When we last left off, I think I was on the river bank merging with the Divine. Flash forward a couple of seasons to a couple of months ago: I had the idea for a new book. I don’t know where it came from, or why this idea had dug its tenacious roots into my dormant ambition, but there it was–fully-birthed in my imagination. Truth be told, I saw myself, book jacket in hand, back on Oprah and The Today Show, regaling my interviewer with pithy narratives from across the eons and around the world on no less mesmerizing a topic than the nature of the afterlife.
The book was to be titled “One Hundred Heavens: Visions of Joy Past, Present and Future.” Cool, huh! Before I had time to stop and think, I’d researched what are the seminal texts on histories of heaven, sent away for a number of them, begun reading them through, taking notes and getting ready to commit my words to paper. I shared the idea with my agent, who was excited, and looked into getting the URL: it was available.
And then I completed the first entry–a 2-page guided visualization of the afterlife based in mystic Jewish tradition, and then a funny thing happened to me. I was done. Not 100 visions. One.
As soon as I committed the vision to words, I knew I was done. I had all my notes for the Pharoah’s version of the afterlife, replete with slaves spearing hippopotamas, ready to go next, and I found I couldn’t care less. I took a whack at it, and hated my life. Where did all the joy go? I was sitting at the bottom of an enormous book 100 heavens high, and suffocating.
When I was younger, like maybe 62 instead of 66, I would have pushed through. I have the drive, the will, the ambition to make myself do just about anything. But now I know better. I can force myself to live up to my expectations for myself, or I can just go out and sit by the river and actually experience merger with the Divine, rather than just writing about it.
I did have one ounce of will left in me. Just enough to realize that I could take my one heaven and turn it into a blog for Huffington Post. So much for Oprah and Pulitzer Prizes. Just one heaven and one blog–but at least, it’s a good one.
A lot went into it–and even more didn’t…but in any case, I do hope you’ll click here for my Huffpo Blog.
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