My first blog post and I immediately thought of this picture. I took it in the Umpqua National Forest last winter, and it always reminds me of what it feels like to feel well and truly stuck. The impenetrable knotted nature of that sense - the tangle, the mess, the petrified wheel. A friend of mine once gave me an image of this that struck me. That in these moments, when we feel at a complete loss, it is as though we have walked every possible path to find the way through only to discover that we are met at the end with a towering cliff. Cut off. That's it. Turn back, and start again. This is how we make ourselves crazy, this sweet, stubborn conviction that, if we just think it though again, walk the path again - maybe even another way - that we will get out, get un-stuck, and move forward. Yet each time there's that freakin' cliff. We've sweat, lost sleep, turned ourselves inside out, eaten ALL the ice cream. We cannot bear this labyrinth. There must be something we missed.
But wait. Stop.
Sometimes the cliff is not a barrier, but an invitation. An invitation to surrender - not to self-destruction, but to transformation. Well-worn paths that just don't lead where they used to, ways of being and doing that - just like that - stop working. They are a like an angel's tap on the shoulder. A (usually not-so) gentle nudge to the edge of the cliff. Offering surrender, humility, awe. Asking, but what about your wings?