Your Life's Purpose

Have you ever wondered what your purpose in life might be?  Do you already know? Do you feel your purpose remains constant or does it change as time passes?  Perceptibly or imperceptibly? 

Let's compare this question to constellations.  Constellations are shapes we humans attribute to the stars to help us remember how the stars are grouped together. It is a way of taking the big picture, the sky, and breaking it down into more manageable puzzle pieces. For a constellation's shape to remain the same, the stars would have to remain in a fixed location. However, they do not.  Though it would take many of our lifetimes, for sure, to possibly notice a star's movement, astronomer Edmund Halley noticed a change in star locations based on Greek charts made 1600 years prior to his lifetime.  And if the stars are moving, so are the shapes of the constellations we attribute to them. 

If the constellations serve as reminders flickering in the night sky, maybe our intuitive understanding of our "purpose" becomes clearer every now and then when we need guidance or a reminder to stay on our path.

Rachel Naomi Remen refers to our purpose as "The giveaway". In much the same way, author Dawna Markova relates if our purpose doesn't include others it doesn't have branches. Branches are essential to our individual tree of life in much the same way our arms are essential branches in tree pose offering balance. If your purpose is only about you and for you, where is the balance?

"No one can tell you how to find your purpose. It can only be found, slowly, in your own dark sky, in whatever is sacred to you, be that church or woods. It can't be found by searching around for a role model or learning how cultural heroes handled their difficulties. It is seldom found by following anyone else's rules. It lives in the rest in the place where music is born, the fertile void, the silence between notes. It is simple and basic. It emerges slowly as a sunrise, as we search through our gifts, our darkness, our losses and loves. Your job and mine is to be quiet and alone from time to time. To be present to ourselves and the natural world, and to be in conversation with what is hidden in us in such a way that we can explore what brings us more alive."Dawna Markova
 
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning."
T.S. Eliot

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