I found myself in darkness recently. A haze, confusion, loss, doubt pulled over me in heavy grey. Not nothing, not everything, the sickly in-between place. No direction feels like the right one. And staying put doesn’t feel right either. A place devoid of life or death. Stuck on one spoke of the wheel, unmoving and not knowing what to do about it. Maybe you know this place too? Maybe you’re there, or have been. This is a hard place to pray from. This is a good place to pray from.

I started praying. I emptied myself out onto the bank of the lake. I turned myself upside down and shook. Asked the Spirits to help me. Everything in my pockets fell down, all the old light, old intentions, old wanting, the tools that have been working but had grown stale, my rituals, my beliefs, my teeth. Everything laid out equally under the sun. A reckoning with myself.

This is what I have so far. Destroy, organize, regenerate as you wish. I don’t know what’s going on. My only prayer, as always, is this: I ask to get out of my own way so Spirit can move through at full creative force, letting me do the work I came here to do. And let me be deliciously happy while I do it. Let me enjoy this terribly sweet human dance in as many breaths as possible until I explode.

And things started moving. A new home fell into my lap. I was spontaneously and serendipitously reunited with traditions I’ve been somewhat disconnected from for a very, very long time. Mostly, the Spirits began to dance again, in real, tangible ways. Or perhaps I could see them with better vision. Their speaking was clearer. Or perhaps my hearing was better.

Can you hear them? The Spirit world is thick and woven inextricably with the physical world. Only when we begin to look and revere do those threads of Spirit visibly dance and glow. Then every stranger, old friend, and wind has the taste of sacredness. We bear witness to ordinary extraordinary magic. This is not make believe. This is the way things really are.

I don’t know what lives in the mystery. Maybe I never will. But I want to keep circling it just like this. Let my forgetting times grow shorter, my remembering times grow longer. I want to adjust my seeing frequently. Let my heart get low to the ground so I can see my kinship to all things. I want to reach into that sacred center where everything comes from and returns to. I want to drip with the beauty of that well. I want to be drenched in it until I disappear. And then I want to be formed again, into a truer version of myself. I want to be willing to do this dance again and again until I am home.