Wolfdreams: Message In A Bottle

Note: This post is about my spiritual path, part of the Wolfdreams category of my blog. It will likely not make much sense to many people. But it makes sense to me.

The message was short and cryptic: “Follow the Patterns to the Stillness within.”

I had been resting, which became meditating, which became journeying. It was the voice of my Guide, reminding me of things that happened long ago, and of an ability seldom used. I scrawled it down, lest I forget.

I had remembered…

I was quite young. I was setting the table for dinner, putting the silverware out by the plates. I picked each fork, knife, and spoon, out carefully: I had to get the right ones. It was not a question of there being different sets of silverware, and needing to get ones that matched. No, it was much deeper than that. I wanted to get the ones that belonged out that night, and to put them at the correct place on the table – picking out the one particular spoon that just felt right with the one particular fork and the one particular knife.

My mother thought I was confused about where the knives, forks & spoons went, but I wasn’t. There was just a feeling of rightness, of belonging, when I put certain ones together in certain places. My mother was impatient with my slowness, and took them from me, and set the table, while I tried to understand why she didn’t follow the flow of rightness I felt.

Much later in life, I still feel it, but not often, not as strongly. Usually, it’s when I’m being creative:

Stringing a necklace, beads arrayed around me. Sifting through a dish of near-identical beads to find the one particular bead whose energy just fits with the other beads I have strung, Trying out different combinations of beads to get them right. Not because of how they look together, but because of how they feel together.

I eventually started calling this Patterning. Arranging things so that they fit into an invisible Pattern, where the energy will flow more easily. Something which I could feel, sometimes, but not quite see.

We know now, through physics, that everything vibrates with a particular frequency. Even things that are virtually identical in appearance vibrate in their own particular way.

Is that what I feel and sense? I don’t know. All I know is that to feel it, the invisible pattern of rightness, I have to be at a very still & quiet place inside. Words cannot be flowing non-stop through my mind.

People spend their whole lives practicing meditation, or prayer, towards one goal: silencing the mind and stilling the soul in order to be open to the voice of the Sacred within.

Silencing the mind is the tough part. I remember the moment I started thinking in words, rather than experiencing life in the moment; allowing things to happen without spending time thinking through them from every angle; without the chatter of the noisy mind filling up my head. You know what I mean, I’m sure – the mind goes on and on, never ceasing with it’s chatter, about everything, every aspect of our lives. Words fill our heads constantly. We “talk to ourselves.”

What I felt as a child, in that moment when I realized the silence within was gone, replaced by words, was a deep sense of loss. I was very young, but I knew that something priceless had been irrevocably lost.

I’ve never known anyone else who remembered the moment they started thinking in words, although I haven’t asked too many people – the strange looks I got after the first couple of attempts were enough to persuade me that others didn’t experience life the way I do.

Maybe, it was an expression of the Asperger’s Syndrome I didn’t know I had until recently. Maybe, people with autism can see and feel things that other people can’t, but which are very real, nonetheless, and are interacting with those things. I know only my own experience. I know I was bewildered at the seemingly random way people did things, and I was acutely aware that other people didn’t feel the need to follow the patterns I saw. My mother says I used to stare at her a lot, as if I was trying to figure things out, and indeed, I was.

The message from my Guide, “Follow the Patterns to the Stillness within,” was like a message in a bottle washed up on the shore; a reminder of the past, and a pointer to the future. To let go of my thoughts more; to spend more time with a still mind; to follow the sense of rightness that comes with certain actions; in order to return to that place of peace, stillness, and quietness, so I can hear the voice of the Divine more easily.

In some ways, you could compare what I feel to the way a river flows. You can spend your life fighting the flow of the water, or you can give in, let go, and let the current take you where you are intended to be.

I think I’ve spent far too much time fighting the flow. Time to let go.