The Blessing Day

As I lay down to sleep last-night I threw up a call to the great spirit to kend strength to me and to my guardian spirits, to offer me a clearer view of the wisdom and guidance that flows through all things if we but look.
It came in a form not expected. Instead of gifting me with the strength to know what I needed to know, despite lack of study, and to perform the tasks required despite growing "rusty" on them, I received another kind of strength. The strength to admit when I was not ready, when I was forced to turn back.
I was nearly in tears as I left the campus where the EMT-Basic liscensing testing was being held - the first time I blew one practical exam, and this time I came un-prepared and left before I made a fool of myself. It didnt feel like strength, not then. It felt very weak, and I felt very much like I had let down myself and also those I had gone through Basic training with, my comrades who I stood beside then, but could not keep pace with.
But, as I climbed the truck higher into the mountains, running just a little bit, exploring new places and spaces, getting higher into the crisp cold air, clearer in sight, I came to see the strength and wisdom of my decision. Instead of putting myself back to square one by blowing an exam a second time, I stepped back and had the strength not to give up but still admit I was not ready. I've never done that before, not really. I have run, in fear and then in shame, from things, but never made a decision to step back and then return more readied, more powerful in my ability to conduct myself with skill, honor and discipline.
Gifts like that are not always recognized for the gifts they are, but they are all around us and come to us when we need them. We dont always know what is best for us, but when we call out to the great spirit, the spirits of sky and of earth, our guardian spirits, to lend us strength and to guide us, they work that for us, they gift us that in ways that truly come to the best. For the first time ever I may be seeing that truly clearly.

I spent the rest of the day journeying through the old small (very small, only a few hundred people in each) communities in the northern mountains, where some of the old world still exists. Very closed in and with a very powerful feel of tradition and the wide open freedom of being, of vision, that can only come from the mountains and from being truly at home in them.
I saw artworks, weavings and silver work, that are some of the finest in not just the West, but in the world, and I saw homes that were hundreds of years old, with fat lazy dogs out front and fat horses in the snowy pastures beside. I watched the tracks of horses in the snow, as it glittered under a pure sun in a clear sky, and I could have stayed there forever lost in those tracks, making a study of them, a religion, an entire creation.
I bought sage to make smudge, and I left tobacco offerings to the spirits on high as I picked up two powerful quartz stones, which later seemed right to be thrown into a small stream, to carry their magick, their guardian spirits, to other people in other places.
I am at home in the mountains, in the small communities and sacred places, I have clarity of thought and of vision there, and all things begin to show their significance, their power and import. It was a good day in the mountains, a good day traveling with the spirits.

As I came down to the lower places, I even visited one of the oldest Catholic churches in the state, and felt the power of that place as well. It was a different power than the sacred power of the crisp clean mountains under the blue sky and bright sun in cold air. It was cloaking and clustering, almost smothering, an oppressive sort of sacred power. It too has its place and its import, and I too have my feelings and connections to that power, but with my vision still clear it was easy to see why I am at home in the mountains and not in any church, why I am at home with the cold crisp spirits of the air, not the candle smoke, holy water, book-bound spirits of the churches. Different ways to worship the same, different paths to the spirit, each has their place, within the world and within me, but my calling is to the wild and the free, the open spaces, the high places, cold air and sparking snow, cliffs and grass shifting softly in the wind, the scent of pinon-pine sap and cedar drifting across the high hills and high-lows as well.

A very powerful day today, an important day. My vision is clearer today than it has been in a long time, my connection to the great spirit, the guardians, all the spirits. For our world is as much a spirit world as the next, call them God or angels, demons or devil, they are all the same, and are all part of the great whole which surrounds us and reaches beyond what we can see, beyond even what we can dream or sense beyond our senses. I have been losing touch with that, losing sight, vision... I have let the clutter of my daily affairs become the clutter of my mind, the clutter of my home the clutter of my soul, and it drags me down and closes my pathways to the spirit, and today was a re-awakening of those connections, that ability to see, to know, the vision and the sense.
Today was a blessing.