Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright

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Around the Bend

It’s a quiet Easter Sunday. The island is gray today with soft promise of rain; the bright of last night’s full moon faded to cushion clouds and pewter wisps streaking the sky.

Since it’s a new month and the full moon just passed, I’ve been thoughtfully considering what I’ve learned of Love, Life and Spirit this past cycle, what I want to take with me into the coming cycle, and what feels finished and ready to be integrated or released.

There’s been a lot of lessons:

How happiness isn’t some phantasm to be constantly chased, always elusive, but something to be experienced right now, even if happiness is simply the enjoyment that comes from a fresh breeze, or a really good cup of coffee, or a sweet lick from the dog.

How getting ahead of yourself can rob you of finding the good in each day, and how expectation can put conditions on what you believe you need in order to be okay.

How to let go and create more space for allowance and receiving.

But I think the biggest lesson that is definitely ongoing, is how it truly looks to live a life of trust…

I said my move to Kauai was about actually living my belief that if I took a leap of faith a way would be provided, and I would be supported in my jump. And yet this past season I have begun to see on deeper levels where my humanness/ego-identity brushes up against trust in spirit. I see the areas where I am still trying to force control.

I want to know what it will look like and how it will work out. I want to see X amount in my bank account to feel reassured of stability. I want things to look a certain way- the way I think things should go- and I sometimes fight the currents when they don’t.

Yet part of being vulnerable and placing our trust in something higher and bigger than just ourselves is creating space and allowing space for things to unfold in new patterns and unexpected ways.

I don’t know what’s waiting around the river bend this next season. I’m not quite sure where Love, Life and Spirit will guide me. It is a far cry from my old life in Alaska, where my schedule was always so full and planned out, I knew exactly what was waiting.

And if life did happen to try and sneak in a few surprises? I could have rounded that bend and smacked into Archangel Michael himself, and I would have told him– “I’m so sorry, I can’t talk to you right now. I’m very busy, I just don’t have time. How about lunch next Tuesday? I can pencil you in from 1:15-2:00.”

There was little space and little time for life to bring me something new. And that is one of the biggest points of Kauai- making space for something new to happen. New creative endeavors. New growth. New opportunities. A deeper relationship with Life. A deeper sense of self-actualization. A deeper trust in the process.

Trust is hard, I had no idea how hard it was going to be. Yet the more I sink into it and surrender myself into a greater space of unknowing, the more I am finding that it’s a beautiful dance to live a life where you don’t have to know what’s waiting around the bend.

Until you actually get there and experience the beauty of how Spirit can work in your life when you learn to let go and trust.