Hope on the Line

I was gifted a vision yesterday while holding a friend of mine deep in my heart. In this vision, I was taken to an ethereal and foggy land. I scanned the horizon line looking for something to stand out, something familiar. It only took a moment before I saw her, Grandmother Spirit, nested in the wisps of clouds. She waved at me and motioned to join her.

As I approached, I noticed that she had situated herself before a large hole dug through the cloud cover. I peeked through its center; galaxies spun, planets moved, and stars shone as bright as our sun. Grandmother Spirit surprised me by branding a fishing pole. With a flick of her wrist, she cast its line sending the hook into the infinite cosmos below.

“What are you doing?” I asked curiously.

“Fishing for hope.” She replies. “Just as we fish for compliments, for problems, for troubles and strife; just as we fish for what’s heavy, overbearing, and familiar, so too can we fish for possibility. Hope is a holding space so that the goodness of life can move in and touch our hearts.”

“Is that what we need?” I ask. “Hope?“ She nods.

“Do you remember in the beginning of your spiritual journey when you could only perceive what was frightening and scary at first? When spiders and snakes were ominous instead of medicine? It took time for you to see the positive. Just as a river carves a canyon from a mountain and a stream smooths a stone, so too must your experiences create change in you so hope can flow like sacred water.”

She reeled in her fishing line and held up her catch: a ‪small, shadowed mass‬ hung lifeless from the hook. After inhaling deeply, she and blew. The black scattered like ashes caught in the wind. No longer darkened and no longer weighted, a bright, shiny star glistened and danced on the line. Grandmother looked at me and grinned with the joy of a five-year-old. She was quite proud of herself. And I couldn’t help but return her smile.

Throughout my life, I have become burdened with the weight of my experiences. Just as my bones gained in density, so too did my energetic system become weighed with my unresolved memories and emotions. We can hold Hope like a container, but first, we need to be hollowed. This is what can make the transformational spiritual journey so painful.

Muscle memory is the ability to reproduce a particular movement without conscious thought and built upon frequent repetition. Behaviors and thought patterns become embedded in this same manner. The seeker striving for healing becomes witness to the restrictive, the painful, the repressed, oppressed, and sodden spaces within in subconscious. My liberation had to be earned through my willing participation. In my own experiences, there has been no free-pass given.

Hollowing of the self only occurs by the light of consciousness: conscious thought. Conscious action. Conscious change. We can all be conduits of Hope. We all have it in us to see the eye and the storm, the light and the heavy, the star, and the shadow. My own hollowing wasn’t so that I could witness the positive first, but rather, to carve out space within me so that all expressions of the experience have space to exist. And no matter how scared or uncomfortable I feel, I can ground myself in the moment with an unwavering steadiness that only time and experience brings and know that sometimes all it takes is a few, deep exhales to let Hope shine.

Be love, loves.