I am embarking on a journey of a mystic without a monastery. I’m walking the Camino Trail of my mind. Today I am contemplating the question: What is truly of value to me?  Have you given it any thoughts on it for yourself? It’s a difficult one. I’m glad to have the guidance of Caroline Myss and the company of hundreds of others like myself from around the world. We’re all travelling together in cyberspace. What a marvellous gift of technology in this energy age. I’m grateful.

For these 5 days, I’m shedding the outside world/influences/distractions as much as possible. I’m going deep within to meet the stranger residing there.  I will be happy to have arrived at the end as in Derek Walcott’s poem, Love After Love.

The time will come 
when, with elation 
you will greet yourself arriving 
at your own door, in your own mirror 
and each will smile at the other’s welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored 
for another, who knows you by heart. 
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 
peel your own image from the mirror. 
Sit. Feast on your life. 

I am devoting today in examining the external distractions in my life. How much of what is in it is truly of value? How much is just distraction? Even though I am retired,  I have been so busy and occupied and unable to stop. Today, I stopped all the unnecessary busyness to go deep within myself. What is of value to me?

I’m still thinking on it. I am surprised that I could stop and be quiet and still. I am surprised to feel how restful it is to do so. I don’t miss the franticness of doing. I love the quietude, of deliberate slowness, of hearing my thoughts and the steady beat of my heart. I love having the time to walk Sheba in the late afternoon. Not to do just a quick poop run around the block but taking time to smell and chew grass. Then to sit on the bench in the park and gaze what is before me.

I’ve been very distracted and tired. I like the silence but need to be doing something all the time. My mind is always occupied with something and somewhere. I have deluded myself in thinking that I am in the present moment. But it is seldom here, in me and with me even though that is what I profess to strive for. I am fooled by myself because I am ‘creating’ painting, drawing, sewing. I can be/am distracting myself by all that as well as other things. I am distracted rather than being engaged when I read crime/mystery books.

So how do I come back to myself? I have to spend more slow days like today. Stop the busy doing. Pick raspberries with Sheba. Tend to the garden. It needs watering, weeding and harvesting. Maybe in the process, I will know what is truly of value to me.