I am not tenaciously excavating for hidden answers any more. I am lighting candles And leaving a light on for them, so they can find their way home, to me. —When we are both ripe and ready.
Whatever comes, must come.
Whatever goes, flows, passing when and where it must.
This does not mean I am complacent or fatalistic. Quite the contrary. I still get to grieve what passes or fails to come. I still get to set my sails and put my hand to the wheel, even get out and push in service to something that sets my heart aflame.
We lament the passing of summer and then nature gives us autumn, when all the heavy toil is done for a time and as Camus says, “…is a second spring in which every leaf becomes a flower.”
Pronoia is a lived belief that life conspires to do you great service and that everything, however difficult, must ultimately have meaning. That what is so often being carried away by what you think is misfortune is hubris and ignorance in yourself—and other encumbrances in your life that would have ultimately kept you small in some way. It is a lived belief that sometimes despite the pain and loss of the threshing, whatever is taken from us was never ours to begin with, or, is how life makes the way for our greater self to arrive. Whatever is sent our way, is what arrives to prepare us in some way for trials and opportunities we will not have the strength or the wisdom to face unless we first face this. Pronoia is the word for Love over Fear.
It is to look at the supposed nobility of hustle and grind and to pull back the hood and reveal the true identity of the Scooby-doo villain: a lived belief in scarcity.
I am not a religious man. But it turns out I am, as we all undoubtedly are, Spiritual.
And so I choose my stance. I trust. I light my candles, I say aloud what I want in this world.
And then I Listen,
with my whole existence.
What is Prayer if not this?
The real question becomes, always, how quickly can I find the courage and the grace to be generous to myself.
I am still seeking and searching, most earnestly… —it's just that curiosity, it turns out is a better spyglass than desperation and grace, a wiser guide than shame or raw defiance, and love, —oh love!— a far truer compass than fear.
