Mar 30, 2022 • 19M

Folding in 25

deep trust.

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Sarah Blondin
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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!


Unconditional

~a poem by Jennifer Paine Welwood

Willing to experience aloneness,

I discover connection everywhere;

turning to face my fear,

I meet the warrior who lives within;

opening to my loss,

I gained the embrace of the universe;

Surrendering into emptiness,

I find fullness without end.

Each condition I flee from pursues me,

Each condition I welcome transforms me

And becomes itself transformed

Into its radiant jewel-like essence.

I bow to the one who has made it so,

Who has crafted this Master Game;

To play it is purest delight-

To honor its form, true devotion.

The longer I live, the more I can witness periods—epochs of life that are dense with different qualities and revelatory phases. The great gift of aging is the beginning to see our life's intricate passageways and backcloth. We have been through much and will continue to roll as we are, through whatever form or format our life takes on. I have found some comfort in the understanding that nothing remains static for too long and that each period holds value. Nothing is wasted on us. Even our most terror-filled moments are rife with value. 

What if we were not anxious to solve a problem all the time? What if we unconditionally live out what is here, now, for us? What if we are to bow to the one who made it so and honor its form?

The two most challenging teachers of my life have been depression and anxiety. The years of depression were a type of soul sadness. These years held a quality of aching—an aching to connect with a part of me I had yet to discover. These years were hard, as the yearning was relentless, but this pressure was the hand that nudged me, minute by minute, toward a deeper relationship with myself. It never let up, it was on my back at all times reminding me to keep looking deeper and deeper. Finally pushed all the way down on my back, defeated you could say, I discovered I was not falling aimlessly through a dark night. I was caught and held, caught and held by me. It was as if that depression and defeat had led me to land squarely into myself, emptied and quiet and still. As I learned to fold in, I found the depression lifting and a new Sarah emerging. This new Sarah would then carry me into another relationship with my life, complete with unique callings, purpose, and challenges. And so the story goes we are led to find ourselves in different ways and with it comes new awakenings. It’s a process.

Nothing compares, however, to the years of anxiety I experienced. I rolled into a storm that turned the world dark. These years had a quality of terror, bewilderment, and utter dismay and despair. After spending two years in its grasp, I am sure it is a threshold. It is where we develop the essential reserve for our life—faith. We convene with our darkness and find our essence. It is where we obtain a light that will help sustain and uphold us as we move more profoundly into our life and our losses.  

What is faith, what does faith really mean? Benedictine monk and author Brother David Steindl-Rast defines faith as trust and courage. "Deep down there is only one faith that all human beings have, and that is that deep trust in life. Even our body expresses that trust in life by always taking another breath. We can't even stop it. We can't stop breathing." To connect with and find this trust in life itself is to find faith. To find faith is to find rest in life and the unfolding, rest in our hearts, minds, and bodies—perhaps the purpose of life: to learn to trust it. 

I speak of this now as one of my dearest friends is amid a very arduous period of anxiety. He has been unearthing his trust, and it has been wearing him down, and yet he appears to me to be flourishing into a person I love and adore even more than I did before. From a distance, I see what he cannot. I see the beauty the roughness is revealing. His hard layers are sloughing off to reveal this tender sweetness to him, and with it, his presence is changing, his listening deepening, and his heart reverberating off mine. I listen and watch as he shares with me his findings, and I am blessed to be able to assure him in any way I can. Just to affirm what he is struggling with, provides a form of healing and peace.

Many of us have stood in this frightening place without solace or support and must toil mostly in hiding, making it almost unbearable. This space I have created here is so no one needs to walk their thresholds alone. I speak to what I have known, to support the hearts quietly reckoning with inner burdens and distress. So, whether anxiety is with you now or another hard thing, you can apply the following thoughts and perspectives. I wrote this in my journal during those long, unnerving years. 

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