The Leap is The Way

Life kindly says ‘no’ to us, a thousand times, before we stop waiting for a ‘yes’ at the wrong door.

Prayer is our true hearts’ desires spoken in the silence of what we mean when we use clumsy words like ’god’.

I know it’s hard to trust the way. But that is precisely what the way is asking of you.

It is because your heart broke, that you believe something went wrong. Our promises have to be taken from us to release us from the smallness they bind us to. Our hearts have to be broken along the way, to enable us to inhabit deeper and more expansive forms of love. It is always how we get led into deeper relationship with our selves and into a deeper relationship with Life.

When you begin to embrace the inevitable Understanding that a wiser part of you, that is not captured by small story with its pages of drama and elation, is leading you always through the meandering path of a much grander adventure, you make space for the possibility that your current low point is hugely necessary.

If you can let go the drama of the moment, and your sense of tragedy and alarm, a perspective begins awaken in you like a dawn that makes a year of dark days seem like the fluttering of a projector as it jumps between frames. If you can allow, with a truly open heart, the sense of being lost, a stirring awakens in you, frightening almost in its implications, of an Epic so grand and sweeping, of a tapestry so humbling in its enormous and meticulous design, and the golden thread of your Meaning to this world, woven right through the heart of it all.

Life kindly says ‘no’ to us, a thousand times, before we stop waiting for a ‘yes’ at the wrong door.

Life, as David Whyte explained us, is a Conversation. To do all the talking leaves us deaf to the Listening. Expecting to hear back only a yes, means we are not in relationship with reality, only with our projections. Being afraid of Silence is to say no to the way we actually Belong in the Conversation. Being disheartened by a ‘no’, is to be like a child that wants what it cannot have. It is only by putting down the weight of our expectations that we can be truly present. And only when we are truly present, that we can truly Listen to what is being said. It is only by sitting back and waiting that we stop casting the shadow of fear onto the threshold of Prayer and see what may yet come through the door.

You are allowed to ask for what you want, but you have to listen to the answer of what it will take to get there.

THE LEAP IS THE WAY

from the womb, 
through great distress, 
to the cradle, 
long enough, 
to forget;
this is still, 
only the nest.

there is a step yet to take
as the poet said;
- without feet,
through the door with no threshold.

an impossible height yet to reach,
made without climbing.

there is a leap yet to make, 
without even the tether of faith,
unless perhaps the certain knowing 
that we are following The Way,
and the grace of understanding
that the leap is The Way.

© Rocco Jarman