To make a really long story short, immediately after we pulled our trailer from Louisville to Minnesota at the behest of Deb’s boss, he sent Deb back to Louisville to work. I stayed with the trailer in Minnesota. I spent two weeks on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, helping with the care of my brand new granddaughter (and her parents of course). Erika is her name. (Pictures on my Web site. See Summer ’09

Then I pulled the trailer to Duluth, where I’m doing readings for local and long distance clients, enjoying summer weather in the northland, and waiting to find out how long Deb will be in Louisville and where she’ll (we’ll) go from there.

And I’ve been thinking about my offer of frequent Tenacity notes, and your responses — which by the way were all enthusiastically positive. Consider this newsletter a beginning.

Birth

Holding infant Erika (oh, the dreamy bliss bestowed by an infant) I became curious about how we come to be embodied. How do we move from non-physical to physical? I have an image of that, but the image requires an assumption — the assumption I mentioned in the April newsletter, the assumption that we are more than our physical selves. You, in your physical form, are one aspect of you in your non-physical form. Today I’ll call that non-physical form “entity.”

So here’s the image. You, as entity, decide to visit this particular dimension, this Earth reality. Perhaps you (as entity) have something you want to learn or teach, or maybe you just want to play here. Eagerly, joyfully, you focus your intent and desire until it bursts through into physical manifestation.

That bursting through is a massive expansion, and that expansion is your life force. Thus, expansion is your natural state.

Expansion fulfilled

You are now both “you embodied” and “you as entity.” The energy of your expansion provides the possibility that your embodied consciousness can be aware of, and can experience, “you as entity.” You can know yourself as both part and whole. You as part can know you as whole — to a certain degree, anyway. In that knowing, much is possible. Your purpose can be lived with certainty, with ease, and with joy.

If expansion is your natural state, how do you live in harmony with it? Maybe that’s what Tenacity Notes will ponder for a few weeks.

Creation

I suspect that the image of your creation into an embodied state is applicable to creation in general — emotion focuses your intent and desire to the point where they burst into physical form. If my intent and desire is to live the fullness of my potential, and my focusing emotion is joy, or wonder, or curiosity, then what I create is likely to be awesome and unexpected, and is likely to lead me to ever more expansion and creation. If, on the other hand, my emotion is fear, and my intent is to hide from my potential, then you can imagine what I might create.

Courage and Tenacity

It takes courage to open to your own potential — to meet it, to acknowledge it, to accept it — and more courage to surrender to the possibility of fulfillment. It takes tenacity to live in a state of surrender to your own capacity. Courage and tenacity — both having to do with love. Openness and surrender — both having to do with breath.

Henry David Thoreau said in Walden

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Breathe. Drink water. Embrace the vastness of your potential.