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Who really knows what a soul is? I don’t. When I try to hold it, the concept of soul disintegrates like sunlight over the evening horizon. I can sense it. I feel sure I can touch it. But the warmth and glow of the experience – it’s gone long before I have anything definitive to show you.

A picture? It records, yes. But it’s not the same as living, as we know.

How about the understanding that the sun is still there after it sets, that it’s just us who are spinning? That’s helpful because it gives me faith that tomorrow I may once again be able to stand here, with outstretched senses, tasting the air and absorbing the color of another departure.

But it’s not the same. It can never be the same. And we know it.

We witness death routinely. People, animals, plant and other life forms – over the course of a typical human lifetime, the transition from alive to dead, from animated to absent, from here to there, happens all too frequently. Death’s regularity doesn’t diminish its significance; it is heartbreaking, sometimes literally, to lose someone or something we love. Part of us feels wrested away, sometimes abruptly, almost always unwillingly, from the inner reaches of our being.

“I’ll never be the same,” it is often said. And that is true. Loss of a loved one can create a void that vibrates with vulnerability, a rent in the fabric of individual identity that is not easily repaired.

Suppose that is the point? Suppose what we feel when lose a precious person or pet is reminder of the deeply interconnected nature of life?

A few years ago, while walking under an evening sky, it occurred to me that the soul may not be a static, singular thing, that each of us may be ever-changing amalgamations of life forces and essences, that people I’ve lost may not have taken part of me with them but instead left part of themselves with me, that the feeling of space experienced when a loved one dies is the opening necessary for a portion of that loved one to continue living. The possibility stopped me on the path. Might a part of my mom’s soul live within, another part within my siblings, additional parts in other people who loved her enough to make space inside their own identities for someone else’s good to continue? Is it correct to call those soul gifts “parts”? Doesn’t quantum physics open up the possibility of non-binary sharing?

If you’re a religious person, you may not resonate with this idea. The same may be true if you are scientific, or an atheist, or, well, just about anyone trying to find their way through this confusing world. Because you likely sense that you are, well, you. You have a name. You wake up each day in the same body. You have memories. You have photos to prove yourself. You have ample documentation from your years on this planet that you are unique, that you have a solitary and special identity distinct from everyone around you. Cultural and media stories reinforce your, my, and everything’s uniqueness. Our differences. Our separation. Logic follows that our souls should be similarly unique, different, and separate.

The word “soul” descends from the Greeks, by way of Old High German and Old English. It brings with it notions of non-physical essence, and immortality – persistence beyond the physical form. Of course, this belief is not particularly Greek; a number of traditions across human history have similar if somewhat varying linguistic and belief ancestries. Such traditions often promote self-awareness, which brings with it individuality, which brings with it our contemporary crises of self-centeredness.

But the same sense of self also enables conscious experience of things greater than what can be measured. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is more to things in our heaven and earth than what we may dream of in our respective philosophies. For example, I know, without a doubt, that I have felt the essence of life hover outside the human body. I know, without the ability to have you know it the same way, that I have experienced soul at the time of, and after, someone’s death.

I believe in soul, regardless of how it is defined, because my life experience has confirmed it exists. Like all humans, I have felt the gaping void of loss, have stood with others as they have been drawn by the destabilizing pull of such loss. However, I have also felt the same void filled by something that was not me, have listened to others describe a similar experience. We are not statically whole. We are instead dynamically whole, a constellation of emerging and engaging presences and essences that somehow demonstrate the unfolding potential of being.

Does that make me immortal? No, at least not in the sense some narratives may suggest; the state of my own soul at the time of my death relies on who and what I invite into it between now and the second my body takes its last breath. Who I am depends as much on who you and others are and have been during my life. Curiously, that makes us, together, immortal. It makes our best intentions, our blended commitment to each other, to life, to something we might call the common good, immortal. When the unique admixture of psyche and inspiration is freed from our physical forms, perhaps we are releasing ourselves to others in the same way that others have previously offered themselves to us. Should we not do so with love, with compassion, with selflessness – in life as well as death? Why do we hold so tightly to the conviction that we are autonomous and discrete embodiments of existence?

There is nothing for good to embrace when physical form expires – except other physical forms. Life seeks immanence. We might try to remember that when we excessively cling to views reinforcing independence as ideal, achievement as personal. We have always been more than a collection of selves. We are, and always may be, a transpersonal and interdependent whole.

When my time comes, please make space for the better parts of me. Because whatever good enlivens my form undoubtedly came from others, maybe even from you. It only seems right to return it.

I watched a bird tiptoe down a branch today.

It performed a sort of shimmy,

right foot left foot, right foot left,

moving side to side, its beak pointing

at the dried and brittle tips 

of the berries at the branch’s end.

Berries? Or just dried disappointment?

The bird’s destination seemed more symbol of wintry 

death than sign of sunny pre-spring 

sustenance.

The branch bent beneath the bird’s advance,

leaning wistfully against another, itself supporting

its own bird having its own expedition into the lightness

of life and the unexpected if impermanent flexibility 

of the food chain.

I live on the corner of a small lot abundant with trees and things that grow. During their daily walks, the neighborhood dogs dally when they round our corner, sniffing at the gravel separating pavement from nature. Many of them leaving their calling cards. As a humorous reminder to the leashed bipeds being led about by their canine companions, I placed a small sign at a more popular location in the collaborative circumnavigation of the block. “There is no poop fairy,” it reads. There is a small picture of a fairy and a gentle request that owners clean up after their furry friends.

“We thought it said ‘poop fairly’.”

One of our neighbors had houseguests who misread the sign while driving by. We all got a big kick out of the misunderstanding. It was, perhaps, more apt than one might initially think.

It is easy to travel the byways of being relatively inattentive to the debris we leave behind. Of course, not everything saved by the universe in the wake of travels is discard. There is plenty of good. Some of us are even more intentional about leaving the places and communities wherein we live better than when we first found them – or found ourselves active within them. Unfortunately, however, most of us have ample space to improve; we jettison what we no longer need or want without sufficient regard for who or what may follow. Or when. And, make no mistake, “when” does more than await. It arrives. When becomes now becomes past all too quickly, even suddenly. Tomorrow rushes toward today with inevitable urgency. Thus we might better consider the consequences of our oversights in current moments, accidental or not, as the refuse we rush from in the present too quickly transform into the quagmires and quandaries of the generations growing into maturity behind us.

The metaphor of pooping fairly is funny when referring to the droppings of dogs. It is less amusing when applied to human behavior on planet earth. For we must not avert our eyes (and noses) to the truth simply because it shocks our more delicate sensibilities: there is no poop fairy magically working out of sight and off camera to clean up the messes of our selfish disregard. We must learn to be those fairies. Better still, we must try harder to reduce the need for poop fairyness.

I get tired sometimes – of the weight of it all. There is so much to improve. As human populations grow, as our capacity to harm each other and our local and global environment expands with almost exponential influence, I sometimes feel like retreating inside the bubble of my secure and relatively safe existence. There are missiles arcing through the lower atmosphere in places I have never visited. There is evidence readily available at the click of a remote control on the suffering and seemingly endless inhumanity besetting communities near and far. What impact can someone such as I have in a world with so much strife, so much hatred, so much hopelessness? Why should I, or you, or any of us delude ourselves into imagining that our little corners of being make a difference when the real decisions, the big levers of survival decision-making, rest with those who pull triggers, push buttons, authorize brutality, and engage in cycles of retribution and vengeance that will, if unchecked, threaten the very existence of humans and all biological lifeforms as we may know them?

Because collective fairness feeds on our individual fairyness. That’s right: you heard it correctly. Communal and collective fairness is fed by the routine and very personal acts of selfless fairies like you and me. The whole – what some call “humanity” – is not some distant, disturbingly separate and unapproachable cloud of impossibly impenetrable ideas and experience. It is the sum, no the synergy, of all the simple and wonderfully tangible touches and triumphantly kind decisions we make each and every day. There is no doubt that human behavior can be horrid. There is no question that bleak and barren conduct confronts compassion and kindness with fatiguing regularity. But just because it is does not mean it must always be. You, me, all of us can and do make a difference – together we all must make a difference – in order for hope to be more than a feeling and instead become a reason, a cause, a collective commitment.

My dog sniffs at the passings of her compatriots every time we exit our driveway. She interprets a language comprehensible only to her kind. I, on the other hand, observe the effect of one tiny sign on the actions of an entire neighborhood of dog owners. They have all become poop fairies. Maybe, if together we leave and heed tiny empathic reminders for each other of our common destiny and capability, our minute acts of fairyness can inspire fairness for generations, even millennia, to come.

Our language can reveal a lot about who we are, who we have been, who we might become.

“Aren’t you just the spitting image of her?” We’ve all heard or used that phrase, or something similar. Some say spitten’ or splitting, depending on the place from which they hail. Before you wonder about whether “hail” in that last sentence refers to the precipitate that sometimes falls from the sky, you should know it does not; sailors instead used to “hail” each other when passing on the high or low seas of human travel and exploration. You can almost hear the echo of their hollers across the waves of time. “Hello! Where are you from?” Imagine human voices mingling with water and wind as voyagers sought connection, even if only for a moment. We are a curious species. Programmed to learn from each other, it is natural for us to hope that someone who has already been somewhere can ready us for our own journeys. It is also invigorating to envision the sights and sensory possibilities of someplace new, somewhere foreign to our own experience, based on a stranger’s description.

Maybe that helps explain a related instinct to marvel when we recognize likeness among people or across generations. Sure, we know that shared genes evidence in familiar features; it is not surprising to observe that the shape and color of someone’s eyes are remarkably similar to their mother’s. We’ve all been taught about the power of DNA. We don’t doubt that inheritance happens through genetics.

And yet there is a different type of legacy we often identify, an heirloom of heritage associated with something else, something intangible yet recognizable loitering behind a similar eye shape and color: a “look”. People are often populated by presences that feel more ethereal than physical. It isn’t the same necessarily as a dead relative or friend but it is, well, spittingly consubstantial, congruent, kindred. It’s like windows are occasionally, even fleetingly, opened into some sacred sense of spiritual sharing, some inexplicable ancestry of soul. The view can be brief, disarming, and strangely reassuring. The image we experience is more felt than seen. We might swear that someone we once knew and perhaps loved is smiling at us, tilting their head a certain way, or using a word or phrase only we understand has special significance, in that moment, to our lives. We feel hailed from a world beyond physical form.

Why should a soul be static? I just took a big leap there; the springboard from metaphysical experience to the demonstrable existence of immaterial spirit requires considerable potential and kinetic energy. But does it really? A friend and colleague passed last week from the earthly plane. Before I could begin to plumb the layers of grief associated with sudden loss, the image of him smiling was just there, planted inside my mind’s eye in a way that felt powerfully visible in the air and space around me. If you had been standing next to me, I feel sure you would have seen the same thing. Memory? The human capacity to seek meaning and comfort through creative exploitation of interior imagination? We too easily relegate our reality to rational explanations and justifications. The binary dominates our viewfinder. Alive and dead. Here and then. Physical and non-physical. Soul and non-soul.

I have a theory: the soul exists, it is continuous, and it is continuously emerging. Depending on your beliefs, you may agree (or not) with the first two characteristics of my theory. But continuously emerging? What does that mean? I’m not completely sure. I think it suggests that my soul borrows from, is infused by, and indeed inherits some parts of other souls. Why should we not, however, be capable to taking the best (or sadly sometimes the worst) of others, during and after their lifetimes? I have no doubt whatsoever that there is persistence of being outside our three dimensional forms; certain experiences have convinced me that consciousness, spirit, and life are not confined to what our five senses typically feel. From that place and perspective, it is easier, in fact freeing, to open myself to the possibility that soul, specifically my soul, is a compositional amalgamation of forces, influences, and continuances from other souls, most notably those who have left the forms we so readily identify with names. Pictures, stories, written words, artistic works, disappointments and accomplishments are left for our material world to retain and catalogue. The unique constellation of spiritual intent and history comprising the person behind and within that organic residue and remembrance need not immutably endure. It can be reconfigured. It may be reconstituted. It might return to and through us in the shape of spitting images, discernible glimpses into a great beyond that is mysteriously and incomprehensibly reshaping, reemerging, and forever being.

My early morning routine is guided by insights from a blend of wisdom traditions. Over a cup of tea, I reflect on the wonderful uncertainty of life through readings, recordings, and commentary from Buddhism, Greek classicism, and Judea-Christian scripture. I used to fuss a bit over which tradition I should invite into each day. In recent years, however, I’ve been learning to welcome any that aspire to helping humans overcome our ego-driven tendencies to grasp, to hold, and to possess. Some days there is an astounding alignment across them all – if only I ease my focus and let their likeness shine. When I lose myself in the wonder of positive intent, there is so much more to find.

Silence is more than the absence of sound.

It was an idyllic autumn afternoon. I recall a canvas of shiny azure celestial ceiling, amber cliff faces and sandstone, and dusty boots. A medical student completing a family medicine rotation on the Navajo Nation, I had been invited on a weekend hike to some overlooks and canyons in the region. Somewhere in the middle of an afternoon made for landscape painters, I sat on a rock ledge, drank some water, and closed my eyes. The months hung like a jet engine’s contrail; their residue shifted with time’s winds until they were mysteriously absorbed by the depths of time’s atmosphere. It felt good to pause, to be awake without responsibility, to sit close-eyed without a desire for sleep. The earth was beneath and behind. A giant yawn of canyon and sky stretched before and around. A single bird called from some distant horizon. Then nothingness embraced me.

Surely I had experienced total silence in the past; we hardly notice what we are not ready to recognize. At this moment, however, in this particular place, it seemed I had earned the right to receive emptiness. There was no sound. There was no thought. The boundary between being and becoming blurred. I was fully awake, powerfully present, yet foundationally unmoored from standard states of awareness and consciousness. Unexpectedly and without intention, I had relaxed into a space of simple harmony. No up. No down. No then. Only now. Just this. Not even this. Just …

What – no sound? The observation retethered me to thought. Could I hear anything? Could I really hear nothing? Had I ever been anywhere in my life when I was unable to hear anything?

Some say that sensory deprivation can have unsettling effects on the psyche. This was not such an experience. It felt invigorating to know that it was possible not to hear. I could create sound, yes; I tested the theory by a slight ruffling of my shirt sleeve. But nothing else was rumbling, roaring, buzzing, or bothering me for attention. It seemed that the universe had gone mute. Or maybe it had forgotten my name. It was reassuring to imagine that I might, even momentarily, be forgotten.

Once observed, reality changes. The weightless sensation dissipated like the last gust of wind from a passing weather system. I fell back into my body, re-opening my eyes to a place that was both foreign and forever familiar. A bush shimmered beside me. The boot of another hiker reminded me of some schedule and timeline. “There you are,” a voice said. “Ready?”

We live our days like frames from a movie reel. Played at the appropriate speed, there is the impression of continuity, of seamless interconnection. Slowed down, however, experience is not as continuous as we presume. There are spaces in between our senses, crevasses in cognition, gaping gazes into the abyss of being that are as much breathtaking as it is breath offering. My experience decades ago on the brink of auditory emptiness was but a taste of the power and potential of silence, of stillness. Meditation motions us toward immutability. When we stop, sit, and cease to speak and listen, when we pause and perch on the precarious ledge of any precise moment, there is a place, a sliver of potential, for poise, for balance. For engaged and detached and ungrasping presence.

At the age of sixty-four, I find myself called by silence. Inside its welcome, there is neither regret nor joy nor desire to be better, different, or anything other than here, inside a still moment, sheltered by the tranquil happiness for the gift of being alive.

It feels good to sleep between the right sheets, especially when the weather is hot. Apparently there is some science behind this. While the specifics get complicated based on material type, the concept is fairly straightforward: a balance between thread count and weave creates for a cooler sleeping experience. The more sheets breathe, the better humans rest.

I can’t help but pause to consider the language used to describe a sheet’s ability to let the human skin respire during repose. As we breathe, so do our sheets. It probably shouldn’t be a surprise; sheets are, after all, just reusable skins we manufacture to help our biologic ones maintain homeostasis when we enter nightly states of semi-hibernatory suspension. Natural selection has adjusted for many things, over millions of years. And the largest human organ – the skin – is an amazing feat of evolutionary manifestation. But humans still need supplemental shells during our daily routines. We don’t just cloak ourselves because of modesty. We can’t survive in most climates, awake or not, without doing so.

Plenty of species don’t have this problem. They use hair, burrows, nests, even other bodies to maintain body warmth by night. They spread wings, flap ears, roll in mud, and use various other techniques by day to keep cool, to regulate. Sure, some four-legged friends tolerate knitted sweaters or blankets, depending on situation or odd human whim. For the most part, however, the natural world has not sacrificed organic solutions for manufactured ones. Humans seem to be the only species unable to survive without fabricated assistance.

This is not an idle critique; I’m pleased to wear clothing and sleep between percale, sateen, or cotton. There is nothing wrong with our requirement for attire. It demonstrates innovation, practicality, and plenty of flair and personality. What other species has figured out how to create enveloping spheres of protection around itself, changeable based on season, replaceable following repeated use? We are animals of verticality, our orientating centers of operation positioned at the very top of our physique. We conduct the business of daily life, for the most part, upright and awake. What we know matters most, what we can do with that knowledge, where it can take us and the planet we inhabit, how we are able to continuously respond to changing needs, predict futures, survive, and grow.

Hold on a second. There may indeed be other species that have figured out a thing or two about protection. Upon further reflection, my mind is now flooded with images of floral and faunal adaptability to weather and environment that make our clothing and bedding discoveries seem less impressive. I should be careful to differentiate between ingenuity and necessity. After all, humans never intentionally decided that we didn’t need body hair or woolen skin. We didn’t consciously, as a species, choose fire over fur. It just happened, as did the drive to knit, weave, cut, and sew natural and synthetic fibers into a myriad of physical shapes and sizes. We had to sort all that out – in order to survive.

But even that’s not quite right. Humans didn’t have to spread themselves out across the entire planet. We could have remained within a band or two of longitude and latitude that didn’t require complex adaptation. We might have been satisfied to keep our species scope and locale somewhat more circumspect.

That is clearly not our style. “Have consciousness will travel!” seems our motto. The infusion of thought and language has fueled an almost insatiable desire for movement. Unable to sit still, the human species has become obsessed with exploration, typically in and of the external world. A place that has not been trod by our footwear, on earth or outside our atmosphere, is a destination, somewhere we should go. It’s actually not a bad axiom, this restless drive to brave terra incognito. Discoveries abound because of it. So does our knowledge of the universe and its cosmos. Bipeds now fly, hover, and voyage to geographies unimaginable to previous species, generations, and millennia. We just need new types of shells, more innovative traveling shells and transportation skins, to take us to these places, and hopefully return us home.

“Home.” The word lands deep within. I feel it in my gut, despite the sensation from the soft chair on which I sit while I think about apparel, travel, and notions of returning. My skin, with its trillions of cells and sensors, appreciates the chair’s cushion, the shirt and shorts on my body, the fan blowing cooling air above my head. My sense of being, however, seeks something else. It recognizes home as something far different than walls, roof, and floor enclosing my rather feeble physical form. Nestled within that sensation of release I have in response to the idea of returning home lies a longing to belong to something well beyond my dermatologic border, a desire, nay, an awareness, that I already am part of something bigger, something more intricate, something more interwoven than the seamless layer of cells covering my unique constellation of sinew, organ, and physical structure. I am awareness, or at least that awareness, the knowing that my gut has which my brain does not. I am not simply a machine motored by physique, manufactured by genes, commanded by brain. There is not some little version of me, the proverbial homunculus, seated in a control tower within an encased hard shell balanced precariously atop my human verticality who is running the show. There is something more. My gut knows this. What type of envelope holds such awareness? What sort of skin, spiritual or ethereal, lets such awareness find inspiration? How thin is the skein of interconnection between my awareness, yours, and that of every living organism and creature respiring in one way or another in the world today?

I am beginning to realize that more threads in a life do not necessarily result in a better braid of being. At least when it comes to a sense of home, a more balanced weave between go and be may bring less bounded space for me to breathe.

Streams flow, emptying into earth, sky, and the continuous current of change.

“I’m tired of not speaking my mind.”

Someone said this to me recently, in defense of a rather blunt and somewhat hurtful comment they had made to someone else. The situational context mattered less, it seemed, than the individual’s need to “tell it like it is”, to be honest.

Truth is a tricky thing. It can sway under the weather and wonder of moments. Like blades of wheat reaching vertically in time’s fields, we move laterally in response to the winds of our days, bumping into each other, becoming entangled, forgetting to keep our attention on both the source of our yearning and the anchoring of our being. The sun shines generously, impartially, on us all. And yet we jostle and position for perspective as if somehow our roots can be transplanted in richer soil, longing for a loam that is free from our common ancestry, our collective existence.

I made a face while eating dinner the other day. My wife and I were sharing a meal inside a recently screened pergola we bought and built in our tiny yet fertile backyard. July has been growing hotter. Sitting outside after sunset in the peak of an Arizona summer seems a bit like a meal resting in a pan freshly removed from a stove’s heat. Volume sags. Presence pulses. The future is poignantly certain yet the moment oddly bursts with unworried relief, acceptance.

That’s when I took a bite of dinner, briefly chewed, and felt the muscles of my face alternately contract, relax, and turn slightly askew as I swallowed. The sequence was unrelated to any conversation; we were eating in silence. I was blissfully empty of thought. And then I swallowed and, as if spontaneously sprouting from a place of majestic nonchalance, a memory arose: how my father sometimes swallowed. This was no image, not some visual remembrance of Dad at a particular place and time. I was simply he. He was me. I was swallowing not as I remembered him doing but as he and I were, had, should be doing together, a gesture of concurrence manifest outside the landscape of time and separate identity. I felt and saw myself looking, acting, and feeling like him.

This hasn’t been the first of such fleeting fancies of blurred beingness. I’ve had a few similar experiences in recent months, a sensation akin to catching water droplets on outstretched hands beneath a cloudless overhead sky. Everything coalesces. Thought ceases. There is only the ineffable recognition of shared now.

I don’t know what is true. And I am increasingly cautious of speaking my mind. Because the reality of what, who, and how we are seems so much more complicated than what the narrative of our personal timeline suggests, the stories you and I construct inside the walls of our isolating identities about ourselves and each other. What does it mean to be honest? Is it helpful to release without filter the often unflattering and turbulent commentary generated by an ego’s memory field onto the outstretched vulnerability of another? It sure seems like the right thing to do when someone else releases part of their own troubled tumult. “Oh yeah?” a voice hollers inside. “You want to know the truth?” Writing those words here, I hear that voice inside my own head. It is a four or five-old’s, maybe my own four or five year-old’s, confronting some emotionally-charged challenge or perceived threat. It is joined by other young, frightened, or indignant expressions of defiant self-defense. They sound like taunts from the sidewalks and street corners of my youth. Sitting with them, however, I hear them merge, into a single plea for recognition, and then softly recede into the soundless posture of humanity sitting on the curb of summer dusk and just wanting to be understood, nay, to be held. We don’t want to fight. We have no desire to be arbiters of truth. We just want to know that truth exists, that it somehow is able to hold our hand, whisper in our heart, touch our spirits with its buoyant beauty.

Aaaahhhh. Release and relief just rippled across me. I can feel myself stretching once more, upwards, toward the dimensionless future, downwards, toward the interwoven past, and outwards, toward you.

What is your greatest fear? There is no shortage of reasons to be afraid, as life offers many challenges. Concern can accumulate in a lifetime like rings in a tree. Unlike arboreal additions, however, the anxieties which often encircle our awareness are quite different to the new growth girdling a maturing tree. One constricts. The other strengthens.

“We really need to try to be more open.”

As usual, my wife was direct and on point. We had just ridden a gondola up the side of a mountain, marveling at the summer majesty of the Colorado Rockies in response to the recent winter’s abundant snowfall. Our gondola ride had not be a quiet one; shortly before the doors closed in the boarding station, another couple had joined us, a much younger pair. When one of the two interlopers had apologized for disrupting what we thought was to be a trip of soft solitude, I had said something semi-welcoming. But our body language had undoubtedly communicated something very different: disappointment.

What a mistake! The couple was delightful. During the ten minute ride to an altitude of close to two miles above sea level, we learned a bit about their background, how they were spending a summer working remotely from the local mountain town, what they enjoyed about both this region and where they would be returning at summer’s end. The conversation enhanced our ride, our day, reminding us that nature’s glory is not always meant to be experienced in solitude. Better still, the interaction offered humbling counsel on the importance, even the vital place, of continuous engagement, receptivity.

It is so easy to close, to recoil, to seek internal cover in the face of each day’s fresh potential for frightening rebirth. It takes courage to turn and unfold, like a flower greeting the sun and elements, when we know not what harm may befall such vulnerable baring. Far easier is a posture of caution, defense. The array of potential provocation loitering beyond transparency’s threshold can be paralyzing.

That’s where faith enters. What I fear, while understandably relevant, should be secondary to what I believe. Because cradled within my beliefs lie the aspirations of my being, the hopes of my existence, the reasons I find during my most private moments to live, to become someone better today than the person I was yesterday. How I act should be guided by what I believe.

Is this about religion? Wisdom traditions based on values promoting positive action beyond selfish place pour steadying foundations beneath frequently unstable human footing. But belief can also include spirituality and sensibility that defies categorization while resonating with purpose and intent. We are not alive for ourselves. We could not live without others, whether of human or other biological form. It makes no sense to build layers of defense when our very being depends on connection.

And yet we do it, or at least I do, far too often. A voice inside me may call for caution. My imagination may fill my spirit with prospects of misfortune, for myself or for those I love. It is easy to lose oneself in a narrative of separateness, of independence. In response to what I might fear, I can construct borders that divide, that compress, that deliver my best self to the clenched grip of my sometimes worst instincts.

Faith – a belief in something greater – liberates. Based on trust instead of proof, it offers no guarantees, only the awareness that the gift of being is shared. Everything is interrelated, interconnected, even interdependent. I can chose to believe that, or I can live within a circumscribed shell of suspicion, of deliberate discretion. The path to peace and growth is illuminated by that daily decision.

I am learning how to turn from identification of my fears towards a more affirming realization of my faith. The experience, however fleeting, feels freeing.

Snow simply falls

manifesting itself from the magical heaven of nothing,

which is everything.

The world is expanding,

growing,

reaching into unworlds that wonderfully do not

exist and yet mysteriously pulse

with potential.

Nature stretches in the morning.

The sun rises and things of beauty and life awaken, extending

their senses into space, satisfied

with the opportunity to open and to be,

each little universes waiting to be embraced.