There are many pathways in this life and it doesn't matter which one you take, for they all have a common destination, and that is the grave.  But some paths give you energy and some take it away.
- Cervantes

 The way of nature is to take energy from the surrounding environment and use it in a unique way to support growth and reproduction. Trees do it one way, frogs another, birds in their own unique way. As living entities, we too take energy and transform it. We hold energy temporarily and focus it in a unique way. We are conduits.

Focusing is the operative word. It is difficult to focus. The tendency is randomness, the dispersion of energy. Focused energy is powerful; dispersed energy is weak. On some paths, your energy will grow, on some it will dissipate.

Part of the process happens on a molecular level, part on a spiritual or metaphysical level. On one level we engage in work to survive, to eat. Taken to an extreme, that is life in the Wasteland where people trade their freedom, their time, their lives for basic needs. They trade their lives for security. They work to avoid life and the risks life entails.

All that matters is what you love
and what you love is who you are . . .
-        John Squadra, This Ecstasy

The other kind of work is work of love. Love energy is special energy, capable of transformation. Love energy, when focused, is capable of creating beauty – transformative beauty that adds to the lives of others. Work of love grows out of our relationship with our inner world. It grows out of a connection with the current that underlies our lives. To focus love energy, that relationship needs to be nurtured. We need to respect and listen to what our inner world has to, wants to, tell us. Our inner world is the reservoir that supports our resourcefulness, our ability to evolve and adapt, our ability to create.

Journaling can open a portal into our inner world. We open a door and invite that world help guide our lives. It is shy and won’t respond to demands for answers though. It responds to relaxed silence, to gentleness. It often communicates in glimpses and images.

 My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.
      - Carl Jung, from the Prologue to Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

Journaling Questions:

In a state of deep, relaxed awareness, imagine energy as an entity. Sit with it in silence. Wait for it to gain sufficient comfort to say what it wants to say.

Ask your energy where it wants to go to grow. Where will your life force gain momentum?