Photo by Noelle
I stand in the parking lot and let the wind and snow penetrate my clothes. I think of standing at bus stops as a kid waiting on the bus for school or trudging home from after-school jobs because my mother forgot to pick me up. She wasn’t mean, just a little ADD and most certainly not on time for a single event in her life. She’d always say, “There you are!” as if she’d been looking for me a good while or naturally expected me to arrive out of thin air.
Photo by Noelle
It’s occurred to me, of late, that my problems as they relate to the notion of waiting really do stem from this. Years of waiting for my mother to be ready to leave or to show up. I’m not blaming her now. Just aware where this whole crazy waiting bus got started.
Photo by Noelle
Christianity, as a rule, teaches a lot of waiting, too. Waiting to be worthy for things, waiting on God’s good graces to slide your way. Not knocking the Christians either. Like my mother who got her “waiting” from somewhere else, then passed it on to me, the Christians have been passing it along, too. The rolling wave of work hard, worthiness and waiting. A ‘Double-U” trifecta that forms the worst sort of box. Always feeling like you have to prove yourself somehow. Push more, demonstrate more, work harder, than wait for that tipping scale when your worthiness reaches some magical goodness quotient and all that you strive for will arrive.
Photo by Noelle
As I stand and feel the snow beginning to cover my lashes it occurs to me I shall let this wind take these old notions out to sea. They no longer serve me. The whip has cracked long enough at my back. The old beggar woman inside of me is finally turning to dust on this gale. How absolutely lovely to know that. Really know it down deep somewhere near my solar plexus. Like a winter sun suddenly pulsating into a white wind.
Now… ah, now, to live it.
Photo by Noelle
Meditation Travelogue 
Beautiful post!
Thank you, my friend. Loved your Gratitude piece today.
I love your wisdom Noelle. We all have our links and beliefs from the past that we have to face and then decide to let go. You write beautifully. It is a wonderful freedom to let go and feel the depth of our power in doing so.
It’s a bit like giving clothes away. You can feel your inner closet has more room for new, more interesting things. Things that fit the you, you are today. Blessings on your own journey of publishing and self discovery.
Yes great way to describe it. I love making room for all the new. Thankyou Noelle.
Beautifully written Noelle.
Thank you, my friend.
how beautifully
i’m encouraged
to no longer
wait 🙂
Indeed… no more waiting… Let us live robustly and with delight.
Compelling and well written … I quite agree with your statements concerning Christianity… Waiting is a virtue, as far as it is a balanced attitude I guess… I think your points here are very interesting and accurate, dear Noelle.
Sending love and best wishes. Aquileana ⭐
I’ve loved that quote about using time, rather than letting time use you. I think, historically, we’ve allowed time to use us. When I think of consciousness revolutions, I think of us beginning to wield time as a tool, rather than it being our prison. Thanks for stopping by, my friend. Always a pleasure.
Well done and the photos are gorgeous. I am sure Dottie would love the entry as well and be glad that you are free. Living in the Now Moment has removed that waiting thing from me. In the Now I can do or be or have anything I choose, or just want in my life.
Mom would’ve said, ‘It built character in you!’ Yes, living in just this moment is so amazingly powerful. You realize how deep and rich your life truly is.
That 3rd photo is awesome. Where is that?
The whole waiting thing I can relate to. In basic military training you do a lot of waiting. That’s where one of my favorite expressions, “hurry up and wait”, comes from.
Waiting requires patience. Who’s got time for that? 😀
Yes, and the old adage, “good things come to those who wait.” There is a kind of patience, though, that I think comes from being centered and confident in yourself and another sort that comes from the exact opposite. We lack confidence and so we believe we have to wait until we’re worthy enough to get it. Same waiting time, totally different experience and outcomes.
Oh and PS: the third photo is the driveway into my condos in Littleton, CO. My home is on the right. Those hills are the foothills to the Rockies, know as the Hogbacks.
Looks beautiful. What a landscape!
Yeah…. my life is rough, as you can see….
Good things come to those who wait…that’s a favorite of mine. A way to cultivate patience. I’d never thought of the “proving ourselves worthy” aspect, but I think you are right. Thanks for the wisdom and frosty photos.
Always lovely to have you stop by, my friend. Yes, I have said that old adage many times to myself…. in fact, this morning… good things come to those who wait. It’s a fine line accepting the present moment for what it is, while also actively creating and attracting the life you seek. Many blessings, my friend.
Noelle ,these images are so good, and that second way me express out loud.
You live in an incredibly beautiful place
I do. Too many people moving here, though. Land is disappearing faster than chocolate at a nursing conference. Everyone always wants to be the last to move in, as they say. Sigh….
As was your mum, so was my dad. He was once so late coming to pick me up from play school that I went home with a volunteer who was young and, I think, slightly cognitively disabled (had to look up a politically correct way to express what I wanted to say; hope this is not offensive to anybody). She didn’t think to tell anyone, so they had the police out looking for me while we were drinking milk and eating cookies…
When I was a teenager I remember telling him I needed picking up an hour earlier than I did in the hope that then he might get there on time.
Coming back to your main theme, I love your point about how Christianity encourages us to defer our happiness and the juxtaposition of this against “Now… ah, now.”
To live the now and open up to receive the happiness that awaits me there, that is what I long to step into more and more each day.
Oh I lied to my mother all the time about when things were occurring. Especially plane flights. Easily an hour and half earlier than the actual flight. It was truly maddening.
It’s interesting. I am in a good place, but my brain wanders off still and I can feel that old dog gnawing at an even older bone in my head sometimes. I’m not sure any of that will ever go away, but I’ve gotten much better at just watching it gnaw and skipping the story about why it’s gnawing at all. That story telling is really what keeps us locked in. If you don’t tell a story, our brains have an attention span of a gnat. It will wander onto something else soon enough. So that’s been my focus of late. Skip the storytelling about things I don’t like within myself. Just skip the story.
Oddly, I am writing less. I have a feeling it’s all related. As I quiet down inside, I seem to have less to say outside. At some point I suspect there’ll be some shift again into speaking more, but for now, I’m just enjoying the quiet when I can find it.
Peace, grace and beauty to you my dear sister. BTW, how’s the pottery going? I came across these rubber stamps for imprinting into clay pots. I wondered if you ever use things like that. I noted the pattern on the dish you sent, but that was obviously carved by hand.
Hello there beautiful Noelle and apologies for the lateness of my reply.
An interesting space you find yourself in. Sounds wonderful – very peace-filled and rich with inner silence – to me. After a couple of years of extensive time alone and doing healing work, now that I’m integrating back into the world I’m finding it harder to find that space for silence. They say we hear our soul’s whispers in silence, so I want to consciously create the time and space for it in my life. I know how busy you are, so kudos for you for being so in touch with it.
I just finished cleaning my pottery studio (well room upstairs…) today, ready to start making again soon – during the winter when it’s cold I don’t do any. I love surface design so anything like that is really interesting to me. I have loads of links to similar things saved in my “favorites.” Pottery has so many different techniques to explore, it’s probably one of the reasons I find it so exciting.
How is your sculpture going or have you found yourself too busy for that? I’ve given out a couple of your beautiful cards on special occasions and the recipients were very appreciative, thank you.
So sculpting is…. well… on hold. It’s there. I see it every day. Waiting for the inspiration to return to it. I may mail you those decorative stamps. You might find some fun uses for them. I need to get back to my collage work, but like you my space is in my home, and it’s not really a space. More like my living room floor. Once it’s all pulled out, it’s out for a couple of weeks and the place is mess. I just jettisoned a bunch of stuff so have more room in my house, but kind of liking the spartan look right now. That’s the way of it. I want order, but I need a large space for disorder to create things.
I am enjoying the silence of my life, which really isn’t silent. It’s full of all the sound of the earth, really. Sending love and will see what to do with those stamps.
If you bought the decorative stamps with me in mind I would love to have them one of these days when you have time as they are something I’m genuinely interested in using in my work. If you bought them with yourself in mind and have other uses for them, keep them and I’d love to see what you do with them.
I’m lucky my house is large, if old and (literally) falling apart. I have a separate room set aside for pottery, but even then it fits in the wheel but it’s not really big enough for me to do things like hand building projects, so like you say they tend to take over my living space. I’m taking it you don’t have an extra room you could dedicate to it like that? Do you have any inbuilt floor to ceiling kind of cupboards? If you could remove all your things from a large one of those (and it didn’t have shelves or the shelves were removable), you could possibly use that as a work space and just close the doors to return your house to pristine beauty.
Have a lovely rest of your weekend my friend.
So okay… you’ll laugh. I bought them for you. Then fell in love with them and didn’t send them. And then, I was like, “Oh she’d love these though…” Then I thought, I could split them up, because there are six of them. In the meantime, I haven’t used half of the stamps I have nor even taken these out of their package. I have plenty of stamps to play with. The day before I got your note, I’d decided to send them all. I think you will like them, so now just to get them mailed. Funny the timing of your note. You clearly are meant to have these. Peace sister, girl!
Divine perfect timing for sure. Can’t wait to receive such a lovely gift ♡
Beautiful my dear friend ….love , megxxx
Lovely to have you stop in, my friend. How are you liking New Mexico?
Love it, N. Your (matter-of-fact I-beat-my-demons) description of Mom and the segue into faith. It’s interesting bc God waited a long time to see His plan through, too.
So true about God’s plans. We are so impatient, but God has no sense of time at all, and yet everything arrives perfectly. Thanks for stopping in, my friend. I attached your link to my recent piece for people to go have a read.