Nothing which you or I have ever called a miracle has ever been absent. Never withheld.

Nothing that you or I have ever looked back on and unwrapped the word perfect to apply to has ever been out of fashion. And in those times when anything appeared to be astray, no matter how dark, there has been a constant, unwavering — present without announcement.

It has been helpful to think of a life as one lived with a variety of darkened sunglasses on.

Except they’ve been on so long that they felt like part of the skin. Not an accessory but an appendage. And so we see the world through that filter. We create geographies and systems and curriculums for planning, for building lives, through that veil.

Until something happens.

A personal earthquake. A reduction. The absurdity is that most of the time this disruption is not something grand or ominous, not a catastrophic weather event, but a droplet into waters already darkened by the glasses. A droplet so pure that it feels imperceptible. Perhaps even not enough.

But it is more like holy condensation that just keeps dripping into the mud, into the untenable. One might even say in spite of the darkened frames by which we view it, until the removal of the glasses, the disruption, and the constancy of that dripping all lead to a complete flipping of a script we thought was reality.

Then, and only then, do the words read in desperate states, scoured for solution, finally land. Only then does the entering and sitting in the back of a room where alternatives are spoken about become possible to consider. Only then are the communities and the groups that have laid out a banquet of option finally appreciated.

We become ready. The individual becomes ready — ready to see the world that has always been. To see the thing when all else is removed. To witness the presence.

But oh, what do we do with the policing?

What do we do with all of the cast of characters, from leaders to gurus to bestsellers, those we have cast as the pinnacle of answers, draped in the designer shoes given to them by the masses? What do we do when those shoes are finally removed and the feet of clay are revealed?

The falling itself is not nothing. The grief of the falling is not nothing. It is the liminal freefall that we’ve been taught to fight since the costume of self was adorned.

Can we not see that everything that has brought us into the community of remembrance, even in its fallibility, has still been a stop along the way?

Only then does disruption become something other than a massive regret. And more of a holy benchmark. The pulsating signal to recognize and know that the return to the truth of your presence, that you are presence, that you are not your thoughts, that it is not even your responsibility to change the thought because the thought in and of itself is not real, has been patiently waiting.

The sky does not have thoughts about itself.

The infinite is not self-reflective, contemplating its own infinity.

It simply is.

And only when the darkened glasses are removed is there even the slightest crack into the consideration that this, this, is the thing that has been beckoning all along.

Not a teacher or organization. Not even a book.

Just the slow dripping of purity into muddied perception. Until once, in one lifetime in a spiral of uncountable lifetimes, we finally arrive at the point to begin to consider that truly, all along, everything that appeared separate, every thought that ravaged our journeys with anxiety, all of it can now be seen for what it is.

And we can see what it is that we are.

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