Where Am I On my Becoming?

"Where am I on my becoming?"  That question has haunted me nearly since I began this retreat.  I am intrigued, and playing with Rabbi Kula's description of commandments in Yearnings as things to which we are to examine from the inside-out, I continue to play with it as I breathe the question in and out.  (See yesterday's post for the commandment.)

Knowing where I am on my becoming would be much easier if I had been handed a map at birth to which I could look periodically to see how I am doing.  Is my journey one from Portland, Oregon, to Miami, using the Pythagorean route of the shortest distance between two points being a straight line? In which case it would be significantly more helpful in knowing where I am on my becoming if I could see I was in Boise, Denver, or Atlanta...or, dread, in Boston.

But, my route might be from Portland, Maine, to Miami, meandering the Inter-coastal Waterway, or from Seattle to Houston.  It might be the T.S. Eliot route:

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -- T.S. Eliot*

Maybe where I am on my becoming is somewhere between Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, knowing it again for the first time.  (Since I haven't been there since high school, and only then rarely, knowing it again for the first time wouldn't be much of a stretch.)

I still have to believe that if we listen and follow what we know in our hearts, they will inevitably take us on the right route, assuming there is a right route. My sense is that our hearts tell us what is True North for us but Kula would probably challenge whether there is a right or wrong route or if it matters. Perhaps dallying in Philadelphia might prove rewarding, even if it is out of the way. At this point, I am so unclear (a good thing, I think,) I am not sure there is a wrong route.  I am, after all, the maven of "not-knowing as a way of life." I am pretty confident that we will know were have gone astray if we aren't truly present to the journey or if a stop sucks the life out of us and we linger there too long. 

As I ponder "Where I am on my becoming," I've had a compelling desire to get on a bus and ride across the country, stopping wherever I feel called to stop. (Alas, I am not free to do that right now, but arrangements could be made to do so soon.)

Like Alice Through the Looking Glass, I am not sure of much.  I could be falling down or up, but I am assured that friends cannot be neglected, and I've probably been doing a bit much of that in recent years. So, where am I on my becoming?  I cannot know for sure, but at about 12:45 this morning I felt like the Universe had flipped my switches and I was more alive than I've been probably since 2000.  Every cell in my body tingled.  I awakened lighter, more joyful, and definitely more hopeful.   So the journey continues...





*Brainy-quote.com"