I’ve been so driven to create my future; so actively involved in writing it out and imagining it, desiring it. I have mentally lived a dozen future lives in other countries, warmer climates, doing real estate development, or only writing and some swing trading, have less responsibility, no more…having multiple homes, then only a windswept cottage and next an Irish castle that is part B&B…In these creative dreams I’ve had no dogs, huge Irish wolfhounds and even horses again. The truth is any one of these lives would work.
My mind has been on a mission to know. My body is reflecting the pain of the tension of not knowing where to aim next in my creative process of actively sculpting my life. I am clearly not peace- full. We are in a fast moving stream of life. If we are not plunging forward we will be regressing, swept back only to have to regain ground once again. Right?
Lately, I question if all that active creation is indeed, “right”. I have a friend who chides me and encourages me to “only live in the now”. I argue that there are two sides to every coin; that he is failing to create his life actively and will have to be content with where the “now” takes him – if anywhere. They used to call this “drifting”. We all know many people whose lives appear no different than when we were involved in them a decade or more ago. What a waste, I think. We only have one life. To fail to actively create it and live it with a purposeful intensity is to have squandered the stewardship of our precious gift called “our life”.
The truth is there is a tenuous balance between living in the now and creating the future. The tightrope we balance upon is trust. There is a trust even deeper than the usual concept of trust. I call it “blind trust”. God shows me the source of my angst lately about which of these imagined “futures” I’ve drummed up mentally and then posted to the page as a possible focused pursuit is linked to a lack of trust…I feel like I don’t want to waste time so I want to know which one future dream to plan for and focus on. He wants me to relax, to trust life, to trust Him. I thought I did…
He shows me a mental image of the essence of blind trust. Jane Shanley, a childhood friend, and I are lying on our backs on a summer’s day on a picnic blanket in her front yard under the most immense Mulberry tree. I clearly recall this day. Our backs one with the earth, we looked up into the tree from the underside and saw it from a new perspective. The veins of each giant leaf stood out from long, sinuous branches as bright sunlight streamed through the tree to bathe us in patches of illumination below. We were 8 years old and I have never been wiser.
We were accustomed to living totally in the moment. No one had to teach us to trust. We didn’t even consider that “trust” might be needed in life or even what it was. We simply lived it like we breathed the warm summer air that day and knew the ground beneath the Mulberry wouldn’t fail to support us. It was unspoken fact and we took it completely for granted. I am learning that I had more figured out in my unknowing 8 year old heart than I do now at 48…just joy, just see, feel, be and do. Just live and share, laugh, move, rest….great wisdom resides in such simplicity of being; in the heart of a child.
God tells me this morning in this memory picture He drew up from my stores:
“This is blind trust. It is the deep trust of a child”.
Jane and I didn’t stress at age 8 worrying about life. Think of all we technically might have worried about….whether our parents would stay together and allow us to keep living side by side as good friends. Whether we would do well in school and the kids would be kind. Whether we’d make something of ourselves and become productive citizens. Whether we’d survive school at all, stay well, not be killed like so many kids are in high school after parties as they drove home drunk. Whether we’d be accepted at the college of our choice and if we’d know what to major in. Whether we would marry, have kids, be able to have kids….at age 8, all those decisions were really not so far off and most would have been life changing. We didn’t give them a moment’s thought. We just practiced living as a child.
As children, we were proficient in “blind trust”. We possessed a “wise old woman” type of knowing that we were just great as we were, doing exactly what was best and certainly not worrying about anything that was life changing. We just wanted to have fun, to play, to be happy. A few years later and magically this “blind trust” would begin to disappear and give way to concerns we never should have entertained bringing with them the accompanying friends, “worry and stress” that have somehow managed to survive to this day. The founding Fathers of the United States understood about pursuing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” That last phrase, “pursuit of happiness” is becoming more of a focus to me. It makes more sense now than ever as I try to actively participate in creating my life, yet long to shed the stress of not knowing either where to actually put my efforts or if they will turn out at all…
Pablo Picasso said, “I spent the first half of life learning to be a man. I will spend the second half learning to be a child.”
God is asking me to return - in apparent regression yet actually rising to a higher level -into the blissful state of “blind trust”. It is the depth of trust that doesn’t even know trust is required because is just a given that He will take care of everything. The animals, who are often displaying a higher evolution, portray it more successfully than man. Their blind trust peeks out in play, even when circumstances would warrant some serious concern like an impending cold front or storm. It demonstrates itself in just plugging away at the task of the day, which for the animal world usually involves feeding, grooming or preening and resting. They don’t have to know how it will all turn out. They don’t live in fear that they will lose their life that day to a predator or freeze to death that night in extreme cold that most humans couldn’t bear. They just get busy doing what they can, and then trust which I think is another word for “live”.
When I am moving into angst because I am not feeling enough guidance to latch firmly onto the dreams I’ve recorded, when I don’t seem to have a way to sort through them to find the right ones, I am called to a little child’s practice of “blind trust”. God says into my heart’s ear, “Watch the birds. Learn from them. Live the life of a child as they do well, in blind trust that their needs will be met and that they will migrate into their best life at the best place at all times in the perfect season. Just carry on today and don’t strain so hard.” It hits my Type A right where it hurts. The tension and strain in my body suddenly makes itself felt.
Inevitably accepting God’s direction results in a sigh and release. He has shown me, once again, that being co-Creator doesn’t mean running ahead in exuberance and enthusiasm. It means a lot of listening, observing- just as I did with Jane under the Mulberry tree that summer’s day. It means living at times without obvious creating…just living and being in love with the life that is mine now. Just being in the now.
God is right. I have been asking to get more guidance, to not waste time and energy pursuing dreams and visions that seem to present themselves with remarkable ease lately piling up on top of each other so that it’s clear, one person couldn’t possibly fulfill all these different life options. Being co-Creator with God is good. Stressing about it is not. Living like the child, in the moment in blind trust is God’s call to me. I will trust that life will all turn out okay, even when we are in a deep recession with no end in sight and retirement funds have been diminished so greatly and the world is not in peace and I fear for my grandchildren’s world…there are a million other cares I could record. We live in stressful times in an increasingly uncertain world.
It is these times I flee to the world of nature (which is at its heart, the world of a child…) and the deep peace it embodies despite the constant threat from predators, from man. Life synchronized to God’s heart is full of images of blind trust. The evidence of it is ultimately joy, laughter, lightness and living in the moment with all senses serving as ministers to our souls. Our eyes are open. We hear, and everything speaks; the resonating blade of grass as it responds to the rustle of a slight wind. We smell freshness in the air and taste the tang of a salt breeze. We feel the release of tension, of fear, of the man-made responsibility of having to know where we’re going. For a moment we understand again how it is to be 8, and feel the lightness and joy. We feel our immense inner knowing, our great childish wisdom as we practice without even realizing it…blind trust.
_______________________________________________________________________________
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~From The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry.
