June 6, 2025

I have created so many writings over the year around my experience with Light. Specifically, about when the light of Hope returns. It seems to be a repeating theme in my life, which indicates there’s been the presence of darkness persistently.

But doesn’t the light come eventually? Doesn’t it always come reliably. It’s fascinating to me that when the way forward seems inconceivable, that a shift eventually occurs. When I’m in the midst of another difficult patch. When I’m going through it so deeply as I have been this last year. When I am not certain that my body can hold everything that is being presented. It’s during those times that I’ve learned, and I’ve been shown, to stay steady in your center. To stay steady in your Faith. To stay steady with those who love you. And most importantly, to find Love and God in your heart. To do it again and again, even when you don’t feel like it. To call to the love of Creation over and over when you want to die inside because the pain is too dark to face. When the grief is too old, too much history accumulated. If you can just face forward and stay grounded in your center. Even if you are in the eye of the hurricane. In the minute-by-minute occurrences, something is changing. Something is evolving. It doesn’t feel like it when it’s happening. But millimeter by millimeter and skin cell by skin cell there is a shedding happening. Your evolution is occurring.

Nothing stays static. Nothing stays still. Not in this life, not on this planet, not in this cosmos. Everything keeps moving for good or for bad. It keeps shifting. When I am certain that I am trapped and I am stuck, that I am sinking in quicksand up to my eyes. My heart certainly buried. Drowned under the weight of all of that dense mud and pain and fear and black water. It has been shown to me again and again that finding the sliver of light will help the Hope break through. Looking for the light is imperative. Seeking it. Not just hoping one day it will return. Not wishing that one day things will get better. But seeking it out and finding it. As if your life depended on it. As it has for me.

The part that has nearly illuded me is the central fact that this loving Light is always within my heart. It’s so profoundly simple and so difficult to access when you feel like you are dying inside from your experience. This is what the spiritual practices are all about. It doesn’t even matter what practice it is. If you live in a spiritual way, or you’re endeavoring to learn to live in a spiritual way, find some practice, some devotion. Find something to believe in. It will save your life over and over again. This life requires us to continue to save ourselves by digging in and finding the Light of Love that is within the center of each one of us. It’s the only way. The farther we look inward towards our own personal truth, the more becomes uncovered, the more we need the practices. I have come to understand the practices are just a mechanism that bring me back to the Creation Love, that I choose to call God.

In this most recent unveiling and unmasking that I have gone through over the last year, all of the aforementioned feelings of hopelessness washed over me. But I knew through Faith, ultimately an expression of Divine Love, that I would persist. That despite my feelings, I would not burst into flames. I knew that I was going to find my way out of the depths of my depression. Rather, my heart knew. There was a still glowing ember somewhere inside me. I did not know where it was or when it would be reignited. But somewhere within all of it while I could not access happiness or joy within me, I always knew that God & Love were embedded in every single cell. And not surprisingly, yet splendidly shocking, it comes around. The heart emerges out of a deep depression. The sunlight of the whole entire universe suddenly cracks open and is the brightest sunrise of the heart you’ve ever seen. And just like that the corner has been turned.

I can never foresee it. It is never foretold. I never know when it’s coming, but I know that it always comes. And it always comes right on time not a millisecond too late and honestly not a second too early. Every instance of pain, and what may be perceived as suffering, was completely necessary on this last little leg of the marathon I’ve been running for the last year. Every tear, every drop of blood that was shed from my heart as it broke, was part of the grand weaving for the betterment and the evolution of my heart and my soul. To bring me closer to God, closer to Love and closer to this human community. Here I am on the other side of some magnificent darkness, brought to the most beautiful light that I’ve ever seen in my life. I am in love. I am full of love. I am so grateful.

I wouldn’t set out to do something as obscene as try to define this beautiful Light. However, I will speak to my ability to access it this time around in my bout of hopelessness compared to the last time I was hopeless. When I nearly died of alcoholism.

The difference as I am perceiving it, is my capacity to continue to look past the moment-to-moment experiences. The ability to look past what Kabir Helminski refers to as slavery to the “likes and the dislikes, the wants and the desires of life”. The inconveniences of life, no matter how large, define the beauty that is innate in all things. Because difficulty, strife and challenges do not come through single-handedly. It is the nature of life that every one of those challenges comes hand-in-hand with beauty, Love & Grace. It is only my human failing that cannot see both sides of hope and hopelessness. That they coexist. I fall short of the ability to see it as it’s happening. To see the full spectrum of beauty, the full spectrum of Hope. The full spectrum of grief is it intermingles loss and love at the same time. My ability to access the grandeur in this world only comes when I bring God in. A human being, trying to perceive the magnificence of this existence will always fall short.

Yet, if I can experience this world through the qualities of God. If I can attempt to conceptualize this existence by embodying the qualities of the Divine. Then I may have a sliver’s glimpse of the totality of this fantastic experience that we are gifted to be walking.

I take no credit as these are not original thoughts. To embody the qualities of the Divine come from the Sufi lineages that have, by-and-by over the years, saved my life. But more than that, saved my soul. The Sufi Mystic’s through their poetry and music brought this flesh and bones into union with God. Whom was at all times, from the beginning, always within me.

Here I sit, cracked open again. Heart open. Full of Love. In awe of this human experience.

“The sheath of a seed must be broken to open it to the nurture of the good earth and the warm sun; so I must lose my old self to grow into another, must die in a former life for a renaissance to a new future.”

-Came To Believe