Meaning
The Meaning of Meaning
Grateful to be connecting with you. I’m newly back from a week away of writing. A week that, despite being planned for a long time, felt like a challenge to embrace. On the flip side now, I’m so grateful I moved through the challenge to embrace the experience.
I’d love to tell you about what made it so challenging. I wonder if you’ll relate.
I had the privilege of traveling from Maine in winter to the sunnier climes of Florida, a place that I used to travel with my partner and our two sons, now 20 and 23-years-old. As the goal was to make progress on The Bliss Manifesto manuscript, I traveled solo. Yet this place that we had enjoyed together many times had so much potent family energy to it.
As soon as I arrived, I could feel the energy of the experiences with my sons as they grew up. We traveled there every other year, so their growth was obvious and stunning each time we landed back in that same space.
From carrying one of them on each hip to them standing on each side towering over me, this space had deep meaning for me of mothering. And while I will always be their mother, the meaning of that archetypal energy has shifted drastically for all of us in the last two years.
To really commit to the writing, I found it necessary to honor that rite of passage for myself to cultivate a new meaning for that space. I honored what was. I felt the gratitude for the formative experiences like Kennedy Space Center and watching the lizards, water birds, and palm trees from our deck.
Then I shaped my own meaning for the space by taking joy in those creatures and palm trees for myself and heading to the sauna I could never enjoy when the boys needed supervision and were always go-go-go.
Oh, and I wrote in peace a lot while listening to Jimmy Buffett. I look forward to sharing all those words with you later this year.
I’m so grateful I moved through the challenge of acknowledging I am now in a different archetypal phase.
I infused the transformation with the meaning that serves me and resonates for me now. I inhabited the sovereignty to shape the energy of the space to facilitate creativity and flow.
Pause for a moment to contemplate how deeply personal it is to interpret meaning from our lives.
A line in a poem may be powerfully inspiring to you and simply be a lovely turn of phrase for me. And while some of us get lost in abstract art, others of us wonder how such scribbles and splatters are art at all. Therein lies the powerful sovereignty in interpretation. We all have the capacity and sovereignty to make meaning for ourselves.
We live in a reality that has a different meaning for everyone. Like the interpretation of a poem, all meaning is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as we’ve heard and perhaps said many times. The current iteration of the phrase was turned by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (great name) who wrote under the nom de plume The Duchess (also a great name).
With infinite choices for making meaning, how are you owning your sovereignty?
Where might you be diminishing your sovereignty in your consciousness design?
How are you harnessing the power of interpreting your reality in a way that supports your ease and flow?
So much of the human experience is about making meaning.
I invite you to own your sovereignty in interpreting your reality in a way that affords the greatest creativity. May we all recognize a disempowering interpretation is only one of an infinite number of meanings.
My deepest intention for you is that you persevere and own your sovereignty to find the meaning that inspires you, even if that meaning is a light out of the darkness like that stars in the night sky.
May the meaning of your meaning light your way, awesome one.
