It’s funny how goodness often comes with a side of chaos.

As if the universe works in waves and flows, new individual energy riding the crest of and arriving on a bigger tide of collective energy. You want to celebrate and revel in the beauty of the moment, yet the winds of change are swirling all around you (literally) and instead of celebrating, you’re dealing with a power outage, fallen trees, and a rapidly thawing refrigerator.

This is a beautiful illustration of my time on Kauai, as I’ve often found that on this island good things happen, but they can tumble in sideways, swept around by the elements and the power of this tiny isle of land, which packs a big punch.

I received news this weekend that I am going to be a speaker this spring at the 50th Annual Transpersonal Psychology Conference.

I got the news in the middle of a wind storm; the microcosm-flurry of excitement inside of me matching and reflecting the macrocosm of the bigger flurry of excitement outside. With the power out, no internet, and wind howling around me, cocooning in bed seemed like a solid choice, and I lay there for a while and cried.

Tears of joy. Tears of overwhelm. Tears of witness for the journey I’ve taken to get to this point: this is my first time speaking at this big of an event- I totally believe in myself even as I feel that rush of unknown space when we step into uncharted territory and don’t know what we’ll find.

It’s hard to keep stoking the embers of a dream when you don’t have tangible results for that dream. I have fire within me I’ve been trying to release but finding the spaces that value my light and need my spark has been a process of creative reinvention and steep learning curves. And part of that process has been finding out that the journey of starting over at mid-life on an island has not always been the easiest, nor what I expected.

Kauai has big energy; she will shake you up and rearrange you.

Since Life has already rearranged me a great deal in the last few years, I wasn’t expecting the lightening bolts of transformation which have transpired here. I wrote about all of it in my last book, Transformations of The Sun, because I feel called to teach about what I’m learning about life, spirit, and being human, as I live it.

I tend to write deep and vulnerable, and I brought that into my book; sharing the beauty, the grief, the ups and downs, the twists and turns. Mostly I talked a lot about what it’s like to move in the direction of your dreams when they haven’t quite yet coalesced. How messy, hard, and challenging it can be to keep showing up for yourself. What it’s like to follow a soul calling and keep faith in the invisible pull of one’s own heart.

Soul callings don’t mean that everything lines up right away. They just mean, if you’re following their divine lines that you will absolutely keep moving in the right direction, even if you feel like you’re moving in spirals and waves.

Like the wind outside making everything swirl and whirl in celestine visions of blue-gray and pewter-breath; you can’t see where it’s coming from, but its force is undeniable. So, it is with life + universe + spirit: it is an invisible but undeniable force.

And when we answer the call of our soul, we are answering this force, placing ourselves in its hands and saying, “I trust, I trust, I trust.” Even when I can’t see the way.

I feel it though.

I feel the rightness and resonance to my choices, even if I don’t know the bigger picture they’re creating. I feel the vibration and vibrancy for my bigger visions of speaking, teaching, and working with a global reach. I feel the inspiration and anticipation that comes from following a dream and being a participant and observer of how it unfolds.

And I’ve begun to see that the past couple years were years for living the questions, and this year will be a year for answering them. Maybe not all the answers, but it’s a start. I write those words with gratitude in my heart, because I’ve been seeding and kindling my dreams for so long and waiting for something to land and stick.

This is a stick.

And even the winds rattling the windows can’t blow it away or make me change momentum, so I’ll just try and blow with them for a while and keeping finding movement in this new direction. Trusting I’m absolutely on the path and that every step I’ve taken was needed to get me to where I am today.

Because it’s not always easy to keep the faith when we can’t see the evidence or results (which is precisely what faith is all about- keeping vision in the absence of sight). But it will always be worth it, because you can always trust your soul.

And even though there are days that can feel a little lost as you wander the wild unknown, tumbling about like a tumbleweed in the wind while you learn to surrender and then surrender again, there are also days where that email will finally come- -

And you know you were headed in the right direction all along, as you prepare to reach, then reach some more, and take yourself on up to the next level.