I’ve been getting these messages to let go of my memoir, to stop beating a dead horse, to let go of old ways. My daughter gave me two things for Christmas—a silk eye mask that allows me to sleep in comfort and darkness, and “The Book of Runes” by Ralph H. Blum, who was a cultural anthropologist.
Consulting the Oracle is none other than finding Wisdom deep within yourself. Playing with Runes helps you to do that. There’s a game you can play called “Rule of Right Action.” It’s where you draw a Rune from your bag of twenty-five Rune stones and receive its guidance for the day.
I played the game for the first time today and drew Kano Reversed. “It calls for giving up gladly the old and being prepared to live for a time empty. It calls for inner stability and carries the warning not to be seduced by the momentum of old ways [minor success with my memoir?] while waiting for the new to become illuminated.”
This Rune points to “a death of a way of being that is no longer valid and puts you on notice that failure to face up consciously to that death would constitute a loss of opportunity…Some aspect of yourself is no longer appropriate to the person you are now becoming.”
Failure to face up consciously to that death would constitute a loss of opportunity.
And as if that weren’t strong enough of a message, I then opened my Overeaters Anonymous daily meditation book which I haven’t opened in years to today’s date of January 15. It reads: [W]e have discovered that humility is simply an awareness of who we really are today and a willingness to become all that we can be.” It goes further to say, “I realized what character traits and behaviors have outlived their usefulness to my life. I saw that the old ways of reaching out to the world [rewriting and trying to get my memoir published, perhaps?] have kept me from reaching my full potential….I pray…to be willing to surrender and allow the natural progression of change to unfold in God’s time. I can even enjoy myself in the process.”
That is a motherlode of guidance for one day. I shall endeavor to pay attention to it. So for now, instead of working on an old story about my childhood, I think I’ll go read the Modern Love and Tiny Love Stories in The New York Times and try not to feel envious of the writers who got published.
"Through our hopes and fears, our pleasures and pains, we are deeply interconnected." --Pema Chödrön, "Comfortable with Uncertainty"