The Path of Life

"He [The Great Spirit] only sketches out the path of life roughly for all the creatures on earth, shows them where to go, where to arrive, but leaves them to find their own way to get there. He wants them to act independently according to their nature, to the urges of each of them.

-- Lame Deer, LAKOTA Every path of religion and spirituality I have studied states this in one way or another. We have points in our life that are set that we work from the first set point being our birth. Next come turning points in our lives which shape us and can not be changed. They are to guide us along our life path and move us in the directions that we need to go or have decided to go by our choices. I call these turning points or nodal points. I have always seen nodal points as the energy of decisions creating different paths to go. It would look like a balloon that had been covered with silly string. People used to take a plastic string and  spray it over balloons.  They would let the silly string dry and pop the balloon to see what shapes it had formed. It is how I feel a nodal point looks if we could see one. It is full of lines of paths that we could pick but did not with the main path moving forward out of all of the other paths. An example of a turning point is when you decide on a profession. It is when a family member passes out of this life. It is the decision to do the things that you dream of doing no matter how often you may have to pick yourself up after failing to try another way to achieve your goal. It is the right decisions in love and having the courage to love a person. Love makes us more vulnerable than any other time in our life. Decisions with our children create turning pints and the unplanned things that make it so we can not make life easy for them. Wanting a family in the first place is a huge decision but one that can be full or love or full of discord and upset. It is all our choices and the way we deal with things on our path. I always felt that the skills learned in anger management and coping skills are very important in today's world where we can prevent the bad and focus on the good. May every one have a Happy Holiday no matter who you worship and find their life path for the coming year.