The things, people, places, ideas that have significantly shaped my life have never screamed my name at the top of their lungs in an open field for all to see. The things that were always meant for me, they whisper. Forever. Until you answer. They are underneath the soil, maybe for years. Every once in a while the wind catches just right and carries their sound to your ears. So light you could mistake it for the fresh green leaves singing to the sun the way they do in the spring. The soul mates – the work, the people, the places, that are truly mine, bone of my bone, these take time. They don’t often yell.

If you lean into the whispers, you can learn to decipher the language. You can learn to distinguish between the sound of the waves and the sound of the canoe moving through the water. Between the way the wind moves your hair around your face, and the way you think you should feel. If you learn to listen, there is a deeper knowing that rises. You can know what bird calls are your heart’s, and which ones belong only to the sky. You can learn the secret language of the lakes and how to know which ones are portals for you, to new dimensions, if entered with the right intention.

I feel obliged to give warning. Leaning in to the soul in this way seems lovely, soft, exquisite, blissful. It is. And it is not. Joining with the river of the soul is extremely inconvenient. The whispers of your soul are not interested in your plans. They are not interested in what you have built, are building, or what the world thinks. The whispers only want you back. The whispers want you cradled in truth, bone by precious bone, until you are piece by piece a whole being again. This is never easy. Following soul whispers will destroy worlds, lives, careers, relationships, dreams, and so much more than this. It will tear from you everything you hold dear, hold you upside down and shake you so everything in your pockets and heart falls out onto the rocks in a crash. Soul is not interested in the easy way. Soul wants whole-person ecstasy, or nothing. You don’t get to follow whispers half-way. The current takes you, and you oblige or get out.

Is there any other way than this? I have spent too many lifetimes in resistance. Haven’t you? What would it be like to be taken by life? To let it live through and out and back into us again? What would it be to allow our living to open us? To risk our known safety for true, soul deep, bliss?

This is the only way I’m interested in. I would like to be swallowed up by the current of soul. I would like to keep building, creating, reaching. And then I would like to be knocked down again, back into the sweet surrender of the river, just to remember what truth is. I’d like the river to bring me to the inconvenience of love, just so I can say yes again. And again. And again. I’d like to play this game again and again with the Universe, until we fall into each other and can’t remember who is the river and who is me.