Preparation for the Next Phase…
 

“Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.” ~ Maya Angelou

Consider everything you have walked through so far. Running your mind over all of it in a flash. The achievements, not belonging, moves, deaths, births, marriage, break ups, awards, mountain tops, victories, wealth, dis-ease, surgery, healing, dark nights, epic travels, friendships, epiphanies, hunger, being included, injuries, bankruptcy, debt, abuse, escaping, investments, ecstasy, children, singlehood, empty nest, losing everything, having everything, business failure, business expansion, being sensitive, being the other, loneliness, communion, intimacy…
 
All of it. Preparation. Preparing us to receive something greater as we shed, dissolve, and transmute what is not us and embody what is.

“What we are waiting for is not as important
 as what happens to us while we are waiting. Trust the process.” 
~ Mandy Hale, Author

I would say even better, engage the process. To be evolutionary is not survival of the fittest. That version of Darwin’s idea is suspect anyway. To be evolutionary is to transform our experiences into wisdom, even bliss. Proactively. Intentionally. Like kindling to ashes. Like weeds and scraps to compost. They rot and break down into a form that is unrecognizable from what they were before—gold, fertilizer or mulch—for a new purpose. A medium in which to grow roots. 
 
Gaining the nuggets of our experience takes us deep below the surface of what our brain, mental wrangling, and psychological knowledge wants to see or make up. It takes us where the deepest darkness becomes the most brilliant light in flashes of insight, epiphany and excavation. Our most difficult experience becomes most essential to who we’ve become and fulfilling our purpose. 
 
At that moment, we can thank the perpetrator, the experience, the driver, the brokenness as well as the ecstasy and laughter. Not because we want the experience again. Because we have harvested our soul’s wisdom into a more magnificent future. 
 

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree 
and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
 

It may seem that our greatest desires show up at the eleventh hour. At strange times. In strange ways. In strange packages. That is the surprising, unpredictable nature of Life. But like Abe’s quote above, we are being prepared for something more exquisite than we are imagining if we will learn to translate our experiences and trust. 
 
Sharpening the ax makes chopping the tree a breeze, a pleasure. Translating our experience into gold makes our next phase ever-so greater.
 
You are exquisite.

Here’s to more of You in the world, 

Shelley