Faith and Direction

For the past two weeks, I was in the bay area. Time with friends, time with myself, time with my beloved, and working in a session and planning for the Sacred Kink Initiatory Intensive while I was at it. Two boxes of books and a pair of flowy pants, a haul of second-hand button-down shirts, and a few new stuffed animals came home with Aiden and I, and a stack of memories.Awareness bubbles to the surface in a thousand ways. Book reading, quite time with a journal or our mind alone, conversations, heartbreak, spiritual and energetic shocks to the system. In my opinion, the trip was totally worth either of two things – Aiden and I reconnecting on a few levels, and having a conversation on the phone with a friend I had not talked to in years, Strider.It's funny, when I am home, I rarely take the time and energy to have a multi-hour phone call. Too much going on, too many projects, too much, too much. I often have to tread water emotionally before I feel swept away into an undertow of my own commitments. When taking things on, or dreaming up possibilities, I often forget the realities of a mortal shell. But on vacation, when the call came almost out of the blue (he did text first), I took it for what it was. Thirty minutes became an hour, became two and then three. We traversed work and relationships, health and vocation, spiritual awareness, humor, friends lost, friends found. But the aha came for me in the form of career/school ideas for me.I have been looking for years, hell, almost a decade, at going back to graduate school. Ideas have fluxed from an MFA to Sexology, Masters in Education to other ideas as well... but a new one, one I had written off, has been replanted thanks to Strider, and reaffirmed by the amazing Dossie Easton. When I mentioned the idea of going into the path of therapy, she lit up. Yes, yes, yes. I felt like she was wanting to hand me some sort of mantle. To have two friends with such rich histories believe in me really blew me away. Or more accurately, gave me a sense of being affirmed, firmed up... strength over being cast into the wind.So now the research begins. Choices of degrees, paths, possibilities within that vein of path. It feels right in my body. Having a practice of some sort, mixed with writing, occasional weekends of work (conferences, intensives, university guest lecturing). Bringing my spiritual practice forward under the honed edge of clinical practice and psychological training.My word of the year is Clarity... and I am working towards it, a breath at a time.Now, in the mean time, let's get the number of emails back down. I have a goal of being down to 300 in my inbox by the end of the month. I have faith in myself.Now that is a big statement for me. I have faith in myself.It doesn't take outside reassurance. That seems like a first for me. Deity, family, friend, student, stranger... I feel like I have been seeking outside reassurance my whole life. I likely have. I fear so often that I will be cast out, left alone, or worse – forgotten. Forgotten that I ever existed.I know rationally that it makes no sense. For good or ill, I will be remembered should I die today. And yet, I have had fear there.Today, in this moment, I have faith in myself. I feel firm in a sense of myself.I am tempted to just delete this journal note, because it doesn't matter if anyone sees it.