I spent the last day of our six-day experience watching the snow melt. Midweek brought our first winter storm, transforming the landscape into a Christmas card with a foot of fresh snow. The pine tree outside my window was laden with visually perfect clumps of whiteness that lowered its branches to the ground. Not comfortable for the tree, but beautiful for me to look at.  Then on our last day, the temperature rose to spring-like conditions and with the threat of rain later in the day, the snow began its departure. Hour by hour the pine boughs raised inch by inch until as darkness fell, it stood upright as it had before the snow, visually unaltered and ready to dance in the rainy maelstrom that this morning has returned the landscape to the greeny-brown greyness that greeted me at the week’s beginning. I miss the snow but know it will be back. That’s one of many joys of living in Nova Scotia: if you don’t like the weather, give it a day and you’ll get a new choice.

Choice. My greatest takeaway from this amazing experience. My signal identified. Who I am, the essence of me inside this body that retrieves, processes and shares information on its behalf. The part of me too long forgotten, silences and overrun by the choices and assumptions of others. In six days I put words to my signal, felt them, and, like the landscape, have melted layers of beliefs and habits and embrace all that I am and choose to be. Choice. I am Choice Unleashed.

When asked on Day One to allow words for our signals,  I started with ‘choice rewiring.’ It served me then and to reflect on it now, it still resonates, but in nostalgia. My father was an electrician. His electrical work was one of the few glimpses of passion he allowed himself. Even when he could physically no longer do it, he retained a a joy in thinking about, knowing about it. He kept his Red Seal active and hanging on his wall. In one of our last conversations, as I struggled to set my newest book to form, I had the image of electrical impulses struggling to connect. I sat at his kitchen table with him, slid a blank piece of looseleaf toward and asked, “Can you show me how to wire a house?”  He spent the next hour drawing, explaining, pointing out the circuits and grounds, the codes and insulators, the components and planning that kept electrons flowing in continuous loops, running appliances and fuelling light bulbs in the process. He spent his career lighting up people’s worlds, but would allow so very little light for himself.  My consolation is that now freed from his body, he is free from the pain and the limits he placed on himself in life. Choice Rewired was an homage to him, but as he often told me, I was raised to be independent and live my own life. So I honour myself, and him in the process, and let ‘rewired’ go.

My words shifted to ‘permission unleashed’, and in that moment, it was accurate. Seeking permission was a childhood trait that I didn’t fully shake as an adult. An innate need to please, to be praised, to ‘do the right thing’ as defined by teachers, employers, clients, partners. I needed to give myself permission to not only be myself but to know myself, to honour my impulses and imaginations, to dream, to trust my instincts, to allow myself to be fully me, regardless of how loud, messy of mixed up that is. And I needed to give myself permission to own that I actually know what I’m doing, that I can’t get it wrong. ‘Permission’ was a freeing word, allowing me to swim and soar in the vast ocean of who I was, am and will be. But by week’s end, it felt like a stepping stone to another word vaster still.

It was time to melt my signal words together.

Choice Unleashed.

In this moment those two words invite tingles, flow, and a huge smile. It feels right.  When I sat down to write this morning, in the space that I have shared safely and with such inspiration with my fellow women manifestors, I felt the tightness of transition, the creep of sadness, just as the snow creeps into oblivion in my yard. But like the snow, our group will gather again and like the weather, my signal is always present, always flowing. I just need to be mindful of it.

Thanks for reading.