This Voice

There is something happening in my spirit. I don know if I can describe it, but I'll do my best. I have been asking and praying and hoping for the path to my purpose..to know my strength and my power, to live my truth and find my live's work. I don't mean a career. I mean my life's work...the reason I came here, the thing that I do that makes a difference in the world and in my soul. I have emptied my heart and my calendar, I have rid my home of children for regular intervals, I have stopped saying yes in the hopes of dwindling responsibilities so that I could create a vacuum for nature and life to rush right into. It hasn't been easy. Some of the things I have said no to have been important to me. They have spoken to callings that I have. I have denied them, each and every one, for the purpose of listening better and hearing my purpose. I have said no because I was told to say no by this voice, this knowing deep in the pit of my stomach. I was compelled to sit still. Sadly, these things I am missing out on are still whispering to me "what if?" "why not?" Those things are silently goading me, wondering (not-so-quietly) if I made a mistake, if I will regret it. Some days I resent those little things sitting there, staring, imploring, doubting. I stare back at those things and calmly, bravely, but softly say "NO."
What rushes into this space I have created are sadness and tears. What I feel is a fear like none I have ever allowed myself to feel completely. This fear is a little girl's fear. It's 10 or 11. It is the fear of hope dashed, of dreams unrealized, of life's realities preventing the imaginings that create the beauty that is living who I truly am. These fears are not unlike the thing that makes us stop drawing about that same age. It's the realization that what we are producing does not represent reality. It's the dawning that something 2-dimensional cannot easily represent something that is 3-dimensional. It's the sinking truth that a stick figure looks nothing like a person. In this life on earth, what we dream and envision is limited by the reality that we paint it into. When those things don't match up, we often quit, rather than continue to risk creating something that doesn't meet our expectation.
The pain that I feel at giving up the dream is more painful that not meeting my expectation. It is harder for me to stop making art than it is to make art that isn't what I pictured. The pain of setting down my dreams, so easily disrupted by the limitations and realities of life, is more painful that holding onto it...albeit poorly.
When I allow myself to sit in this space of fear and really allow myself to feel it, there is a sadness that follows that can only be the grief of not realizing it all sooner. I feel so sad that I thought it better to set the dream down that to face the stark-raving lunacy that I fear will come from trying, with assumed futility, to realize those dreams from this very human condition with all of life's very real limitations.
So that is where I keep finding myself..in this place of fear and sadness. And I keep allowing it, returning to this place because it feels so important to face it, to hear it, to accept and walk through it. I keep returning here because I want to see what is on the other side of this wall, waiting.
I keep hearing this voice, compelling me forward. It is my own voice. It is my mother voice that reassures small people who feel insecure. I have seen myself still small and suffering, I have recognized that my younger self had all the same awareness of the realities of life that my adult self does, but without the emotional ability to handle all that comes with it. I have agreed to go back and get that small girl and to hold her hand. I have agreed to bring her here and now, full heart intact, into the present.
She has work to do.