Holy Yes and Deep Devotion

{Listen to the audio version of this post, here.}

It begins simply enough. A tug in your belly. A longing in your heart. Restless feet aching for the grit of the road. The call of — something.

It pulls you out of your warm bed, your tangled sheets, just in time to glimpse the stars dissolve, the sky reveal its morning face. You stand barefoot at your window.

Next thing you know, you’re breathing sea air. Eager, thrilled, bewildered, you stumble towards the tideline. The ground under your feet gives way to crumbling sand, to shell-pricked tidal flats. Mud squishes through your toes. Salt stings your legs as you wade through foaming waves.

Ahead, a shimmering horizon. You can’t see any details yet — not from this far away. A rim of violet mountains squats at the edge of a pewter sea. A pale sky, breathtaking in its simplicity.

Spaciousness. Freedom. Beauty. Joy. The call of wild geese, high in the sky. The call of the unknown, echoing all around you.

Your heart lifts, soars across the bay to those mountains, to that glimmering horizon, in a single swift breath.

Oh, yes! With all your heart, you say Holy Yes! This. This is where you belong!

But then… Your feet in the shallows, covered in seaweed. You’re still on this shore.

How will you get from here to there?

How will you cross that immense body of water undulating between you and the place your heart knows intimately, but where you’ve never been?

You can’t swim there, it’s too far away. You don’t own a boat, though the bay is dotted with craft of every kind — white sails and little red dinghies, Crayola colored kayaks, hulking oil tankers, sleek cruise ships. None of them belong to you. You have to find or buy or build your own boat. You’ll figure out how to navigate it later, once you’re on board, engine started, skimming the waves.

You contemplate the distance you’ll have to travel. You veer between delight, determination and despair; bright faith and lurking heartbreak. Notebook and pen in hand, you make plans, sketch out schemes and strategies, write impossible lists.

You gather supplies, roll up your sleeves, fling yourself into action — and the horizon that beckoned so compellingly dissolves in a flurry of screen-time and Facebook updates, to the staccato soundtrack of barked orders from that little fascist voice in your head: Do This! Do That! No, Not That!! That!!!

Every time we create something new, we hold in our hands the crackle and zing of that current between Here and There. It arcs between the horizon of our heart’s desire and the shore on which we stand. Deep devotion holds us steady throughout the journey.

Without vision and bright faith we’d stay asleep, or we’d shuffle dreamily along the familiar shore, ignoring the call of our true desires until we fall ill, or the safe harbor we’ve so diligently clung to collapses in some inexplicable way.

Without the Holy Yes of deep devotion, we would never take the risk of making art or raising a child. Building a business, abiding by our true desires, growing an intimate relationship, growing ourselves — each of these demands love and courage, grit and grace, power and the humility to listen to the voice of our hearts.

Our Holy Yes summons our intelligence to learn new skills, our creative genius to lead the way. It calls on our willingness to live true stories and abandon hollow tales. Our deep devotion feeds our determination to do the work, to build that boat, to cross that sea, to give ourselves, body and soul, to the task at hand.

Devotion also holds us steadfast for the long haul. There are no shortcuts to this journey. It won’t all be transcendent bliss and angel wings wafting us home, though both angels and bliss will reveal themselves when we do the work of clearing our vision of the scrim of beliefs, patterns and stories that obscure the view.

We are accompanied by all the evolutionary forces of the universe. We don’t make this journey alone. And, no-one else can do the work that’s ours to do. Our Holy Yes is ours to declare, not just at the start of the journey but every step along the way.

Our Holy Yes launches us out of the safe harbor of Here. Deep devotion keeps us moving towards There, towards our heart’s horizon, where the emerging soul of wholeness lives.

Holy Yes, deep devotion — these are the gifts we offer our world, the gifts that accompany us on every evolutionary journey.

If there’s something calling you now — a new horizon in your business, a vision that won’t go away no matter how often you dismiss it as impossible or impractical — try softening into the Holy Yes that sings in your heart. Listen for the pulse of deep devotion.