Fidelity

Let your prayer mat become worn and well-loved. Let it become part of you, day by day, as you ground downwards into its weave, the earth, the soul of things. Keep coming back, they say in the rooms. The master does her work, then lets it go, says the Tao Te Ching. The Bhagavad Gita says we are entitled only to the labor, but not its fruits. The results are none of your business, Megan tells us in the Art Paradigm. I’m starting to get it now. I’m listening.

Today’s prompt brought me back to a story I wrote in the writing challenge two years ago. Day 11. The story is called “magic carpet” and it’s about an LSD trip in which a small ornamental rug, which I’d once shoplifted in India as a wayward teenager, became a symbol of renewal and devotion. This blue and gold and white rug, two feet by two, transmuted before my eyes from a source of shame to a portal of divine grace. For a month after the trip, I stood on it every day and prayed. Then the experience faded a bit. The excitement wore off. My cat started attacking the rug, and I put it back in my closet. My prayers stopped landing in my chest. I sunk into a new season of fear and insecurity, disconnected from the revelation which had felt so profound mere months before.

For the better part of a decade, I’ve felt called to write. I felt it when I started my first online business in 2015, and I felt it in 2020 as I shuttered that business and started a new one. I could feel my intuition bursting through. Something in me was adamant that I write, and write a lot. And I tried. Again and again I tried. But writing always felt like pulling teeth. I was so bound up in my insecurities and shame, terrified that if I didn’t write the right thing, the perfect thing, then I would be found out as the fraud I felt like. I felt as if my entire sense of worthiness hinged on these words. I kept forcing myself to write, brutalizing the words out of my head and fingers. It’s little wonder I was never able to sustain it. These commitments were declarations of war against myself. Writing merely grew the surface area for my shame to consume me.

I’ve become quite a spiritual person over the past six years, something early-twenties Rob would likely be appalled and confused by. But the more I’m connected to God, to a higher power beyond my limited understanding, the more I certain I become, in the deepest recesses of me, that I need to be writing. That my life depends on it in some way I don’t fully understand. In my darkest hours these past few years, as I’ve loved and lost, been split in two between the person The Girl and my mother told me I should be, and the person I felt myself to be at my core, I asked for God’s direction again and again, on my knees, pleading for direction, any way out of the darkness. Please God, show me the way. What comes back is always the same. You need to write. It’s time to write. Start now. Let go.

Lately I’ve been enthralled with the work of Martin Shaw, a gruff old Englishman, wilderness guide, mythologist, poet, bard. A man of story and depth. The way he spins old fairy tales into initiatory journeys of soul is unlike anything I’ve encountered. His writing feels alive in a way I’ve rarely experienced. I can sense these stories already live in me somehow, the way they unsettle me, resonate in the hollows of my chest with an ancient familiarity.

I know that I am the shepherd’s daughter who wanders into the forest and meets an old crone, who tells her she must sow twelve nightshirts with intricate patterns around the heart before the eve of her wedding to a great black serpent. A year and a day she takes, sewing, pricking her fingers, with deep fidelity to the task before her. Only after enduring this tedious task, attended to with love and patience and care, by showing up, is she ready to meet her fate, and to transform the great bellowing beast into the prince she will love the rest of her life. Fidelity to the task before you. Fidelity to what life is asking. The work of getting made, getting tempered into a real human being.

I pulled that old magic carpet out last week, and laid it down in the place where I pray. Its fibers are rough, scratching into my knees as I bow down in humility each morning, asking for guidance. I’m struck that it’s never too late to start again. That a new, deeper commitment can always be made. As I wander back from the woods, I have a task before me. The same one I’ve had for years. It’s time to write. To do my work, and then let it go. To show up every day. To live into the season of fidelity before me and cherish it. Onwards.