Actually, this is more of a checklist than a guide on how to follow your heart and make your own path.
It becomes a guide in that articles to come in my new newsletter (sign up for the newletter in the upper right hand corner of this page), and posts to come here on the blog will grow each of the pieces.
Yes [arms waving, horns blowing, billions of bubbles from the hidden bubble machine floating in the air], that’s known as a teaser: great things coming your way here!
We last left Morgaine heading out into the storm, crayons and notebook in hand, Fortune Cookie drifting in the mists of a dream memory.
Enough readers have asked for MORE! about Morgaine that I thought it would be fun to follow her as she figures out what’s next.
You may remember, this is where we left off in writing the story that is not in the book [if you are just arriving on the scene – do click back and catch up]:
Placing the post-it in the middle of her afternoon calendar, she grabs her old journal, the one she never finished, some colored pens and broken crayon stubs, and goes out to meet the coming storm.
Oh my Buttercups, my Darling Dumplings, the story does not end with the storm. No! In fact, the storm was merely some dark clouds and enough rain to make a rainbow when the clouds unveiled the sun. A story always depends on where you wish to take its strands, how you wish to tangle or untangle or form it into something brand new.
Morgaine walked through the small forest. She stopped at the edge where land and water met, pulled the colored pens from her pockets and put them on the warm, slightly wet surface of the rock on which she sat overlooking the grey-green, slightly ruffled Bay. She turned to a blank page in her journal, thought: Blank Page! Thought: I can put anything here that I want! Thought: What is it that I want?
She closed her eyes and summoned her namesake, the Morrigan, revisioned the Fortune Cookie that was handed to her, imagined breaking it open, and read, “Follow Your Heart.”
She was thrilled until she realized that she could not write down what that meant to her. She thought: that’s the answer. And she wrote in orange and blue and purple across the once blank page:
How to Follow Your Heart
1. Decide that I really really really want to follow my heart, even if it means making my own path
2. Get clear on what I want – what it is that means “following my heart” to me
3. Write about a perfect day – what it looks like, feels, smells, tastes like – when I am following my heart
4. Figure out what I have to leave behind to follow my heart
5. Figure out what I need to learn to follow my heart
6. Find a community or several communities of women who share my quest or something like it – for companionship, for sharing, and for support on dark days
7. Create a daily practice to ground me every single day for when I get lost. Because I will get lost. If I don’t get lost then I’m not really really trying anything new.
She pulled out the bits of crayon and doodled around the edges of the journal’s page and then closed it. She thought: the story is not even in this book. I am the story.
A breeze played with slightly wet tendrils of her hair and in the distance a great heron beat its wings against the air and rose into the blue blue sky.
Come my Pumpkins, my Kumquats. Tell me: are you ready to commit to following your heart? Are you finally ready to answer what you will do with your one “wild and precious life”?
P.S. Here’s YOUR fortune cookie quote – go ahead, break it open if you dare.
