Many years ago I heard a soft inner voice tell me:
You don’t transit, you JUMP.
Sometimes Life changes – just like THAT.
It comes like an arrow shot from a bow so far away we cannot see. Landing, quivering with its energy and direction right into the centre of our hearts.
No amount of preparation, careful thought and deliberation, nor collecting of resources can help us sometimes. No ‘one step at a time’, no slow movements across the divide from here to there.
The call has come. We just have to leap – go for it. Acts of crazy courage seem necessary for these inner shifts as energy rises out of the unknown, what is unconscious, and Life demands: move, shift!
A leap of faith is demanded of us, not reason, nor analysis, which warns us: ‘Look before you leap!” But a deep awareness just to do it even if it appears foolish, doomed; just do it.
Our careful preparation may well provide some relief, some buffer, some much needed physical, emotional and mental support and resilience. Yet it cannot help us take that necessary jump across what at first seems to be a chasm, the void.
Just do it…now.
Prepared or not. The heart knows, the guts know.
It may come with the lick of flames down the road as forest fires burn, as waters rise around us as rivers burst their banks and ocean waves turn tsunami.
It may come as soldiers burst into our homes, as friends turn enemies as whole nations are ruptured and we have only one option – flee.
It may come softly in the saddened voice of the doctor saying: I am afraid we can no longer help you.… Or the soft voice of a lover, a life-partner who says: It is over.
It may come as a deep knowing to travel to far flung places, to start to do something we simply have no knowing how to, and perhaps have often deliberately been stopped from doing and given up. And we know we have to surrender to that within and say simply: Yes. I will.
Ruptures appear in life’s skin, traumas happen. Barriers melt away, we become permeable to life, vulnerable. What in Islamic mysticism or Sufism is known as the barazkh, the place where the two seas meet. The place of crisis – danger and possibility. Can we hold both of those within us?
This is why we speak of a leap of faith – towards an unseen direction that no compass seems to contain. The heart knows something we consciously do not yet know, it whispers silently to us and somehow we hear. This is faith.
We just do it…single-pointed, holding on to both sides, death and life….
Like new born lambs struggling to their feet and gamboling and leaping across spring’s green grassy hills, and flowers bursting out of buds unbidden, and words spilling out seemingly from nowhere onto empty silent pages… that have waited so patiently to receive them.
Then as we sense the shock of the cool new air against our skin and, bewildered, see life raw and fresh. And true. Our consciousness shifting, our awareness adjusting, even amidst the grief, the tears and the loss, gradually we come to know what the heart was whispering silently to us.
