Jane A. Rothfeld

When I was 24, I returned to live in my childhood home and started working at a cheese and gourmet food shop two towns away. I felt defeated. For six years, I had tried to craft my interests to fit the mold my parents and society insisted was mandatory to my success, but it had not worked. My one true love was spiritual freedom. No school taught that. No school can teach that. I didn’t need a degree to free my soul.

I watched as my peers graduated college, then professional schools, and started careers and families while I earned minimum wage cutting wedges of cheese and voraciously reading books about spiritual evolution.

Why was I so intensely drawn to this? Was it to avoid the responsibilities of adulthood, as some suggested? What could I do with this passion in the world given that I felt no connection to existing religions and the potential careers they offered?

One day at the cheese shop, an old friend from childhood came into the store. Mimi Fogel. Mimi Fogel was Freddy Fogel’s mother and I was madly in love with Freddy at the tender age of five. I had not seen Mimi in twenty years. We greeted each other with words of surprise and delight.

Knowing nothing of my secret passion — spiritual inquiry and brie are not an obvious pairing — Mimi told me this: “You were always such an abstract thinker. Even at 4 yrs. old, you used to sit in the back of the car and talk about God and the cosmos.”

Unbeknownst to her, among the wheels of Jarlsberg and sacks of gourmet coffee, Mimi Fogel gave me back a piece of my self that completed an inner puzzle I had been desperately trying to assemble without even knowing it. I realized my love of spiritual reality was even older than I. I had come into life already burning with it. It wasn’t an aberration or childish frivolity. It was part of my core. It was solid.

Despite all the pressures of being a seeker of spiritual truth (pick any era on Earth and you’ll find pressures) I remain true to this quest. I know the state of absolute freedom is the essence of every person. It is the place from which each one of us originated and it is the place-less place to which each of us will inevitably return.

I also know this lifetime, this physical body and the true nature of the Earth are all designed for us to complete our universal journey. This means you can graduate out of this Universe after the millions or billions of life expressions you’ve experienced in its universal vastness.

To get there you are transforming like a diamond. Your soul is taking all the inner bits of shadow and light from all your life expressions and integrating the wisdom it needs from them, then compressing these aspects into a zero or unified point. From that zero point you implode (birth inward) and emerge as the diamond: a whole new expression, never seen before, anywhere. How exciting is this?!

At the time of this writing, there is much apparent turmoil in the world, but that is superficial and ultimately for our evolution (yes, I know it does not seem that way). It is a form of compression for the planet, pulling it into its own zero point so it can birth into its own new expression, some of which will be a star.

Take this opportunity to see the truth and use your life to bring those wayward, orphaned aspects of your self into the home of your heart. That is the path to becoming the diamond: a universal creator.

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