I did a wonderful thing. I quit my secure, well-paying job at a university with great insurance and a great retirement plan. I got to bike to work in a great town through beautiful neighborhoods. I got to be at the nexus of policy, research and education at state and national levels. I made friendly connections with interesting dynamic change agents and decisionmakers at state and local agencies and educational institutions across the state. I got to travel to Africa and Central America to help on watershed projects. I got to work with top scientists in aquatic ecology, hydrology, geochemistry, and climate science. I learned tons about those sciences, and about water sustainability, research, hydrologic databases, and academia. I also learned that I am not meant for a desk job dealing more with computer files than people being asked to help groups of faculty that are not sure what they need to be helped because they are in a brittle system set up to function only if each person devotes a tiny amount of time and thought to each of their 100 projects/students/classes.
Going to work started to feel like a chore, and even punishment, because my passion was really in my social, arts and nature activities. I had projects in sewing, puppeting, organizing, and work just seemed to get in the way. I had no time for this "work!"
My spirit started struggling and rearing up. My higher self decided I was done with this pretense of comfort, because in actuality, I was growing to be very uncomfortable on many levels. I found I was pretending that how we were doing things was fine with me. And I felt unseen, and I squashed my own expression more and more... first with a sense of frustration, and then peacefully, with a sense of acceptance with a deep knowledge that this was so temporary and so not my world,,, I used to think that this academia thing should be my world. Then it was clear that I was meant for other endeavors. I could see this was a big machine working in ol dwell-worn ways with old worn out ideas at the institutional level. How incredibly boring and uninspiring. I could go on. But let's get back to me.
I found a part of myself rebelling against the comfort and security... something suddenly surprised me... a suggestion that I should quit without finding another job... I needed a break from 'working.' It was my spirit that insisted on this. So I saw myself deciding to quit as soon as I had saved $12,000. I would somehow go outside of my routine and out of my current society for a while to shake up my world in such a way that things would look different, like shaking a snow globe or a etch a sketch like blowing a Mandala away. e a hunch that things aren't really as they seem right now. There is a lot of illusion. Until I get out of my routine, my house, my comfort, I will have limited viewing.
So it is time for a retreat, a time to step back, zoom out, refresh, put on new glasses (or take off the glasses), climb out of the cave (I love the image of Plato's cave where people are enchanted by their own shadows and are comfortable in that safe warm cave and don't want to realize that their shadows are just shadows, and that the bigger truer world of life and expansion lay outside the cave itself.
So I plan to go to India on January 24 with my friend Kanika and her family. We are invited to her cousin's wedding and I am so honored that they will host me in their home! I go north from there to the base of the Himalayas for meditation retreat down the road from the Dalai Lama. I will travel south after that to do yoga and retreat in several other places, to meet a few friends, to experience elephants. Then I fly to Thailand. There I will explore more of the elephant world and conservation. More about that soon...
People want to know the PLAN... I think they get confused and worried when the plan is very loose, and undefined... maybe I am too a little bit. My goal is to establish connections with people there, and learn about opportunities and then have those in my list of options once I am there... but I won't have everything planned out. I know I will be ok. I am trusting the world to catch me as I step off the edge into the arms of love from people and animals. I will invite that love by sending love out And I have plenty of intellingence and travel savy to help me along.
