Sacred Stories
She was feeling such disappointment, hurt, and anger. Her husband had essentially told her he could not support her plans to go to Morocco. Her daughter felt the same way, “You are too old. That ship has sailed….”
Pouring out her heart about all of this the following day, her sister listened and expressed compassion, then asked her to speak of what the idea of the trip meant to her. “Almost like a vision quest. Out of my comfort zone. Wanting to prove to myself I am capable. Learning a lot about fear. I have a heart connection with the friend I have met online and I would like to meet her. I want to go to the desert.”
Her sister looked up ‘desert spiritual meaning’ and read out loud to her essentially all her heart had just spoken!
The desert symbolizes survival, creativity, clarity, revelations, loneliness, and overcoming life’s greatest obstacles.
Metaphorically, the desert is a place of testing and transformation, of being divested of empire and ego. In the desert experience, the dreams, goals, and visions of the false self can be seen clearly, sometimes for the first time. The desert symbolizes the terrain in which we unlearn empire spirituality.
Wow….
“You have a clear sense of what it is for you,” her sister said, fully understanding the feelings of disappointment and anger. “It might be helpful to be clear on that intention and be open to multiple ways to integrate all of this in your life. It seems that thinking there is only one way something can happen is the ego and the empire spirituality the symbolism is describing.”
Even with the feelings still present, she could see truth in that.
The following morning her sister’s supposedly-randomly-selected screen saver was a desert scene, and this message from the book The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency shared by a friend spoke so succinctly of the situation:
Too often, we try to gain a clear perspective before it is time. That will make us crazy. We do not always know why things are happening the way they are….
Today, I will let things happen without trying to figure everything out. If clarity is not available to me today, I will trust it to come later, in retrospect. I will put simple trust in the truth that all is well, events are unfolding as they should, and all will work out for good in my life—better than I can imagine.