It is midsummer. The yellow & burnt sugar glow of the evening light permeates the corners of my home. It casts shadows against the fresh grey walls & salt-scrubbed floorboards that bring me refuge from the movement of the world. The space between sundown and nightfall is where I do my best thinking, and without fail, I wish I can make time stand still in these moments.

I have carried with me through the day, as I do any other, the heavy luggage of an over-burdened heart whose gone weary in the throes of a white-knuckled existence. While I spend my waking hours dutifully tending to my obligations and responsibilities, my spirit has become tired of survival as I know it. Indeed, I am enormously grateful for the love of my family, this home, and our earthly possessions. In the deepest corners of my inner knowing, though, I know that I am not living as God intended me to be.

I feel that I’ve become wrangled by the chains of today’s world to the confines of a prosaic existence. I wake up. I clean my house. I take care of my partner and our kids. I churn out bouts of energy for my “day job,” (or more recently, the business I am starting since I was laid off.) I keep groceries in the fridge. All while tending to my physicality so that I can outlive the statistical average of my personal timeline. In spite of myself, my spirit spins webs of song out of dark matter and ordinary moments into poetry. It is my nature – and the quiet machine that fuels the turbine of my cosmic design.

Every morning when I wake up, I feel a pang of guilt strike through me like lightning as the tiny flame of my heart meekly cries, is today the day you will stop giving up on yourself? It is like groundhog day, over and over again, as unrelenting as a blacksmith hammering a stubborn iron rod over an anvil. This inner knowing plagues me with a deep, personal shame I wish I could shake. It is a vicious cycle: the more shame I feel, the less I write. The less I write, the more shame I feel.

Where I used to make time for whatever set my soul afire, I have become consumed with reasons not to. Coupled with the weakness of my insecurities, the idea of living up to my dreams has felt insurmountable. It makes me feel incapable and unsteady in my own identity. Where I used to feel audacious in my aspirations, a tangled rat’s nest of self-doubt has taken up residence. I’ve yielded quite a mess which only I can clean up, and I desperately need a pitchfork and a scythe to do it.

In spite of myself and the weight on my back, I have never been one to back down from a challenge. I decide to be brave and face myself in the quiet hours when I can hear myself think. It’s here that I can look myself in the eye and conjure the strength to step back onto the path – even if it means taking just one small step. Traction will come along in short time, just like with anything that you stay committed to. In my case, it has to. I can’t let my spirit stifle up and die inside.

Because, who am I if I can’t be who I am? I cannot be a prisoner to my circumstances or confined to a certain way of being. I have to be the girl I was summoned out to be when I woke up all those years ago. No matter how far away I get from here, I need to keep her in focus: the girl on the hill who sees between the lines of this tangible world.

Not the girl looking down at her feet.