This is my goodbye post to this blog.
What does your intuition tell you?
I honestly don’t recall ever being asked that question, outside of the occasional self-help video or slightly weird yoga teacher. At some point, it seemed a little dismissive to talk of my intuition, as if I couldn’t also have reason, intellect and critical thought. I suppose I always knew I had intuition. I even sometimes listened to it. (It is the reason I live where I do, after all.) It rarely occurred to me to follow my intuition so, well, so blindly.
When I decided to move back home, that started to shift. I did small intuition experiments, just to see what might happen. For example, there was about a week or so before the holidays where I kept having dreams about Kali-ma. I knew precious little about Kali-ma, but I read her story anyway, and got myself a small necklace with her picture. The man who sold me the necklace said: “If you dance with Kali, you’d better be ready for changes.” My heart soared, so I actively sought out the changes.
One of the earliest changes was completely repositioning how I thought about relationships. When I thought about meeting people just for some fun, casual sex, my intuition did that little crossed-arm, head shaking thing, so I stopped doing that. If someone wasn’t piquing my interest on multiple levels, I let them go.
Somewhere close to my heart, my poor neglected intuition started to stretch and grow. She was quiet, a little disoriented, and sometimes slow to speak. I tried to quiet down and let her gain her strength. At some point a few months ago, she started exercising pretty hard, telling me that I the guy I was seeing was not good for me, that he was controlling and manipulative, and that furthermore, I knew it and was just scared.
I had just heard her — really heard her — when, almost by accident, I met True North. We were at the same event, talking about books and poetry and Emily Dickinson. In the quiet of my drive home (alone) that night, I felt my intuition straighten up and point, strong and unshakeable, completely in his direction.
Over the next weeks, and then months, as I got to know him (as I continue to get to know him), she still points, strong and unshakeable, in his direction. I said to him, one of the first times we sat in a park (on a bench now known as “The Bench”), that the way Virgos know when they’ve found their person is when their internal chatter goes quiet. I was kidding about the astrology, but absolutely serious about the quiet. I sat with him then and listened as the multiple layers of monkey-mind chatter dissolved into silence. I sit with him now and feel the same thing.
True North is serene and warm, like the Costa Rica beach at sunrise. True North is safe and secure, like our own warm house on a snowy January night. True North welcomes me, whole and entire. Waking to True North is like walking home.
So maybe I haven’t traveled the world like Elizabeth Gilbert, and I haven’t embarked on an epic physical challenge like Cheryl Strayed, but nevertheless, I have uncovered and built up my intuition, and through it, I have found my True North. Every day that follows today is now a chance to live gratitude for all that was, and all that is. Every day is the chance to think learn and act on how to build our ordinary epic together.
