When I woke up this morning I had an overwhelming feeling of sadness and fatigue. Sadness about people who are struggling, others being stubborn and a feeling of stalemate. Seems I am doing best when there is movement of some kind. I also had an overwhelming feeling that many lives may be lost today. If so I wish them all a peaceful transition. I don’t have a working TV so I never know what is going on out there except by word of mouth. But I had heard that there would be a demonstration today of over a million people.

Last night a friend called crying. Her boyfriend is being evacuated today with his company. I think all the big companies need to evacuate their people when anything major happens. She was cry, sad he would be leaving, probably wondering when she would see him again. I could really feel her pain. And it really affected me. Up to now I had encountered people who were fearful but not grieving.

I told her that I’m sure he will be back as soon as this is over, and hopefully that will not be too long. She agreed but said we have no way of knowing how long this will last. She herself has been through other wars such as the Balkan wars which lasted 15 years in all. I am sure that her grief and feeling of separation is well founded. She has actually experienced that. I am not coming from that place so I don’t have all that ‘experience’ to influence my thinking. I am seeing time acceleration and don’t feel that anything will last very long anymore, for good or bad.

I puttered around the kitchen doing my usual morning routine, feeding the cats, making coffee. Decided I would blog with my morning coffee, perhaps I could purge this sadness and heaviness. While I was waiting for my computer to boot up I decided to pull a card. I use to pull cards every morning with coffee, either angel cards or Affirmation for the Everyday Goddess cards. I saw the cards sitting there and realized that this was something that had fallen by the wayside.

I used the Goddess cards. As soon as I saw the card I had pulled I recognized it with out even reading what it was. It was the Sun and the affirmation was ‘I am blessed with the gift of life. I am free to create a life filled with joy open and connected to God’. Yes this is exactly what I needed to hear. I went on to read more about the card and something really struck me ‘Real freedom is the power to live the life you choose in empowered ways’.

People are always talking about freedom, like rights, as if it is something that someone gives you. Freedom is another illusion, or rather a perception. It is how you think about your life, how you feel. It is not defined. I remember hearing Nelson Mandela talk about this. Even when he was in prison he was free, because his mind was free.

These past few days, I go out during the day and gather food. The curfew is at 4:00pm so I am home by 3:30pm and that is it. I cook, I clean, write and I have no obligations and I feel very free. I hadn’t realized how oppressive activity can be, being obligated by appointments and expectations, the glass cage. I admit this is probably going to get old and I will get bored and want to do something else but it is the realization that is important. Until you break out of old patterns you can’t even see that they are patterns. We feel we are free to create our lives, but are we making good choices or are they obligations or expectation?

I am a person that did feel that I had created my life the way I wanted it to be. I do the work I love. I am clearly on my own schedule. But now I see that I had created a form within a structure and never venture outside that structure or perhaps didn’t venture out far enough to see what I really wanted or enjoyed, or where I was feeling obligated. Now I have the opportunity to re-imagine my life.

Over the past few years I have started to be somewhat apathetic about my life here in Egypt. There seemed to be things that would just never happen and it would be wise to let them go rather than to continue swimming upstream. I knew they were not in alignment with what I really feel is ‘me’ but I am not here to change the world or impose on others either, so I let it go.

But what I have seen in the past few days is amazing! Perhaps it is possible for your external world to completely change. I actually enjoyed going out yesterday and walking in the streets. It was a pleasure to wander around going to different shops, gathering food, seeing what is out there. Anyone who knows me knows that this is a monumental shift. I do the best I can to be the Hermit because I hate walking in the streets full of people and traffic. I expect that Cairo will go back to its crowded chaotic state once this is over but now I have a clear vision that anything IS possible because I have seen it with my own eyes and experienced it in reality, not just a vision.

I have witnessed something that anyone who has been to Cairo knows is almost an impossibility. I know we are in a period of great change. This is yet another confirmation of that change. It confirms that we are moving to a place that we have never been before and so we don’t have a clear image of what that place might even look like. I started this ‘revolution’ with the thought that it is best not to start something if you don’t really know where you are going. But I was wrong. We need to navigate, by intuition which comes in the form of inspiration. Again this seems to have been a collective, shared inspiration, as long as people keep moving ahead by intuition and inspiration we can get to a place we have never been before. I believe that Egyptians are still right brained enough to do this. And as my hero Captain Kirk would say ‘we will boldly go where no man has gone before’.