February 27, 2024
Now we play in clouds and play hopscotch in heaven. ~ Kathleen De Rose, Once Upon A Dream
Taking a moment to look about with curiosity is a simple practice my soul recently offered up. I arrived at it through an exercise I learned from Dr. Peebles. When pondering a particular problem, I remembered to look at it from three different angles: problem, purpose, practice.
What is the problem? What is the purpose of it? What is the spiritual practice it’s pointing toward?
I applied this three-part formula to a current problem. I described the problem, then asked my soul the purpose of the problem, and lastly, asked what soul wants me to do.
Trusting the first image that popped up when I asked “what does soul want me to do?” (standing outside, looking about with surprise and delight), I arrived at “the practice is awe and wonderment.”
This was the global opposite of the problem itself. The purpose of the problem also seemed unrelated to the spiritual practice being offered.
From that, I concluded that Spirit is more of a hopscotch player than a train on a single track. Spirit gets to scatter its hopscotch squares anywhere it wants, and we gamely hop along, even though we don’t know the precise destination.
I suspect this is always the case, even for the most complicated, all-encompassing hopscotch game ever, with squares flung between universes and dimensions. Spirit knows the destination, but we can only guess.
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I’d much rather dwell in the realm of wonderment, the uplifting wordlessness of awe, than the cramped little playground my mind constructs. Bars made out of fear, a hard floor paved with worry and anger.
The practice of observing life with wonder and awe seems pretty useless when faced with fears and worries and furies. But inevitably, consciously shifting focus to my soul’s preferred game made the cage of the mind seem more like an inconsequential distraction than a formidable prison. A little while later, I no longer noticed implacable bars and unforgiving anger-paved floor. I no longer sensed the cage.
It may still exist, somewhere. But I choose not to be awed by such a possibility, and to spare no wonderment on it. There’s literally an endless supply of things I would rather notice and explore. That in itself fills me with wonderment and awe, overlaid with a shimmering blanket that can only be gratitude in the raw.