There isn’t a savior beyond our own understanding that we are part of an eternal river’s rising and falling. There is no easy answer or endpoint, just the willingness to pay attention, to feel, and to trust the wisdom of our experience. The more powerful we become, the more we are asked to kneel closer to the earth, and let go. The more we allow energy to move through us without resistance, the more we experience moments of radiant fullness, connected to our place in the web, humbled by all that is beyond our control.

Our hearts will not stop their work of breaking, but we will stop hoping for that anyway. Often the most we can do is honor the water’s wise path, sometimes bone dry, sometimes teeming with life. I trust my body as an extension of the earth, my vision as an extension of her knowing. I trust her cycles and I trust my own. I listen to what calls me further in. I trust presence, the movement that spirals out from stillness. I listen to what I don’t understand. I become the river who always meets the sea.

We are not initiated once, but thousands of times. Many of our leavings and arrivals are barely noticeable, but we notice, and we are changed. We are led, continually, over thresholds we cannot plan for. Divine order changes its tune as we sing along. And the chords we strike, just by being, create cosmic waves. Barely perceptible or earth-shaking, our energetic signatures exist here as an essential part of our collective experience. As we empty the vessel of striving, we make space for what forces desire to come alive through us. A welcoming. An opening. A walking through. We are merging worlds, learning to tone in resonance with Mystery, breaking contracts with which we no longer agree, weaving our stories one revelation and one question at a time. One toe always in the water, inviting the ceremony of entering.

The soul is not static. Spirit shifts. Bodies soften and harden with the tides of time and experience. We are called to crack open wide, not for ultimate bliss but for ultimate presence, as we leave behind the comfort of knowing and enter the realm of soul that begins at the edge of the woods, at the precipice of comprehension.

There are some thresholds that will ask you to step back before you cross them. The guardians of the sacred will assure you—it’s ok to put one foot behind the other, to exist quietly and thoughtfully in your own skin without proof to the world that your stillness has worth. To breathe in and receive the miracle of this moment’s arrival. You will know when it’s time. You will remember the feeling of forward movement, and you will trust it because you have listened, and felt, and waited for the moment the wave swells around your spine, fluid matching fluid, currents carrying you to shore without pulling you under.

Your spirit will ask your body why it believes the pause and recoil isn’t exactly the movement needed for the way forward. If you resist the question, forcing your way through because the pause feels unbearable, you will be reminded to respect discomfort, until you have sat with it awhile, watching it slither snake-like through old grooves in your system, really listening to what it wants you to know.

If you have ever loved anything, or seen the eternal from behind human eyes, then you know fear and beauty can walk hand in hand. And you know that love can be there too, and that feeling the enormity of aliveness doesn’t make you anything less than honest and brave. If you are a bricklayer or bridge builder, unearthing is the first thing you must do. After that, it’s befriending winds and floods and earthquakes, so you understand the way it may go at some point down the line, building deliberately with danger in mind, hands dark under a moonless sky, strong with feeling, gentle with knowing.

Touching what is will bring you through the doorway of home, where everything changes because you have. And when body turns wise as stone, water will find its way slowly through the cracks to remind you what else you’re made of. Don’t be fooled by stories that are not your own, pretending to have answers you haven’t touched for yourself. Keep listening. You will be carried. It is enough to dance in the dark until the first sliver of light illuminates what is growing. It is enough to tend to the glow of embers until they catch themselves alight.