Fehu

For those of you keeping score, I’m taking liberties with what many have interpreted as the end of the Long Count, the Mayan calendar that completes next week on Solstice.  Mostly, I’m taking inventory of events in my life and coming to fierce conclusions about what they mean, or unmean, as the case may be.

Most of you know, particularly those whom I’ve known since childhood, that I’m a very driven person.  Not so much a planner, though assuredly led by some deeper drive to accomplish a particular desire.  I know how to bring things into being.  I know how to manifest, even if I do it with a sledgehammer and crowbar.  And those of you who know me really well know that drive has always revolved around empowering others.  In fact, a lot of you who go way back probably knew that before I did.  Imagine how fortified I felt to learn in my late twenties that my greatest spiritual goal, my life purpose, as it were, was just that.  Specifically, I learned that I came into form to have as many diverse human experiences as possible, so that when I spoke to others about surviving and thriving, I wouldn’t just be talking out of my ass.  I would know; I do know.

I designed many facets of my life by that purpose.  Why wouldn’t I?  I had the stamp of approval of the gods.  That’s what ego does.  Its job is to protect the form, which is accomplished through taking very esoteric concepts and making them formed, or at least tangible in some way.  It takes classes.  It tests principles.  It jumps hoop after hoop until a concept is wisdom.

I’ve devoted all of my adult life to this process of centering my many experiences of human strength and frailty.  Through my shamanic work I’ve even spent 15 years helping others discern their life purposes, so they could set themselves on the proper course of personal development, soul awareness.  This year, though, something changed.

I’ve felt it coming for a while, acutely after the birth of our twins. I didn’t realize what it was until now.  Some time in late spring, early summer, I began to feel keenly that I have no life purpose.  My guides affirmed it.  The Runes spelled it out.  Everytime I came to them about this feeling, I drew Fehu, the soul coming into form, then Uruz, awakened personhood.  The constantly shifting scapes in my dream state and spirit worlds supported it.  I felt this truth through everything, yet in my experience of How Things Work, it just didn’t make sense.  All of the conventional spiritual teachings (some of which are quite old) inform that we all have a purpose in coming into form.  That purpose may not be vividly detailed and doesn’t preclude choice, yet an overarching mission of the soul drives how the self is created over the course of a life, possibly lifetimes.  Did not feeling connected to a life purpose mean I was finished with human life? Was I about to be hit by a bus?

I don’t know if this insight is coming to me now because we are approaching this end to an ordering of time that, whether we have consciously subscribed to its truth or been delightfully oblivious to it until recent hype, has engraved its existence on the back of our cultural pocket watch.   Maybe I would be arriving at this awareness had I reached this experience in any timeframe.  I can’t overlook that regardless, I’m having it now, and given that synchronicity, I finally understand the time of untime.

There is no life purpose.  For me, holding onto that singular principle around which I create myself is its own organized religion, a limiting structure that stopped working for me in my teens.  Whatever task to widen my empathy came before, it’s gone now.  I completed it, or at least completed it in that ordered, linear way.  I can’t express how discombobulating and post-traumatic this insight has been, is still.  Yet, it is what it is. I can only move forward in my truth as it is in this moment, and my truth is only this moment.

Living with no sense of life purpose means creating living vividly in the present.  It means exquisitely connecting with All Things, not because I can, but because I am All Things and in that animistic realization lie my answers, my solitude, my truth.  This is the life without a net.  This is the leap. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know what I will create of myself from this point forward, because I’m creating her now. I do know that if you’re feeling similar distress, it’s okay. This kind of leap isn’t your undoing. It’s actually, perhaps, your very first actual doing.

Thank you for coming with me on this journey.

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