Deep distrust is corrosive to our mind. Bad experience—rejection, disapproval, and misunderstanding—initiates distrust, and often, it is warranted and understandable. But while lack of trust prevents us from being heard and received, it also prevents us from sounding fully, and this keeps us in isolation with the few gifts we’ve retrieved. Because no matter how justified in the beginning, sustained lack of trust starts to erode the clarity of our first-hand experience, coloring our perception with doubt. This is akin to a liar not knowing who to believe. For very subtly, when steeped in distrust, regardless if we’re right or wrong, we are, with nary a blink of the heart, not just skeptical of others, but suddenly in interior crisis as we’re now more skeptical of ourselves. And since at the core we’re all one, when we distrust another without cause, we doubt that part of ourselves, and such doubt spreads like rot in wood till the center turns punky.

Yet all the while the Unity of Things is relentless in its lure, demanding more trust than ever, demanding that we do exactly what we fear we can’t, demanding that we loosen our grip, that we let go of what we’re so afraid to lose. Thomas Merton puts it this way:

A [person] cannot enter into the deepest center of [themselves] and pass through that center into God, unless [they are] able to pass entirely out of [themselves] and empty [their self] and give [their self] to other people in the purity of a selfless love.

But when out of balance and skewed by the infection of skepticism, this selfless love waits in the open like a home on the other side of a canyon that seems impossible to cross. And Everywhere—Other People! Intimate and Strange! Calling and Ignoring! How? How to sound from within, in the face of others who want nothing of what’s been found? How? How to live with others? How to live without them? These questions never go away. And now, as well as preventing the influence of others, there’s this skepticism turned inward which dirties our lens. Eventually, it keeps us from both living clearly and sounding fully, leaving us, as Rilke complains, in a shadowed state, half-connected to everything, fully bonded to nothing:

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy.

And grasp as we will, nothing comes through cleanly, nothing pulls apart neatly, nothing that is digested is simply itself, as if the Source in its coagulated variety insists on giving us morsels beyond what we have asked. As the naturalist John Muir discovered:

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.