Key to the Castle

I feel stuck.  There I admitted it.  The door behind me is closed and the one coming has yet to open.  Hell maybe it hasn't even been framed yet.  I keep asking for guidance and help from the peeps, but they are just being quiet on this subject.  I have been trying to sit tight and not fly off in any direction just because I feel like I should be doing something.  

Group meditation at Healing Circle, a practice generally used to focus communally on a larger subject, was designed  last night for each participant to look inward for what they needed.  Answers were rich and varied as the people in the circle.  

My vision was of the 3 of Staves in my favorite Tarot deck by Stephanie Pui Mun Law (www.shadowscapes.com).  It is exactly the place that I have been for the last two months.  Standing at the end of the little land bridge and unable to proceed.  I can see the horizon of where I want to go (or think I want to go), but there is no way to get there from where I am. Sometimes I think it's one of those Indiana Jones kinda things where I am supposed to just step out into the void and to find there is more path, I just can't see it.  But I can never do it, can't seem to take what amounts to a leap of faith.  The image is beautiful, but it makes me unnecessarily sad and I wonder why I can't seem to move from there.

THAT seems the right question at last. Growing up we got a letter from a local toy store called Johnny's Toys near our birthday. It contained a small metal key that opened a child-sized door in a child-sized castle in the store and you were allowed to choose one gift, an ingenious marketing ploy. I loved that key. It was the potential for every toy my kid brain could imagine. It was power. It was magic. OK. So I told you that in order for this next piece to make sense. I see my grown up self now standing in front of an adult-sized and more realistic version of Johnny's Birthday Castle. The lights are on inside and they are casting a warm yellow orange light on the linoleum floor.  I press my face to the window and gawk at what I see inside.  The castle is stuffed with the most amazing gifts.  These aren't wrapped and I can clearly see what they are jumbled and stacked in there.  Gripped with a child's greed I want it all!  Happy Twirling Dance.

I come to realize that this castle exists inside me like St. Theresa of Avila's Interior Castle and that those things that I am seeing are for me.  ALL OF THEM.  Happy Dance Part II.  I wonder why don't I have access to them then?  Also an excellent question.  Seems that whole one at a time thing has bit me in the ass.  Yunno.  Get out one toy, play with it, put it away before you get out the next one.  Study one subject at a time.  That for years I have been using the key to open the door and get out one awesomeness, then put it back and retrieve another.  What I really want is to get them all out and spread them across the floor and roll thru them laughing.  I nearly faint from the sheer joy of this thought.  I am suddenly five again gripping my key to the Castle and dreaming of what I might get.  

The only problem with this is that I don't have the key to the castle.  And I think there might be a sizeable obstacle between me and the door.  An obstacle of my own creation made of all the boogeymen I have ever known.  But I'm not concerned about that.  Now that I have seen what's inside I will get in there. 

And once I do, I know that I can stand on that land bridge, hold out my hand and the right tool will appear by magic in it and I will paint, write, sculpt, dance the bridge into existence in front of me one magical step at a time until I get where I need to be.