a season of quiet

I'm in a big, quiet season. In life. I'm retired and don't work for money. I don't volunteer. For a year and a half since the onset of sciatica, I've been in recovery mode physically. I do housework, laundry, meals. I read, add pieces to the jigsaw puzzle, listen to spiritual teachers. There are wide expanses of time with nothing to fill them. Creativity of the past isn't flowing into the present – i.e., quilting. Eckhart Tolle says such times (of pain) are good for burning up the ego.

It's been a time of reflection and introspection. Longing for direct contact with God. (This moniker – "God" – has been transformed for me. I left Christianity and the evangelical Church gradually starting in the early 1990s, with a clean break in about 1997. What I mean by "God" now is not what or who I meant before then, growing up in the evangelical world: A Big old Father in the Sky Out There to whom I pray for the things I need. "God" now seems to be the word I come back to when I'm pointing to Presence-Awareness-Stillness-Spirit-Source.) And yeah, a lot of it could be called "navel gazing" as we used to refer to this kind of behavior. 

And I've struggled with it, looking at it from the outside. I'm not productive enough. I should be volunteering, doing something useful. I should be like Nancy, or Kate, or Andrea, or Wilma. I should make myself do more useful things, even if I don't feel like it. The world around us is crescendoing into chaos and confusion, hatred and separation. Ego stuff runs rampant. I should do something about it. 

Apparently Mother Thersa said, "If you want to change the world, love your family."

Something like that is what keeps coming to me, correcting me when I claim failure status. This is a season. Don said that. Can I let it be this? I'm grateful for the beauty of this time, in spirit. Could it be as the nondual spiritual teachers say, that by meditating alone in the Stillness, I contribute more to this world of form spiritually (essentially) than anything else I could do?

And then, I have a couple of major fails in the love department. Life from outside comes in, and I'm reactive, not responding out of a place of love. More about that next time.