We all have different sides to our lives. We carry them around inside of us, trying to reconcile them to each other, a task that challenges us. But we keep trying to bring who we are together with who we were, and with who we want to be.

Sometimes it’s hard to find the continuum. It was for me. Living in so many places and doing so many interesting things often left me feeling fragmented about where I came from. I’d wake in the night fretful without knowing the reason.  But in retrospect it was because I was too separated from where I came from, and too unsure of where this project that we took on would lead us.

I felt like I had to have answers when I didn’t, that I needed to understand everything about myself when I couldn’t.

But then it dawned on me.

We live our lives like strands of yarn,  each chapter a different color, a different texture.  Sometimes when we are living one chapter, we forget how it was to live the others.  This protects us, in a way, from  being too overwhelmed.  We’d like to believe that life is one path – that one event leads to another and that somehow they are all connected.  But that’s doesn’t seem to be the case.  Some experiences are so diametrically opposed to others that we can’t make sense of any connectivity.  If we’re too much in the thick of change, of uncertainty, we grasp at trying to find the lesson, the meaning, the Truth.

But the Truth is tucked inside of small events, it hides behind trees and in the whisper of the wind.

The Truth is what we know to be right for ourselves.  It’s absent of agenda and guile.  It’s the thing that makes us feel connected. For me it is the view from my home, overlooking the mountains and the vineyards in the most perfect composition. And it’s on the banks of this river, this beautiful river, where I walked in my childhood and stood and wondered what would be. The water flows down today, as it did then, and when I look at it I feel the most complete sense of myself.

And in that complete sense of myself is also the most complete sense of Spirit that I can imagine.

When I look downstream, and I think of where my life is centered now, in Italy, I realize that somehow the yarns, the chapters of my life, have woven into a tapestry, a colorful, uneven, poignant story that is only mine. And it seems to me to be wholly fitting that it began on this river and, after a complicated labyrinth of a path, has led me to beautiful endless rows of grapes on hills that run into each other, positively infinite.

When we look at where we come from and where we are, all of the events and experience that happened in between – however painful, however difficult – act as small conduits to move us on.  And the circumstance in which we find ourselves today, at this moment, is no more than one of these yarns, pulling us forward, sometimes gently, sometimes forcefully, reminding us that nothing ever stays the same and we never arrive.

The journey is your Truth.

Embrace it for whatever it can offer you, even if it seems terrifying and lonely. Embrace it for where it will bring you, and for all the things that led you here.

This is not the end of the road, you’ll move forward from here.  It’s in the grand design of things.