Be the Alchemist of Your Life
Alchemy:
a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life.
“Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked.”
[He] will fight for you; you need only to be still -Exodus 14:1
Be a cloud gazer. Look for different shapes in the skies. Often there are animals, trees, even God's eyelashes gazing directly above us. Tune out the outer world and distractions in order to allow in the inner intuitive mind, to drift and dream. The art of being still and imagining a better, beautiful world floats above us. All we need to do is look up. As children, we created and imagined often, so why not now? Forget our conditions, the lines we aren’t supposed to color through, play and color past the borders and the rules again; educating our hearts again, not just our minds.
"Real doing comes from stillness -- not endless busyness or even reading". Do you have a moment you felt most exposed, raw, and visceral? When I birthed my son, I threw off all my clothes and screamed at my husband to throw- no NOT lightly sprinkle, but THROW ice straight in my face. It was a moment that strengthened my soul in a way words don’t efficiently describe. When our baby boy was placed in my arms, I felt I was powerful enough to hold the whole world in my arms and care for it efficiently; a primal moment that no technology or virtual connection will ever touch. A birthing music playlist that I had meticulously chosen based on tempo and lyric added to the existentialism. In my own battered and bloody body, I looked to his blue, limp body and wondered if he had survived the grueling days of contractions and hours of posterior pushing.
They wouldn't allow Marshall to cut the umbilical cord as I’d imagined my husband doing in that moment, and our baby boy was quickly whisked away to the neonatal unit with an Apagar score 2. His dad reported his son had already had his first experience of becoming a gentleman. Kezman's Apagar score rose to an 8 after meconium was removed from his nose and throat. As quickly as they had whisked him away, our son gave up his neonatal bed for another baby girl who was born very prematurely and would be in the unit a long time. He came back to my hospital bed with pink skin, loads of hair, and his mother's nose and toes. Feeling his soft skin and his baby breath was euphoric. That moment, my soul balanced like a bird in flight, soaring above the pain, the sweat, blood and the tears up, up, above the clouds and so happy to be looking down from my high place. It didn't matter what happened next or before...all that mattered in life was that moment. I had created something that was more valuable to me than gold is to the alchemist that made it.