•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, tell the story of an experience that opened your lens of perception, that widened and deepened your understanding of life. How has this changed the way you meet the days?

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a fear that you’re experiencing now and the hold it has over you. Explore the difference between feeling that you’re in the fear and when you feel the fear is in you. In your journal, enter a conversation with this fear, beginning with the question, “What is it you want?”

•  In conversation with a friend or loved one, describe a time when you relied too heavily on your own opinion and a time when you gave yourself away. What was the cost of each? What did each experience teach you? How can you apply these lessons to a difficult situation you’re currently facing?

•  In your journal, tell the story of a time when you held another when they were breaking and describe what unfolded because of your care.

A Terrible Knowledge

A TERRIBLE KNOWLEDGE

The sighted fin only implies the wonder of the great fish pumping below, and the sighted star only implies the ocean of light flooding the Universe beyond the range of our eyes. In just this way, everything worth knowing is cloaked in paradox because everything substantial defies being revealed in its totality.

Most of us are thrust to one side of a paradox or the other by events, or the acuteness of our suffering, or by the incapacities of our character, which can’t quite accept the abundance of mystery we’re subject to by merely waking. But the one-sidedness of our experience never mitigates the beauty or power of the multi-faceted Whole, and, though we seek to experience unity and to inhabit wholeness, being human, it’s a momentary affair at best, like balancing sticks on a fence, or words of truth on a tongue, or pains on a precarious sense of faith.

Yet, despite our limitations, there is in everything, as Aldous Huxley suggests:

a Divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds, (an) immanent and transcendent Ground of All Being—immemorial and universal.

Every culture understands this, and, though modern science has done much to discredit the notion, there is a common, numinous quality in everything. The Algonquin Indians call it Manitou. The Iroquois call it Orenda, and the Eskimo call that essence of Divine Reality Innua.