I’m drawing you into my inner sanctum as I dig deeper into the inquiry. How much of the home improvement and pleasant daydreaming about our next beautiful room or outdoor project is about a deeper longing for certainty, safety, security or a yet to be named thing?
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Seeking the Sanctuary of Certainty
Unrest and uncertainty happening around the planet cannot NOT impact us as earthlings. We may largely stay unconscious to it, but fear gets in there, and if you use a smartphone, it’s on autoplay.
Call me cuckoo, but I would rather know what I am up to so I can contribute more help than harm while I’m alive.
The catch is there’s a cost.
Shining light on our motivations below the surface in order to become more centered in truth? Emotional sobriety? It demands guts, maturity, and humility.
Gratitude for Shelter
If you’re paying attention to trends in real estate and assorted housing shortages across America, then you know. It’s expensive to own and rent just about anywhere. Homelessness is an issue in my community, and younger generations wonder if they will ever enjoy home ownership.
My husband retired a couple of years ago, and as emptynesters we split our time between Northern Illinois and Central Arizona.
I hoped the most annoying autoimmune symptoms of my illness would ease with added sunshine and steady temperatures.
Since that hasn’t happened, I find myself self-soothing with daydreams.
Is there a better place to settle with weather and opportunities kinder to my body/mind/spirit?
Is my dream house or dream community waiting for me to discover more balance?
I seem very much trapped in cycles of intense flare followed by recovery then an always too-short remission.
The Longing Underneath the Unrest
As I sit with assorted mixed emotions–uncomfortable and humiliating as they are–I begin to see how many of them arise from faulty beliefs.
As much as I struggle to manage the cycles of wellness and pain, the truth is that I am not doing life wrong. I’m getting a lot of it right. There’s a ton of love flowing. It’s simply life…life subject to laws of an impartial universe where I am not the center of things.
I would prefer to be at the center. Prefer to have dominion rather than responsibility. But I’m a teeny blip in a magnificent cosmic love story stretching four and a half billion years for earth. My presence matters, and I’m accountable. I am here to serve and meant to become purposeful healing. It’s not about living as many years as possible to consume and extract as much of its offerings as I can.
I get tired. I crave sanctuary. When I forget about my place in this grand universe, when I fall out of gratitude and divine vision, fear sneaks in.
Fears of scarcity, uncertainty, and insecurity get in there and interfere with the ability to be at peace in the present. To feel safe, centered, and satisfied.
As much as I want to believe I have reached a mature age where this culture of cruelty and chaos cannot poison me, where I have learned from experience that I can bend and not break with losses and heartbreak, I am humbled to know it remains a battle. I can revert to adolescent rebellion in the blink of an eye. Opportunities and temptations to fall out of integrity are everywhere.
This journey is what I consider a conversion journey, and it is never a one and done spiritual transaction.
My conversion feels like a lifelong process of spiral-like dynamics, and right where I am this moment, it resembles a descent into poverty much more than upward riches.
None of us are getting out of all this alive, and what brings the most joy and fruit right now transcends property value, perfect weather, and dream kitchens.
My dream house is the shelter where my heart is centered in prayer. Where divine Grace, telling the truth, practicing my faith, tending to my soul, learning to love purely, and detaching from outcomes becomes my daily reality, not a dream.
Do I require a perfect garden for this sanctuary?
The trees are important teachers so I need access to them, but ownership? Probably not.
Would the size or quality of any gathering space in our home compromise the joy, peace, or fruit possible?
Does any dream property filled with favored design elements erase the uncertainty built into the realities of daily life?
What I’m getting at is deeper than mere gratitude for blessings.
Even when we shrink our needs and live simply, we are still prone to secretly believe that if only _____ were in my possession…
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that somehow we would experience a deeper satisfaction.
Maybe it is regret which haunts…if only I had zigged and not zagged all those years ago.
If only I had met the right person or stumbled into the right career…
Suddenly the past is alive in us and draining us of precious power for the present.
It’s more often visions of an uncertain future that steal my energies.
The patterns are hard to change, and most of us would rather make a cozy home in them than take an adventure into the new. But isn’t the new always trying to be born in us?
A song I just started writing this week goes Hide, hide me in You/Create something new/It’s true Your ways become my ways when I dare to change/When I can’t see the way/When I’m all out of faith/I’m turning to You/To tell You the truth, I don’t have to know to keep loving You/What am I willing to lose/An old soul singing the blues/It’s true Your song becomes my song/A silver moon moves me along.
I hope you are opening in fresh ways to hidden longings beneath your own striving and daydreams. If you are comparing your life to others who claim to be “living the dream,” I recommend you…not. May the shelter we all live within become the grace, prayer, relationships, love, and beauty feeding our souls and supporting us as we grow.
Peace to you right where you are.
-michele
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