October 25, 2022
What’s it time for now?
By Amba Gale
As I listen into the question, “What’s it time for now?” I can hear the universe calling: This is a time for New Beginnings. It is a time for re-examining our lives, for leaving behind those previous identities and conversations that were right in one life’s iteration and not right in the next.
In the summer 2019, I did just that. I journeyed to Isle Royale, National Park, in Lake Superior. That was the outer journey. The inner journey was one of crossing a threshold that was a challenging and dangerous crossing for me. Why dangerous? Dangerous, because if I didn’t succeed in making that crossing, I might have disconnected from, or dislocated my relationship with, one of my most favorite people in my world: my daughter. Now, an adult, she was begging me to see her differently, differently than I did when she was a child.
And this was good. And cross I did.
I didn’t know what I was doing, nor how to do it. The book, Crossing Thresholds, Island Reflections, contains all the poems that came to me from my own poetic imagination, my own inner guide, my own Muse, who held my hand and supported me in forging a bridge in my own internal journey from shedding one perspective about my daughter and inventing another.
I was deeply empowered by the physical presence of an outer dock without its bridge, as the wooden bridge had been separated from the dock at spring ice melt. I knew that If I were to accomplish getting across to the land of a new perspective, I would have to build my own, inner, bridge.
I also saw that creating that bridge involved letting go of a way of being, thinking, and doing, that might have been appropriate in one life and was not appropriate in this one, the one in which I could see, and stand for, newly, who my daughter is now.
Now, I see, after three years later, as I am (as we all are) emerging into this new world we find ourselves in, I find it is time, once again, to newly enter the inner depths… to connect with what is most wise, most precious, most intuitive, and most original within myself, through a dive, a retreat, into Silence, and, then, return to the circumstantial world of people and things in a new way, with a new perspective, a perspective in which I can author, I can dance with the surrounding winds that propel me, I can create my life. I can let my outer life reflect my inner one, through design, and re-enter my life of joy.
That is why I am offering The Joy of Being in February, to which you are graciously invited.
At the island, on the very morning on which I experienced the completion of my inner crossing, I stood in front of the lonely dock-without-its-bridge, and, more than anything, wanted to wade across to feel the sun and celebrate my crossing. When I shared with my husband, Don, that “by golly, no matter what,” I was going to WADE to that dock, as there was no bridge to get me there, he dissuaded me with the words, “It’s deeper than you think.” I wanted to go anyway. He got fiercer, and said, “You WILL get wet and cold.”
All that turned into the following poem which you now can read.
Here’s a prompt for you, after you read the poem:
Question: What dimension (way of thinking, way of being, way of knowing, way of relating, way of doing,) of your own life is it now time to leave behind?
Deeper Than you Think
By Amba Gale
The wade to the front dock
is deeper than you think.
You will get wet and cold.
To stand on the front dock
and celebrate the sun,
the wind,
the blue sky
and the water,
requires some sacrifice.
Leave what is dead
and time to shed.
Leave your old life behind.
