Before I go to bed, I prepare a trail of breadcrumbs so when I wake up, I can find my way home if I feel lost. Sometimes my dreams take me far away to places where I feel angry and frustrated. When I wake up, those places cling to me. I finally figured out that those places don’t mean anything and I can just start walking home.
My breadcrumbs are my books with bookmarks at my favorite passages, quotes stuck on the mirror, a chair in my garden, foods that lift me up placed on the counter for breakfast. Each of these things provides a step on my journey home: ‘Not one atom opposes us’ and ‘Gratitude is the bridge between you and freedom’.
Each day I rebuild my world by believing one thought which leads to another. Then I believe that thought which leads to another. It is a trail of loving understanding that starts with compassion, moves toward beauty, then to gratitude and ends in delight. The key, I’ve found, is to take one step at a time.
On days when my world is already there for me, I rebuild the whole world. I start at the big bang and move right into seeing the earth as the incredible paradise that it is. Right now, my favorite time period is when the Hunter/Gatherers roamed the earth. One day as I was creating this, I realized that they were not Hunter/Gatherers at all. They were Finders. I was wondering how human-type beings could have survived for 30 centuries racing around looking for berries and roots and chasing after antelope. I realized that this viewpoint comes from our current model of having no idea how to live off the land. These people would have been so connected to the Earth that their experience must have been like living at the grocery store. Everywhere they looked, they saw nourishment.
So I’ve made a commitment to find my way home to my true self every day. Some days I wake up home. Some days it is a long walk. Some days I never make it. It is the practice that gives my life structure and meaning. As some time has gone by since I started this practice, I’ve proven to myself that I will find myself most days. I trust the process so I don’t beat myself up on the hard days.
I have always wanted to experience life as sacred. For a long time, I believed that when I got everything handled, some type of powerful understanding would show up in flash. It turns out that we have a choice in every moment about how we experience life. We get the opportunity, again and again, to choose the walk home.
the Living Economy 