Notes From the Book

Perhaps You Know You Are in Need

When we set out to ask and to receive the help of Earth a first key starting point is to embrace the depth of our need. There is no limit to the depth of the need for help.

Perhaps you know you are in need.

The need itself is a given. Humans live in need, all our days. The awareness of the need may swell in sudden clarity. 

• A health crisis. 
• A relational transition. 
• A sudden escalation of ownership, responsibility and determination. 
• A long-looming threat that all at once becomes personally immediate, unavoidable, and fatally here. 

All futures in this one future. Live now, in need. Or do not live.

Perhaps you feel you need help to abandon that which now is gone forever so you can be born fresh into this new day and take a first new breath, alive at last, alive again at last.

Perhaps you wish to preserve at all costs some precious memory – some precious inheritance, some family stewardship – now at great risk of being lost forever. Seeing all life change – and change faster and faster all the time – you wish to plant a flag to say that this one thing shall never change.

Perhaps you know you are in need.

Perhaps you have suddenly expanded to a new sense of scope, a new scope of self, a new level of care. You now care where until now you could or would not see. You now see a bit more clearly who you are. You now see a bit more clearly where you are. You now see a bit more clearly what you will never do and what you will always do. And yet your life, your lived world, is still the world of the old, mostly. The world of the new is totally here, totally available to draw on, yet not yet totally grounded, not yet totally in play, not yet totally organized and ordered for supporting life. It may be your spiritual home or even your mental or emotional home, but it is not yet the home in which daily living unfolds and occurs. It is not yet the garden that sustains. 

Perhaps you are simply happy, happier than you let yourself ever show or share. Or you are secretly or not so secretly in rage, or in fear, or in love.  Or perhaps this time it is grief, sadness, despair. Perhaps today you are seemingly captured by thoughts and emotions you can barely let yourself imagine let alone express. Today you are aware of the ways in which life as we seem to live it seems to grind down and extinguish that which does not quite fit the prevailing emotional and natural climate.

Perhaps you know you are in need.

Perhaps you have nothing and you wish to eat.

Perhaps you own the Earth, or a big chunk of it. You live in luxury by eating the excess of all you own, and you wish to keep doing that even as the world turns all around.  Perhaps you wield or wish to wield  god-like powers that could make or break the earth, and you now wish to garden these powers in a way that preserves  rather than kills this home of ours, this Earth.

Perhaps you aim to cause a revolution in all our global structures of decision and exchange. 

Perhaps you yearn for a gradual emergence into a shared tomorrow that could learn to survive and thrive in a new way for the new day.

Perhaps you know you are in need.

Perhaps you are a student, a scientist, a builder, studying intently the ways of creation, wishing to see clearly and deeply the ways of things to bring life to learning and learning to life.

Perhaps you wish to heal our living earth and wish to offer your gift and your voice towards the creation and recreation of that which holds and shapes all you love.

Perhaps you have a dream. Perhaps you wish to live this dream out loud, sharing it and building it anew each day, giving generously so as to receive. Perhaps you simply wish to tenderly and tenuously listen to the dream whisper in your heart, to see if you start to hear more clearly where it leads and where it glimmers. Perhaps your dream is crowded out, lost in the noise, barely heard amidst the tumult and bustle and agitation we seem to inhabit.

Perhaps you are an artist and you yearn for the new. Perhaps today your art seems stale and dull, as if the moment for that art perhaps has passed by. Perhaps today there is a new art that you can almost taste yet not quite to the point of breathing it into being. Perhaps you wish to sing a new song. Perhaps you hear that new song and wish to sing what you hear. Or you despair to ever be able to sing what you hear.

Or perhaps you turn your life to prayer, asking to be made over from the inside out in the image of that which is whole and Holy and real and true.

Perhaps you know you are in need.

Perhaps you are a group of friends who wish to claim a deeper friendship. Perhaps you are alone and wish to find your friends. Perhaps you surround yourself with friends or almost friends and yet despair of ever truly being known, despair of ever truly trusting what you know. Perhaps there is a group of friends that (once upon forever) started out upon some happy way, some dedicated bond of study and truth and practice. And yet this group of then-friends now seems stuck, mired, disabled in the face of some deeper challenge. Perhaps the challenge comes from outside, a deep shock that calls on the group to rediscover and reinvent a new bond, a new way, a new friendship, a new love, a new truth. And perhaps the challenge also arises right here in our midst. Perhaps a new trauma has arisen right here in the center of our working together, a trauma that calls our very working together into question.

Or perhaps you are simply lonely, or simply curious. You wonder what else is here in life beyond what you see around you. You do not even know if more of life is possible. Yet you are willing to be willing to show up to find out. You just might be willing to thaw. You just might be willing to relax. You just might allow yourself to wonder what you actually wonder, and let that be that start of a trail to follow. You just might be ready to let love in, just enough to start to wander in the wonder. You wonder, yet you wander in. Perhaps you just might be ready to start.

Perhaps you know you are in need.

Just wander in.

Just start here.

Just start.