"Write your life."

Happy New Year everyone!  I hope you feel as upbeat as I do.  I know the world is facing enormous political problems, due to a long-standing childish denial of the realities of living on a planet that is not infinite, yet I feel excited by the new year.  I've been spending time reading notes from various courses I have taken with the Daoist master Jeffrey C. Yuen, with whom I studied in graduate school, and invariably that fills me with a sense of awe at the deep beauty that is ancient Chinese medicine.

I'm working on two books at the moment, both of them involving Daoist medicine, and despite knowing how long it may take to complete them, I am very happy about both of them.  Twenty some years ago I took a course in "Core Shamanism" with Michael Harner, Ph.D. at The Open Center in lower Manhattan.  It was an eye opening experience, and I found that I felt completely at home performing shamanic journeys.  In one journey, I asked what I should do to make money in a way that was completely in line with who I am and what I have to offer to the world, and my spiritual guide at that time picked me up like a paintbrush, and with my hair as the brush, wrote across the sky "Write your life" in paint that was all the colors of the rainbow.  Quite a psychedelic vision, but a very direct answer.

You would think that might be an easy instruction to follow.  Not so.  What could I possibly write about my life that would be at all interesting?  Yes, I've lived a rather unusual life and worked in quite a wide variety of professions, beginning at a young age.  I sat down to write the actual story of my life beginning in childhood.  There are some fascinating stories there, but I couldn't seem to find a thread on which it all would hang.  Who am I that anyone would care to read my story??

Also, writing about my actual life stories was simply not interesting to me, and I felt certain that I should enjoy the writing of my life, not just grind something out to fulfill the requirement.  And so, 20 some odd years later, I still had not written my life.  Until now.  Finally, at along last, I have begun the real story I was meant to write.  In a dream a couple of weeks ago, I finally found a form for telling my story, in a way that I would enjoy the telling.  While it will be the story of my life, of who I am and who I have been and can be, it is also a fictional story.  And in this form, it is finally a story I think others will enjoy reading.  I have never read a story anything like this one, and so I am happy to be telling a story no one has heard before.  How fun to work on it and see where it goes!

The new year looks very promising.