My words woke up this week. It’s been months of silence, something brewing beneath the surface of the soul. I could feel it there, a lump in the belly, an itch in the brain, but it wouldn’t come out.

It’s awake now.

Change comes suddenly. I went back into employment two weeks ago. I want to say I went back to work, but that isn’t true because I have worked consistently on a self-employed basis for the past three yeras. I went back to work in school.

It’s a necessity for us right now to provide for our household, it’s also good for my mental wellbeing to interact with other humans.

That shift has brought unexpected outcomes. There is obviously less time available for other things in the week, I don’t know why this surprised me but it did. Being out in a workplace for three days is time consuming, who knew?

Then there’s the shift in energy. Interacting with others all day and moving around a large campus is tiring, especially when you haven’t done that for years. Again this has been surprising (maybe because I was ten years younger last time I did it?)

But there’s something else too. The long silence is broken. I am awake on an inner level that has been missing, as though the edges of a working day have reflected something back to me which defies everyday language without such borders.

It has led me to see that my own spiritual self has shifted into a new space, something sensed but not seen previously. That the myths I had been living by are no longer for me. I am ready to step out again into an exploratory space. For the past six years I have been following a consciously pagan path, beginning with new age practices, travelling through eclectic witchcraft and druidry with a detour to visit with Buddhism for a while.

Now I find that there is something else at the forefront. No gods or goddesses, they have waved me off into the wild, liminal lands. I don’t yet know what to call this. There is some animism there, and ancestor connection. It feels very old, like the space inside a longbarrow, or a cave, deep and dark, rooted.

The oddest thing is that it is a place with few requirements. There is no need for complex ritual, daily practices, rules or creeds. It simply is. The world is. Nature is and within that I am. Nothing to prove, climb, achieve, explain, it is just here. Now.

This feels risky. I am so used to sprituality which requires fulfilment; the conformity of church or the occult knowledge and practices of esoteric traditions. What will it be like to simply live, connected to life’s web, one of her children.

What will it be like to abandon the modern individualistic teaching of uniqueness and accept my microscopic place in the vastness of creation. To allow myself to be unexceptional, the gift of the ordinary?

Can I even manage or it, or, like an addict, will I jump back into patterns and routines which shore up my ego and need for conformity, losing my soul self in the need for validation?

I guess we’ll see.