“Does the walker choose the path, or the path the walker?”
~ Garth Nix
I knew I was going to share a little more Billy Fingers wisdom today. And it’s funny how the Universe gave me such a shining little pearl of a sunrise this morning, through the small opening in the clouds ….
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Many of us want the pearls in life, living on easy street. But Billy Fingers says that the saga of the oyster and the pearl is much more complicated: The pearl only happens when sand gets inside an oyster and irritates it.
And the irritation doesn’t feel good, but without it, no pearls!
To be a pearl maker, our oyster needs a good strong shell to protect it from a hundred million irritants in our environment. Our shell helps us to tell one grain of sand from the other. You know which one can become a pearl and which one isn’t worth the irritation. If we become a really smart oyster, with a good shell, we can live life with more abandon, because we don’t have to worry so much about the sand. We can just relax about it. And if we deal with the sand creatively, we’ll end up with a gorgeous treasure …
The inside of our oyster is soft, fertile and uniform. It’s our creative spark, our pearl making laboratory. And since we are the Universe, our laboratories are run by none other than the Universal Intelligence. Look at pictures of the Universe, and when we can turn our attention to the limitless, to our infinite self, all the irritations seem small by comparison.
The world is my oyster. I am both the pearl and the oyster. And in the oyster shell I will find many pearls. Pearls of wisdom that I will cast before all creatures …
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I sat there staring at that pearl in the clouds for wisdom this morning. I was thinking about my own life’s timeline, and how every single piece of it … all the irritants … have been absolutely crucial to my being in this very moment, with these exact set of circumstances. This pearl, this treasure.
I was thinking about Steve Jobs, and the speech he made at Stanford …
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path.”
Until this week, I’m not really sure that I fully believed in so-called destiny. I’d still like to believe that I am in control and that my decisions effect where my life is headed. But when I contemplate my timeline, and I think about the visions that Spirit has shown me, I am becoming more and more convinced that my life’s experiences are predestined.
And that without all the irritants, I wouldn’t be the person that I am becoming.
For it’s the irritants in life, all the pain, that’s given me the wisdom to seek out Truth. And it’s with the utmost faith and trust that I place my future in the hands of the Divine.
To quote John Lennon: “There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be…”
If we deal with the sand in our lives creatively, through communion with our infinite selves, the road ahead is sure to be filled with gorgeous treasures.
And it will absolutely be worth any pain in the short term.
❤❤
