A review. A recount.

Challenge, Choice, Outcome.

Alas, I cannot. For these words cannot take that form. That constructed form.

I tried, but it felt like an essay I would have written to get myself a High Distinction at Uni. Or a marketing campaign to persuade voters. Or even a social media post to motivate people I’ve never met about how great their life can be too.

After an entire year deconstructing those kinds of habits, I just cannot.

Instead, I just re-read my post “The Spaciousness of True Discomfort”.

It’s the one that you all apparently liked the most according to Substacks analytics. I’ve not taken the time to explore Substack analytics, because I’m not writing for those reasons. But Substack emails me random things from time-to-time, and kindly let’s me know. And I thought it was interesting that was the one.

Why, I wondered?

I’ve been allowing that kind of spaciousness to return to my life after a big few months of travel, family chaos and loss.

God, we are so damn good at filling. up. the space.

I can see why it connected with so many of you. Even the most devout here, are still so good at filling up the space. We are strangers of spaciousness.

Always progressing, towards more.

Distraction. Distraction. Distraction.

But when I look at the world around me, micro and macro — I see us circling all the way back around. Back to where we started. After fighting for generations in the name of progress. Have we progressed so far away from our Source, our Truth, we no longer even know what we’re truly progressing to? Is this even what we truly want?

Are we just distracted, in the name of progress, from our ultimate liberation?

Our ultimate human-ness?

Of Self and the Whole?

* * *

I’ve finally plugged my dumb phone back in, and I really needed to reconnect with why I am choosing to make life intentionally difficult for myself.

Because it’s really a shit of a phone.

I actually kind of despise it. And no, I don’t have masochistic tendencies.

But why it matters to me, to make life utterly difficult for myself in this way, to make my life the least externally glorified as possible, is simply to be reminded of what’s real.

In the most basic example, it’s to stop texting and just pick up the damn phone and talk like human beings to real people, whom are my real friends. Human beings that have real time for, and real connection with, each other. Because using their phone around their kid to make a phone call is okay, they way it was okay for our parents to use their landline. Voices talking, not blank faces staring, hunched spines and fingers twiddling. Because it’s just a bloody phone. Not a blood-sucking, brain-altering, dehumanising piece of tech attached to our souls, that deprive our children of love and presence, and mean we need to consciously try to have “screen free days”, to restore any kind of balance to our families and intimacy.

Dramatic, I know. Soz.

But as long as my SIM card was in a smart device, it did not matter what I told myself, my entire energy field was tuned into distraction.

Distracted from purity.

Distracted from connection.

Distracted from truth.

Okay, you know I’m not just talking about a phone here.

I’m talking about every single distraction that exists in my life, in the world around me, from what’s pure and true and innocent.

And let me tell you — when I resist the purity, when I delay taking the damn SIM card out of my smart phone, my children are so incredibly sensitive they’ll call me straight back into line with a visit to the Emergency Department.

Even if I’ve spent the three days prior being deeply present, reconnecting, resting, just being after a big week… once false step and BAM. They’ll fall backwards off a chair and land head first onto concrete. Just to say — Whatever else you are thinking about, Mum? Let. It. Go.

There is no buffer zone, for me these days.

I’m either on the path.

Or I’m off it.

The One True Path.

And perhaps that’s all that I’ve really learnt this year, summed up in four words.

There is no where else to go.

To surrender the material distraction of life, and simply come back to being guided by the divinity of it.

* * *

It’s come into my field recently that a lot of people have been turning to Jesus lately. I thought this was pretty interesting. Real new agey folks (like me?), repenting their old new-agey ways. Or simply walking a private and intimate journey with Jesus that I have no idea about, other than that they are. I’ve even had friends who’ve been meeting him in past-life regressions and all sorts, it turns out. It seems it’s kind of happening on scale.

I’ve been exploring this a little bit more with deep fascination over the last few days, as I am not someone who would label myself as a Christian. That said, I’m not un-Christian, either. I believe in God, pray daily, read my children Bible stories and love celebrating the story of Jesus of Nazereth at Christmas time.

I also read them Chinese Festival Stories - of Chinese Gods and celebrations, revere KuanYin, live by the Tao and practice Qi Gong. Amongst many other things.

I’m fascinated by other cultures, religions, celebrations and stories.

I don’t know if I could ever be exclusive in my beliefs?

My ultimate beliefs are rooted in Oneness.

But what I’ve found so interesting in my recent observation of my comrades finding their way home to Christ, is their denouncing of Self in the process.

In living a life devoted to Jesus, they have surrendered their Self to Him.

Which, honestly, I think is beautiful.

In the new agey world — it can get pretty cluttered with believing in yourself, the Universe, manifesting your dreams, living life to your potential according to your Human Design, etc. At least in the digitised version where pervasive algorithms feed that exact reality. Where the Self, and healing and reclamation of the power of the Self, sit comfortably and hungrily at the centre.

Whilst I haven’t found my way to Jesus (yet! But who knows what all this spaciousness will invite in?!), I feel that my path of purification has innately been of a similar nature of surrendering my Self to God, to divine will, for my body to be used as a vessel for purity of God’s love, for my life to become more humble and in service to God’s will.

I mean, I do sound like I could probably join the club talking like this, right?

And perhaps that’s why I’ve a deep fascination with this new knowledge I have come across lately.

At the end of the day, though, I remind myself - another person’s path, whilst interesting and insightful for me to explore and expand my own self - is actually just another distraction.

And I’ve realised that my exploration of this, is yet just another distraction.

I don’t think I could ever stop being curious and analytical.

But like my devoted friends, I too am on a path of devotion — and I actually need not acquire, seek or strive for anything (including knowledge or perspective), right now.

Except, simply be devoted.

Which, I think, my younger Self, someone devoted deeply to the progressive agenda, might find pretty difficult to understand and comprehend.

Knowledge is power, I once might have said.

Faith is blind, even?

But truthfully, my journey this year has been a sort of Return to Jesus experience. Not specific under the beliefs of any particular deity or God. But in the pureness of Faith. Trust. Surrender. Releasing the Self, in the name of the Higher.

It’s a fascinating reflection for me, how myself and many are being called in this way. One I’ll unpack more in private over time, and no doubt many questions to my friends on their similar paths. Holla, if that’s you.

In the meantime, the seeking of my spiritual deepening must end.
It has come to its natural end.

I must simply be.

Practice.

The words coming up for me this week are —

Devotion.

Innocence.

Purity.

Distraction.

Progress.

Spaciousness.

Surrender.

Self.

God.

This week’s musing may or may not have adequately captured the essence of my swirling frequencies right now around these topics, and how they all relate.

Honestly, I’m feeling a little blank this week. On paper and even in person.

But I’m okay with that.

Blank feels good.

Clean slates are blank.

New beginnings are blank.

Spaciousness is blank.

This week, I am simply reminded to return from where I have been distracted, once again, to nothingness.

And once, more, I will find myself some spaciousness to sit on my couch and literally do nothing, as I lean a little deeper into the discomfort of releasing a life and world that has expected everything for so long.