There are moments in my life when something has happened that has caused me to hit a snag and tear. I unravel; the fine knit of my soul ladders, the stitch widens, and I become stretched. The experience is interesting in isolation for what it reveals to me about my soul. It allows me the opportunity to examine hidden depths, to reflect and grow, to understand the edge of my reality, to understand who I am in the rawest form. With time the tear is repaired, and my soul acquires a new more beautiful pattern. Brilliant, I think to myself, the perfect experience. I am ready to move on. The darkness is complete; I prepare for the expansive light.

It does not come.

No, that’s not right. It comes, but it comes in little spirals, with oscillations between light and dark, a slow climb up a mountain. It is easy to fall; yet, it requires such perseverance to climb.

On the road up I find myself on a plateau. It is a wide expanse but it is also full of caves and spirits, past lives and old histories, little land mines and great treasures and no ladder to the next level; at least none that has revealed itself yet. I am here. That is the only place I am permitted to be, held in place by someone I do not immediately recognize (could it be self?). It is clear that I am here only and here has in it some learning that I have thus far avoided.

Why have I avoided it? In all of the pain of the snag, the repair, the tears, the despair, the letting go I still held on to something that now insists on keeping me here. And then I realize (in a rush of awareness) that I have always been here. It is just that now I am able to recognize it. This is perhaps the ladder I have been avoiding, the ladder of dues paid in cleaning and clearing the old wound, the ladder that will deposit me at the feet of myself. I am finally ready to climb it, that sideways, expansive ladder that leads to (a bigger self I have been preparing to assume?) I am not sure I know, actually. The ladder is a spiral and with each turn it widens capturing more space and requiring repeated visits to old selves from different vantage points.

There it is.

I thought I was done, I thought the healing had occurred and it had. In an old self with an old set of requirements the healing, the re-stitching was completed and a new more beautiful pattern was laid down. But that spiral staircase of the expansion outward and upward takes me back to the tracks of that pattern for a reason; it asks me to consider the reflection of each curve and how it represents me (my true self). If I am to be real each step in the tracks laid down in my soul must operate as a word in some piece of my soul story and each word must be correct.