By Kate Pennell
You don’t have to be of noble birth to change your path and those of others. Just have a tenacious heart and the ability to put one foot down in front of another.
I know where I am. I look ahead to where I want to be. Each step must take me closer.
It’s hard.
Sometimes, like today, I feel that I will just die with things left undone, unsaid, and unfinished.
That my fear will come true and my memorial will be, “Well, at least she tried.”
After a bout of flu, colds, and sinusitis, I am worn out. But more than that I am tired of feeling like I make some progress only to be held back again by ill health or ill circumstance. My body is showing signs of post-viral fatigue, my brain has come back online, but I feel exhausted after doing not very much.
And I have so much to do. I’m concerned that another spell of cyclothymia is due to stir within the next month.
I can begin to imagine my life away from where I currently am but it feels like a fairy tale.
Steven Pressfield was right about resistance being at war with us.
I feel at war.
My enemy is exerting force against me to keep me shrouded. To keep me in the shire or on some backwater planet away from the rebellion where my glory and gifts are needed.
Hobbits showed us that you don’t have to be of noble birth to change your path and those of others. Just have a tenacious heart and the ability to put one hairy little foot down in front of another until you walk out of Moria.
Stuck in the middle between the urge to scream in defiance and frustration or to weep in defeat, here is my Middle Earth, where the Balrog is made of my own shadows. The wraiths are those curses that cling from my past, who others said I would or wouldn’t be, the accusing failures, the inherited limiting beliefs that seek to fence me in. I am nobody and nothing. Cackling goblins shoot their arrows, those fears for the future that scrape my skin, as I scramble for higher ground, for daylight.
The mythical calls to us. It reminds us, if we listen, that we are at war.
That we are more than we appear, that our part to be played is desperately needed.
That our enemy is real and relentless.
That the weight of our lives and our hidden glory makes turning back impossible.
Bilbo was right. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
When it feels a dark day, when behind the daily tasks there is blood and sweat, I will choose to lift my eyes to the hills and place one hairy foot after another on the path that I have chosen.
I will keep faith and determination as my companions to walk through the mires and the gloom. I will see goodness in the land of the living.
Kate Pennell, English and slightly geekish, is a coach and dream catalyst who lives in Spain with three kids, various furry creatures and a patient husband. She loves nature, creativity and seeing people discover what truly makes them come alive. Kate provides the people she works with permission to launch and helps them begin to fly as they were made to. She teaches, encourages and connects with fellow travelers across our global village. Find out more at https://permissiontolaunch.website/.