Right Place: Clicking My Ruby Slippers

We bought a new water fountain for our cat. It must have the scent of someone else’s pet on it because our cat is acting as if a strange and terrifying animal has taken over the house. So he has banished himself to the basement. He is crying down there. He longs to come up. Everything is waiting for him: food, water, comfort, companionship. But he can’t overcome his fear. We have to get rid of the fountain, but until we do, he is living in self-imposed limitation. All because of a fear-based illusion – no strange animal has taken over the house.

Am I like my cat? Am I living in the basement, full of angst over where I am and pining away for my Right Place, when all I need to do step across the line of my self-imposed limitation?

In Creating the Work You Love: Courage, Commitment, and Career, Rick Jarow talks about how finding our place in the world literally can also mean finding our place figuratively:

A person can become empowered by a place. For many people, the matter of creating artful life work may not be so much a question of finding the right job as it is of finding the right place. If you feel connected to a place and many people report moving into the area on the intuitive strength of knowing that this is where they belong, honor that place. Find a way to develop a relationship with it. The place itself will then produce the work that is needed to keep you there. I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is quite mysterious how a place calls a person, and there are stories upon stories of peoples’ fortunes changing when they change location. This does not mean that you must pick up and move somewhere because things are not going well; that would be giving into the scarcity principle in another form. On the other hand, honoring the energies and feelings that a place communicates to us factors into our personal management work. . . .

The question that must be asked along with “What do I want to do?” is “Where should I do it? Where can I integrate into a community of like-minded people who are likely to support the creative expression of my work?” [188]

So maybe we don’t have to have it all worked out before we can go. Maybe going there will enable us to work it out. That feels right to me. Still, there are certain basic considerations we need to have accounted for before we can leave: jobs, health care, medical insurance. And these are the considerations that keep us cycling around looking for a doorway.

But I like Jarow’s notion of “honoring the energies and feelings that a place communicates.” Maybe that is the doorway. Honor those energies in your life wherever you are, and they will expand. And in expanding, they will lead somewhere.

Meanwhile, a friend emailed me today with the very wise and deeply appreciated comment that Maine is actually my place of Love and Freedom and that even if I never get to live there, I am already holding it inside, just let it be . . .