Stepping into the risk - excerpt from my book True North

Stepping into the risk

The earth quakes from the cry that erupts from my soul, rooted as it is to the ground like a spring bubbling through my veins. The magic that is longing can only be tasted as it applies itself to risk.

A stolen moment of interlude with intimacy is most often felt when one dares to be still and live there, waiting to be taught how to carry the dream from the moment of it’s birth.

An unbearable ache, these seducers of hearts desire. So often suppressed, the longing bears witness in pent up passions striving to be free.

A breath is the only way of escape, the traveler of spirit on her journey through life. I wish to occupy eternity in the journey from day to day. Living life into the corners, stretching seams that are skin, bursting veins that breed stories that perpetuate the longing that the ache should live on, and on and on…

In a way, the nineteen sixties were the beginning of the end of the idealism that we baby boomers were ushered in with. We were naive to believe our parents could protect us by pulling us into the folds of a fifty’s housewife skirt. Although we were vaccinated against the debilitating phenomena of polio, nothing could prepare us for the rise in political warfare with the assassination of John, and Bobby, and Martin Luther King.

With the dawn of television came visual access to the threat of communism (The Red scare), and the Cuban revolution. Faith was replaced by fear with the threat of Russia having secret knowledge of the atomic bombs production. As children we watched in awe, as America put men on the moon and in the same decade, introduce the first passenger to jet flight. In The Prisoner TV series, people were replaced with a number, and there seemed to be no escape.

Television changed the way we could see the real or fabricated American lifestyle, and an extension of the world. For me, it marked the beginning of oppression. By the time I was in the fifth grade, I was hospitalized due to the conditions of stress. I couldn’t blame my parents. It was the feeling surrounding our emotional and physical economy. I had a sensitive pulse and silently reacted to adult talk about the coming crisis, one after another. I was never invited into the conversations my Mother and Father had, as children were often seen and not heard in those days.

Now I am a woman over 55 and am in the midst of a movement of the most famous generation in American history, children born to parents who survived WWII. As teenagers and young adults, we buried boyfriends who were killed in Vietnam. We have protested or appraised situations surrounding abortion. We have seen world famine, and national disasters while we raised our children and cried for their future we once hoped to celebrate. We are a sensitive generation who grope for some source to explain what we did not anticipate.  We have too much information coming in over the net to be comfortable anymore. We are soul sisters ready to make a mental and physical shift into another stage, living under different lights, with a different plot that will require different acting. We are moving from pleasing to mastery. The life we lead now is due for some reconsideration as we accept the sacred invitation to step into the risk.