Sarah Blondin is a free weekly newsletter. If you love it, consider supporting it financially. For $7/mo, you’ll gain access to my monthly Q&A and my serial-Folding In. The work I create here is reader-supported, hence the lack of ads and sponsors. Thank you!
From time to time, alchemizing energy surges through my body, mind, spirit, and with it comes this unspeakable knowing and assurance. Beauty is laid bare. You see farther than you are used to, beyond the corners and bends, and over the tops of distant mountain ridges. A rise of love, faith, and trust, bloom like a mushrooming cloud from the center, widening out like a vapor of sweet air.
These are the times when gratitude is spontaneous and dense, shot out like moonbeams from your eyes and mouth and skin. You can no longer conceal your love. These are the times where you can see clearly that all the forces of our life, its expressions, and experiences meet at one central point of illumination, and we are deeply soothed. The distress of life and all its uncertainty and coming loss is still present, but they are set inside a kindness, resting in the melody, receiving the gentle and generous caress.
Just as this glimpse of miracle is given to our eyes and heart, things will and do change. The lens around your eyes may grow dark, fear will shapeshift the stump in the forest into a wolf, and your perspective will mutate. This is the nature of things. But we prepare the earth of life, the garden of our existence, regardless of the seasons of drought, flood, and spoil. We meet the ground with seeds of love, for we know it grows our harvest. Ripe, round, sweet things spring from the ground, just as surely as the inevitable bite of frost.
I'm coming to see within the hard and bitter landscapes we are looking for something. The soul dips in and out of unity and regulation to wrestle with doubt and distrust. This is the way the bread of our life is kneaded. We are shaped and formed by what we discover within the seed of every season. It is wise to begin the inquiry about what we are looking for in our fear or loneliness, self-deprecating thoughts, or sense of isolation and separateness.
What are you seeking to find in these places? What kernel of light are you reaching to claim?
It is not my joy or the ease of life that has taught me most; my fear has shown me how to cultivate the virtues of compassion, understanding, gentleness, and faith— the very fulcrums of my existence. Fear continues to teach me essential things about myself and how to be with my life, but only because I try my best to face the fear and seek to find what is hiding in it for me. Fear or whatever other flavor of struggle needs a process to process. We pull a carrot from the ground to eat, but not before cleaning and shaking off the soil covering it.
But after the visit to a doctor or hospital, the bash of hysteria from a news headline, the unexpected death of someone we love, or the grief of sudden change settling in, it is easy to forget there is wisdom thread into the fear the body goes through. It's easy to forget there's a hand being offered to you to hold— the hand of fear itself. It is easy to forget this is the time for investigation and careful harvest.
