Liberating the Angel

Good Morning -

We have here another Rob inspired Virgen. The Leo horoscope for this week reads:
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free," said the sculptor Michelangelo about a statue he made. Let that approach be your guide in the coming weeks, Leo. Proceed according to the hypothesis that the beautiful thing you want to create is embedded in stuff that's hiding its true nature, and your job is simply to liberate it from what's extraneous.

So, as you can see, we have our Virgen flanked by two sculptures - one a wooden angel from a church here in town and one a statue of emerging stone people from a courtyard downtown. Like yesterday's Virgen, behind all this is a mountain image taken from the Alaska tour book I recently got in the mail. It's probably Denali, right? I mean, is the program for the big Broadway show going to have pictures of the star or pictures of the extras? The star, of course.

This suggestion from Rob is exactly what I needed to hear this week. I have this goal, and I've been working on manifesting this goal, and it was going well. I had a plan, I had a time line, and everything was laid out nicely. My partner has the same goal, so all was in alignment (think here of the line about the best laid plans...).

And then, my partner got an invitation to go down a path that could get us to our goal quicker. She accepted the invitation and, at almost the same moment, I got an invitation to go down a different path that could pave the way to my piece of this big goal. My invitation wasn't to a shorter route, but it was a smoothly paved route with plenty of good lighting and perhaps even some wildflowers growing along the shoulders. (Ah, allegory. It's a bit of a lost art, wouldn't you say?)

Her shorter route to the big goal seems to be coming along nicely. We've both set aside our original plan to invest our energy in these new opportunities, which is a little unsettling because the original plan was wholly driven by us. These shorter and paved routes involve other players, which creates potential for things to happen that we have not created.

My paved route hit some bumps almost immediately after revealing itself as a choice. The asphalt contracting company changed their estimate, the surveyor pointed out all the places that are going to need extra fortification before the paving can occur, and the price of tar shot through the roof.

This all made me very sad and shifted my focus to all the woes and wonderings with this paved path. I'd lost sight of the bigger goal at the end of the paved path and began to feel like this new paved path was the only way to get to my goal. With all the trouble with paving, I was getting forlorn that I would never achieve that goal...

...until I read Rob yesterday. Well, until I read Rob, read another horoscope that is based specifically on my particular planets, followed its advice to loosen up and relax by practicing making mojitos, and reflected on Rob's advice while sipping my mojito in the spiritual sweat lodge called Our Livingroom.

The angel that needs liberating in my life is the big goal, not the paved path to the big goal. There are other ways to get to that goal - my partner's potentially shorter route being one of them - so to focus just on the one path with its problems isn't going to liberate anyone.

All the woes with the contractor, surveyor, and tar distributors are the extraneous nonsense to which Rob referred. By shifting my focus back further down the horizon to the big goal, all that nonsense drops away and my goal becomes clear.

Here, I imagine is my next assignment - trusting that with this newly cleared vision of the big goal will come new, clearly defined paths to attainment.

Here's to having goals. Here's to having the vision to liberate them.