This piece is about the distance we keep from our own lives. It is about the part of us that asks again and again what we are meant to do, while declining the movement that would lead us toward answering it. There is something in us that keeps us circling the questions instead of moving toward the risk of discovery. We can be haunted by the life that wants to live through us, and yet refuse the small steps that would bring it into form. We do this not because we do not know, but because to know is to be changed, and that knowing frightens most of us from going deeper into our lives.
We each hear guidance. We each feel pulled and called. And still, something in us prefers the safety of longing to the vulnerability of becoming and to the intimacy of meeting what is trying to take form through us.
At its heart, this piece is about courageous listening, and honest looking at where we may be refusing life.
Lao Tzu wrote, twenty-five centuries ago: “ Who can make the muddy water clear? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear.”
I took this to mean that if we become still enough, our dirt settles to the bottom and stays there, leaving us clear water. Now, I understand it differently. The mud that fills the glass, the glass that is our body, does not sink as we become more aware. It rises to the surface instead. It means what was hidden below forces its way up, clouding the glass before it passes through.
Before the water clears, the mud must rise.
I have come to believe the silt lifting from the floor of you, obscuring everything you thought you’d settled, is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the first sign that something is waking and attempting to move out of you. The water gets murkier as it becomes more honest. What was resting on the bottom, undisturbed and invisible, is finally getting the chance to move up and out of your container. It stirs to be seen, before it spills out of you.
This is what it felt like when a cloudy swirl of dark dust rose in front of me the other day. It was a little vein of self-deception I wasn’t aware was running through my waters. An innocent lie that began to unmistakably take shape through the murk.
Writing in my journal, two questions surfaced:
Where have you been saying “I don’t know” when what you mean is “I don’t know how”? Where have you been turning away from a doorway you know you must go through?
I have been telling myself that I feel lost. That the maps are unmarked and lead nowhere. That in my lostness, I cannot possibly know what’s next.
For years, a dream has come, like a bird tapping at the window. On many levels, I have been denying it and refusing to engage it fully. The map is not clear; that part is true, but the doorway has long been marked. I am simply resistant to entering. Instead of taking a risk and daring to push open, I’ve been standing in front of the door, narrating my confusion and the fog of my not knowing.
The lie I have been telling is: I do not know.
But the truth is: I don’t know how.
I’m not sure how I’m going to get there. How am I going to bring the dream into this body? How am I going to grow into someone capable of meeting what the dream asks of me? How am I going to embody what I feel is mine to embody?
I have sat at the foot of the same cedar tree and made the same prayer: May the mystery have its way with me. May it guide me where I am needed and called. I have felt something like wings move inside me, a great light taking up more and more space, urging me toward territories I am not certain I can survive entering. There is a momentum growing, as if something in me is trying to lift into flight. And at the very same time, I grip certain pieces of myself in place.
My quiet requests under the tree have felt deeply sincere, but fear rises when I imagine losing the comfort of my familiar world — the furniture arranged just so, the life I know how to manage. The dark earth begins to move with insights and urges, ways to move forward, and at the first sight of the sprout, I cover it with dirt.
So perhaps the prayer is not, “Have your way with me.” Perhaps the prayer is: Show me how I am blocking myself from following through with what I already know.
How often, I wonder, are we obscuring our own knowing, because what we are actually afraid of is entering — or exiting — the rooms we know we are meant to move through?
