Part Three of Three: Finding My Own Way
You know what’s funny about finally finding people who think like you?
Sometimes you discover they have just as many rules as the people you were trying to get away from.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After the terrifying experience I wrote about on Wednesday, I started exploring spiritual forums on the internet.
And let me tell you, it was like walking into a room full of people who spoke a language I didn’t even know I understood.
I’ve always been drawn to rocks (pretty unknown ones, fossils, arrowheads if lucky, holey rocks and oh,,, so much more!).
I collected them because I liked them. Their shapes, their colors, the way some looked completely ordinary until the light hit them just right.
Then I discovered crystals.
Well, hell.
Apparently, I’d been collecting interesting rocks when I could have been collecting interesting rocks with entire books written about them.
And that was only the beginning.
Numerology.
Repeating numbers on clocks.
Animals that seemed to appear at peculiar times.
Dreams.
Symbols.
The moon.
The rhythms of the earth and the feeling that somehow, everything around us—and everything within us—was connected.
I wasn’t interested in somebody handing me a list of rules and telling me what every symbol absolutely meant.
I wanted to explore what those things meant to me.
And for a while, I’d found my people.
People who understood why I might stop and notice an animal instead, be it in nature, on television, or in a magazine.
People who didn’t think it was strange to wonder whether a coincidence might carry some personal meaning. (There’s a coin in coincidence, after all. And coins have value!)
People who could talk about nature, energy, spirituality, and the mysteries of life without insisting there was only one acceptable answer.
I became deeply involved in that world.
So involved, in fact, that I eventually became one of six moderators for a very large, worldwide spiritual group.
Six moderators.
An international community.
Me, the woman who’d been told as a child to say she was Baptist without even knowing what the word meant.
Life has a sense of humor.
For several years, I helped moderate that group and spent time among people whose interests and experiences resonated with my own.
But slowly, I began noticing something that bothered me.
This was a Lightworkers community. The whole idea was supposed to be about connecting people around the world.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?
Except somewhere along the way, connecting people apparently came with a whole new set of rules.
One of them was that we weren’t supposed to plan for the future.
I’m not kidding.
You couldn’t even talk about your future plans.
Why?
Well, that was never explained in any way that made sense to me. Apparently, we were just supposed to accept it because the people in charge said so.
And that didn’t sit right with me. Not one damn bit.
I’d spent years questioning the idea that somebody else had the authority to tell me what to believe, how to think, or how to live my life.
And here I was, in a community supposedly devoted to spiritual growth, watching people being told what they could and couldn’t even discuss about their own futures.
To me, that wasn’t enlightenment. It was control.
And I wanted no part of it.
Different language.
Different beliefs.
Different box.
Same damn problem.
So I left.
Not because I stopped being spiritual.
Not because I regretted exploring that world.
And certainly not because I suddenly had all the answers.
I left because I’d learned something important about myself.
I don’t need to belong to a group to belong to this world.
I don’t need a title, a label, or somebody else’s approval to feel connected to nature, to life, or to whatever greater mystery might exist.
I can appreciate a crystal because it’s beautiful.
I can explore what an animal symbolizes without insisting that everybody else must interpret it the same way.