It truly is a miracle to be alive. Of all the different species that we might have ended up as on this planet, a fish or a cat, a whale or a hummingbird, we have gotten the chance to be human, with all of the faculties at our disposal for imagination, for creation, for love. It’s an incredible miracle and opportunity. AND this moment in our evolution can also be an incredible burden. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t at times longed or wished to be a fish or a bird or a whale or a blade of grass. There was a great little video going around for a while of a woman complaining about being a woman and all that it came with. She was saying how next time she wanted to come back as a tree and just hang out for a few hundred years. Somehow we have made this human condition quite burdensome. And yet it’s interesting, because the burdens seem to be balanced out by the opportunities: all of these different ways of living that are possible to us now because of all that we have created and all that we have come to understand. It’s an incredible opportunity of freedom. But when we live from the perspective of needing to do something to get it right, it can be an incredible burden. I often think about what it must have been like to be one of those early humans, living in a small band of others, focusing on survival and food and shelter and the basics. I wonder what their inner landscape was like. Certainly they did not carry this burden of choice. Life was much more immediate and much more simple. You were either surviving or you were in threat. Now, with all of these opportunities, we live in this question of survival or threat on myriad levels. Am I surviving or am I being threatened in my role as a wife, as a mother, as a citizen, as a woman, as a person who must bring in an income to support her family, and on and on and on? There is so much to our psychological survival these days, because within most of the ways we’ve come to understand how to live, we carry a scale of winning or losing. Am I being a good mother or a bad mother? Am I succeeding at my job or am I failing? Am I finding my true purpose or am I floundering? Am I healing or am I making myself ill? There is an overwhelming number of ways to get it wrong, and getting it right feels quite elusive. What does it take, within this current moment, to just feel okay to be here? To feel like we’ve done enough and we can rest, and to feel present with ourselves, with the life around us, and, if you’re a theologically minded person, with God, with the Creator of life? My sense is that for most of us there is a little bit of dis-ease present nearly all the time, on one of these levels of measuring. To slip into that state of ease, that state of rest, that sense of there’s nothing I need to fix or figure out in this given moment, is hard to come by for most of us right now. We seem to be carrying this legacy of always needing more, wanting more, almost approaching life as a problem to be solved all the time. I imagine some of you watching this are saying, yeah, that is how it is. How could it be otherwise? Especially if you start to move in concentric circles outside of your immediate family, your immediate work life, or your community, and think about the city you live in, the country you live in, the world you live in. Yes, it is concentric circles full of problems to be solved. Surely to rest, or to feel ease, or to feel present when there is all of this mess to clean up would be a disservice. It would be a failing. It would be a rejection of the task at hand. But what I have been dwelling in these last few years, and what I think a lot of us are starting to dwell in, is the clarity that this mindset of problem solving will never find its end. And that is, in fact, the bigger problem. There is something about how this life business works that requires us to discover, right now, whatever it is we want to experience in the future. If peace is what we long for, if sustainability is what we long for, if communities working together and thriving is what we long for, if a new paradigm of life, where we’re not going to destroy this planet we live on and end up in war and catastrophe, is what we long for in the future, then we’ve got to find a way to dwell in that state of peace, of community, of collaboration, of sustainability, now. As long as we are furiously working for that outcome in unsustainable ways, in unpeaceful ways, in agitated and frustrated and furious and gloom-and-doom ways, we’re just never going to get there. We’re not going to be able to build that world, because we can’t even imagine it now. One of my first videos on this Substack (I guess it was actually posted on YouTube) was me reflecting on the two parts of myself. There is the part of myself that is grounded in the Divine life, that knows myself to be loved, to be whole, to be just as worthy of life and joy and wisdom as all other beings on this planet. And there is the part of me that is really not so sure: the egoic part, which is convinced everything’s going pretty wrong and sees myself as not measuring up on all of these different scales, all of the time. In that video, I was reflecting on what it is to be a being who has those two different perspectives all the time, and to hold that. Since recording that first video, and being on this journey of making worship all of life and being devoted to the church within, those two parts of me are still very much here. And I have been going through a process of being totally committed to prioritizing that inner Divine knowing, as what is more true. Even though the part of me that sees everything as a mess and has a lot of self-doubt is louder. She’s got more experience. She’s definitely generating more thoughts throughout the day. She has a lot of history, at least in terms of physical life on this planet. I have been seeking to rest in that deeper part of myself, to see what it’s like to really believe that it is true. And I’ll tell you, when I rest in that deeper part of myself, this other part gets kind of freaked out. She gets a little wiggy, because these two parts are in conflict. The truths that my conditioned self lives on and rests in most of the time don’t stand up to the light, to the beingness of this deeper knowing that I belong here, just like everyone else. That my life is sacred and whole and needed and beautiful, just like everybody else’s. And that there’s really nothing to fear. All of the fear stories operating in this materialistic, egoic part of me are just stories that have been made up, handed down generation to generation, and now amplified by artificial intelligence and the internet. They write all of these crazy stories: hierarchies of the beautiful and the ugly, of the rich and the poor, of those in high positions of authority and those on the lowest rungs; this idea that we are different from each other in substantial ways, that some of us are not worth it, not worth life, or have made some terrible error and will be discarded. These stories depend on that falsity. So for the last few years, there has been this electrical activity occurring between my deepest knowing of who I am and this being that I have become. Some ideas and stories that are part of this conditioned self have started to be exposed, and they’re starting to break off and fall away. It is a painful, ugly, messy process, and it is very much happening right now. Truth be told, my highest hope for this work I’m doing and the community I’m gathering is that it will lift up this deeper truth: that we are all here together on this planet, spinning through space. We’re all worthy of life. We’ve all hit the Divine lottery in being given the opportunity to be human beings. We’ve been given incredible gifts and loves that we are here to express and to live. And in dwelling in that truth together, we’ll make some room for this limited, conditioned, fearful part of who we are to break down and be transformed, so that it can be a partner with that deeper Divine essence, so that it can finally start to live the peace, the joy, the playfulness, the freedom that is our true birthright. So that’s what I’ve been up to. I’ve started to look at the next twenty years of my life, to my seventieth birthday. Who knows how I’ll be at seventy, but I’ve been thinking about the next two decades and dedicating them to dwelling in this work: holding fast to the truth of who I really am, who you really are, who we really are, and creating spaces where we can show up together to affirm that, and to let this conditioned part of us start to shift and change, own up to the falsities it’s carrying, the false ideas and beliefs and fears, and come into alignment. My sense is that’s going to take some time. Maybe two decades. I don’t know. It feels like it’s happening quickly, but it also feels like I just come to deeper and deeper layers. Maybe it’s an eternal process. However long it takes, I deeply trust and believe that it’s the most important work I can ever do. So I’m committed to doing it, and I’m hopeful that something creative can happen in the doing of it with others. My sense is that I’ve been called to create some spaces for that to happen over these next two decades, in which I’m guessing we’re all going to witness an incredible amount of external change. Maybe it will go a little bit better if, together, we can start to find that peace and collaboration and creativity and possibility now, while we walk forward, instead of imagining we have to wait to step into deeper sustainability and balance and resource and hope and love. Now, even in the midst of all the challenges we face and all that is undone. So, friends, that’s what’s been on my mind and on my heart. I hope it speaks to you, and I’m grateful for you being with me in this time of incredible change. May we find peace now, even in t
