Since I launched this blog (a whole month and a bit ago already), I’ve had an idea for a post. A short, spontaneous, chatty but informative little piece on my favourite name and form of the Divine Feminine (often referred to as the Goddess): Saraswati.

Well, as the keenly observant among you will have noticed, no such post has appeared. Procrastination in overdrive you might say. Or perhaps it was that the Goddess just wasn’t keen on me doing the post about her?

You see, I did some research, made a ton of notes, and discovered all kinds of fascinating things and I just felt I wanted to share what I’d learned. Somehow, though, the idea didn’t go any further. I’ve thought about it from time to time, but still, nothing has come. Then, a couple of days ago, I came across my notes and reread what I’d discovered.

Now, here’s a key moment: as I reread those notes, I thought (paraphrasing here), ‘I really must post this. It’s all so fascinating and would interest a lot of people and even be helpful.’ Something like that anyway. Yet, still, it is not written.

So, despite my notes seemingly begging for my attention, I guess that maybe it’s not the time. Now my notes are safely tucked into a few nice little folders within a larger folder somewhere in the depths of my harddrive.

All that struggle; all that thinking and fretting over what was supposed to be a short, spontaneous couple of hundred words on a subject I love. Still, the episode has got me thinking about intuition and how it can disguise itself – with our help – as procrastination. And vice versa.

Yes, I know, obvious question: how can we ever know the difference? When are we inventing all kinds of reasons for putting something off, and when is it really intuition trying to guide us?

Well, it’s complicated. As creatures able to reason, we are always ready to come up with arguments for and against, to think endlessly and agonize over the smallest and most trivial details while ignoring the big stuff. Really, in my case that’s all there is to it: I just think too much.

Sticking to the Saraswati blog post episode (a catchy title don’t you think? Watch out for a post headed up ‘The Saraswati Blog Post Episode‘), I don’t recall why I didn’t just get right to writing it. It might have been any number of things: a perceived lack of time; a promise to self to ‘give it some more thought’; a resistance to the actual ‘labour’ required. Who knows?

Or, was it more that, while the idea was a good one, I just wasn’t feeling it? Maybe the timing just wasn’t right? The problem is that sometimes an intuition comes in a flash of knowing – with a capital K – that you can’t possibly miss.

Then, other times, it creeps up so slowly and quietly that it gets drowned out and ignored as our monkey mind takes over with its endless arguments for and against, pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages,

The lesson I was given here was this: What is going to get done, will get done; what is not going to get done, won’t. Sounds simple really, but so often we make it more complicated with our overthinking, our coming up with excuses. We procrastinate.

Then, at other times, we just dive in the deep end, flowing with the intuition. It may be right or it may be wrong, but it’s done. Actually, I am trying to realise that there is no right or wrong about a decision made: it just is as it is. Easy to type, hard to do.

Flowing. That’s a good word actually. Saraswati, along with many other characteristics, embodies flow. As in the flow of the river of life. She’s the Goddess of all things creative as well as any activity that helps one to discover the essence of self.

So, flash or gradual realisation; right or wrong; left or right, be the river: flow with what happens or doesn’t happen. Don’t fret about the twists and turns, the ebb and flow of tides, the rocks in the stream that force us to flow around or over, or to change direction completely. In 1946 the poet Jorge Luis Borges wrote an essay about time. In that essay, among other things he says:

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river (emphasis is mine)

Jean Luis Borges A New Refutation of Time 1946

Reading that quote reminded me of a song that I’ve been humming on and off for a very very long time (hint: I saw the movie when it first came out).

The river flows, it flows to the sea.
Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be.
Flow river flow.

Peace from me to you.

PS: Thanks to my memory for giving me these lyrics from The Ballad of Easy Rider. Or was it actually Saraswati whispering in my ear?