This morning as I wrote the final line of my Daily Pages, something inside me tapped my shoulder and said, “remember your Heaven.” I had been reflecting on yesterday’s tsunami post and how tears in others have become a kind of signal for me. And with the last few words to fill the page, I wrote, “Let’s go make a river of tears.”

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100 Liminal Days is an experimental project of embracing my current transitional season after exiting my business by sharing an honest, real-time account of my self-initiation experience in daily posts. Visit Day 1/100 to learn more and sign up to get the weekly recaps delivered to your inbox.

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This tap on the shoulder helped me remembered something I wrote in July when I was just getting started in Erick Godsey’s Mentally Fit course. Our first assignment was a journaling protocol – four consecutive days of journaling for 20 minutes. For the first 10 minutes, I journaled on my Hell – that is, what does my life look like if I don’t answer the whisper of my soul. For the second 10 minute block, I journaled on my Heaven – what my life looks like in five years if I do brave things and follow the whisper. Then, at the end of four days, I wrote a 500 word summary of my Heaven and shared it with the class.

As soon as I closed my journal this morning, I went back to my Heaven and Hell assignment and read through the entries. My Heaven involved water. Flow. Emotion. Tears. I wrote this before I could understand.

Revisiting My Heaven Journal

As I reread these lines, I felt a strange recognition – like my past self had left breadcrumbs for the person I’m becoming now. (Did writing it then set it into motion?) I had spoken in metaphors I wasn’t ready to decode. Now, reading them through the lens of tears and dreams, they feel like prophecy. Especially these passages:

I’d make things that stir my heart and make me cry. It would make other people cry, too.

Hours of my day are spent painting, writing, speaking my dreams into art that transmutes into a river of tears.

This river becomes an unstoppable flow, carving a new path of hope, love, and peace.

I remember that when I first wrote this, I felt like it was incomplete and ethereal. I didn’t like that it was so mythic instead of definitive. But it was the only thing coming out each time I wrote from the journaling prompt.

And now I remember the title I gave to my 500 word summary of Heaven that I shared with the entire class. I named the archetype without understanding it at all:

I am a River Guide (but the river is made of tears).

Back then, the phrase felt strange, symbolic, almost too mystical to take seriously. Now I see it for what it was: a message from the deeper Self. An identity waiting for me to grow into it. This is what Bill Plotkin would call the mythopoetic identity.

Throughout 100 Liminal Days, I’ve struggled first and foremost with identity – releasing an old identity, but unsure how to define a new one. But here it was all along, written months before I began this project. Now, as I reflect on this five month old writing, the tsunami dream, the repeated pull toward bringing others to tears, I notice powerful connective tissue forming around the bones I didn’t know were already there.

I am not the source of the river. I am not the flood. I am the one who has learned how to move through the waters.

I wrote that the river is made of tears: mine, yours, theirs, our ancestors, the collective of humanity. These tears are both grief and revelation, but even greater than that, they offer us holy waters of baptism, washing over us as we navigate into the next version of Self. These tears are the initiation for us all. These tears signal to ourselves and others that we are ready to make a deeper meaning of our lives.

Who I Am Called to Guide Along the River

At the time of the writing of my 500 word summary of Heaven, I attempted to identify who I would serve. I thought it might be LGBTQ professionals and women who were tired of traditional leadership training related to overcoming and avoiding burnout – those that were looking for something deeper. I also thought I’d be helping people with what I called “focus training,” but now, having learned the lessons of the liminal, I see that it’s different, bigger than that.

The people I am most uniquely equipped to guide are the ones who already stand barefoot in the water. They’ve cried the tears. They’ve felt the current. They know they’re in liminality, and they are hungry – aching even – for guidance, for meaning, for someone who knows how to read the river. These are not people seeking another transaction. These are people seeking transformation.

Weaving It All Together

As I sit with all of this – the dream, the ritual, the tears, the Heaven writing, the River Guide emerging – I can sense God dancing through it all, pulling the strands toward each other. These were never separate moments. They were pieces of the same myth gathering itself. And today, the truth shines with a kind of clarity and peace I can finally feel in my body:

I thought I was choosing and pursuing my dharma, but it turns out my dharma has been choosing me.

I can see now that I’ve been training for this my whole life – holding the tension between what was and what will be. The tension between opposing beliefs, forces, and desires. First, I held that tension between my Christian faith and my sexual orientation and identity. I wrestled with God. That’s one of the greatest tensions we can ever experience, and God blessed me through it. Then, here in my liminal space – standing on this rope bridge spanning the width of a canyon between a 10-year leadership journey with Trusty Oak and my emerging vocation – the fog is clearing. I see the liminality closing. I celebrate this, and I take another step, and another, and another.

And now that I can see myself as this Tear River Guide, I understand that it’s been here all along – quietly waiting for me to notice. I wasn’t ready until I cried my own tears. Until I learned how to hold space for others to offer theirs. Until I understood the sacredness of listening, of presence, of letting emotion reveal truth.

This is the gift I give back to the Source of all life. And this is the gift Source has been preparing within me all along.

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