5/8/10
Today I spent a couple hours seeking out the geomantic features at the University of Virginia (UVA) in the Academikal Village. This is the original section of the college, conceived by Thomas Jefferson as a place where professors and university students of all levels could live and eat and learn together, inspiring intellectual debate. I began at the Rotunda, the central building of the village which was originally the library (not, as in most other colleges of the time, a chapel), its dome shape inspired by Rome’s Pantheon and symbolic of the enlightened human mind. It also housed classrooms as well as some meeting areas, which are still filled today with furnishings of that period.
I began by walking around it for quite a while, as has become my habit, just looking around and feeling it out. Unable to see or sense a single thing, and feeling a bit dubious about the whole alleged feature, I sat down and began to pray to the supreme being who was supposedly more accessible from here. Why would one need a special place to connect with the Great Spirit? I wondered. After all, isn’t God everywhere, accessible from every place equally? Why then would there be a special geomantic feature to serve as a doorway of sorts to the Ancient of Days? Perhaps it connected to a “supreme” being I knew nothing about. That would be a new one for me.
So I sat, contemplating my history of walking with Supreme Being: the ups and downs, ins and outs of that relationship over the years. I have been living a conscious spiritual life since 13, so it’s been a long time since I first connected with Creator and felt the love and power of Spirit wash over my being. I started praying, speaking to the Supreme Being who is allegedly 
accessible there, telling him (I had a masculine sense of the place), telling God, how I want to know and feel and sense him as I once did when it was all brand new. I had the urge to feel Spirit as close to me as I once did in my life, in the closest of times, those days before I became so educated and sophisticated that I distanced myself from Source in a way. Funny that I should have this thought in a place dedicated to the human mind. Yet I know it to be true that we sometimes allow our mind to draw us away, rather than closer to, the Source of all the beauty and wonder with which our mind is enraptured.
At some point I finally started feeling a shift in consciousness, a different sort of energy; subtle but definitely there. And for a brief few moments, I began to see something overlaying the physical structure. But the day was so long and I so tired that I honestly don’t remember now what happened in that altered state. What came out of it – the thing I felt the most – was my saying I was showing up for my life. “Here I am, I’m showing up for my life. Help me Spirit, I want to show up for my life!”
It has been hard these last few years. Readers who don’t know me may be unaware that I am living with disabilities: pain and fatigue and migraines that act like a thick, gloppy soup I have to push through every day to get anywhere. Sometimes it is easier to check out, to dull oneself so you don’t feel the pain, than to stay with it, day in and day out. I have tried to stay conscious, but I can do better. I want to swim in the clear, crisp, sparkling ocean of Spirit — to taste the saltiness, embibe in the invigoration — that comes from that pure, sweet place where our spirits dwell in Unity; where All is well. I’ve walked there before, I know the place. How did I go adrift? More than anything, I want to feel the nearness of Spirit, as close as my breath.
And so it is that I left the Rotunda, having offered contrite and sincere prayers for revival, renewal, restoration and ongoing evolution. And so I came to name this day, “Showing Up for My Life.”
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