"Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain." — Joseph Campbell
Joy is...
...waking up to see a strip of bright blue sky in the gap where the drapes don’t quite meet.
...morning messages from your beloved.
...the smell of ground coffee beans.
...watching youtube videos of your favourite spiritual teacher...or anything to do with dogs scared of cats.
Read More"For in their hearts doth Nature stir them so, Then people long on pilgrimage to go."
—Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
From the silence beneath the noise, I feel it—a tug from the unmet mystery to wander out into the world, and a push from my desire to meet it.
My mind starts trying to formulate a plan: starting and end points, how long and far I want to walk, what time I will leave.
But this call asks for none of that. It is not about duration, exercise or a final destination. The call just asks me to get out of my chair, get dressed and follow where it leads without needing to understand where, why, how or when.
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”—Joseph Campbell
At the moment my writing is going through another phase of floating through a snow dome and so I have been quiet on the blog. There has been some significant change in my inner and outer life and more injury so I must simply wait for the mud to settle before I can write about it. However, I feel inspired to share a small timely insight.
Read More“Movement is the song of the body”—Vanda Scaravelli
The sky is denim blue as I leave the house and the oak tree is a charcoal bushy silhouette against the glowing horizon.
Today for the first time in two months I feel an honest urge to go for a walk—not for health or fitness or to train for some crazy long-distance walk but because my body feels like walking.
"If we look at the world with a love of life, the world will reveal its beauty to us" — Daisaku Ikeda
...I have wept tears lying on my bedroom floor. I have rocked my pain-filled hip as if it were my own child that was filled with pain and crying. I have woken day after day and lamented that it’s not the day that I go back to normal life again. But the truth is I never will. This pain has burned me to ashes.
Throughout this pain-filled journey, there are two things that have kept me going...
“The essential surrender happens within you, it has nothing to do with anybody outside you. The basic surrender is a relaxation, a trust — so don’t be misguided by the word. Linguistically, surrender means to surrender to somebody, but religiously, surrender simply means trust, relaxing. It is an attitude rather than an act: you live through trust.”—Osho
“Your willpower is the problem,” my osteopath said as he treated me last week.
I laughed.
Determined. Stubborn. Strong-willed. That’s me. Hell, I was going to walk from Rome to Jerusalem with a bung left hip and my left ankle still recovering from a severe sprain—I couldn’t get more strong-willed than that.
I laughed because he spoke the truth
"There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub."—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Everyday, I listen for the silence beneath the noise.
We live in a busy world—daily work to earn a living, chores and to do lists, relationships to nurture and maintain, places to visit, fun to be had, plans to make, dreams to achieve.
We live in a noisy world—small talk, conversations and laughter, the constant chatter of social media and news, not to mention the thoughts that run rampant through our minds.
Yet beneath the busyness and the noise, there is silence.
Kym Wilson is an Australian writer, coach and pilgrim. In late 2013, she walked 2,022 kilometres alone along the Via Francigena pilgrimage trail from Canterbury to Rome seeking inner wisdom and healing.
