I have some plants on my back porch. I don’t really have a good place to put them inside where they would get enough sun, but it is getting cold, and it’s unclear any of them will survive.
And in my little mind I’ve been thinking about them struggling to survive out there, but then it hit me that is really not what plants do. They have a life force within them which expresses itself naturally. When they have enough light, water, soil nutrients, and a congenial temperature, within a broad range, they grow naturally, daily. They are neither trying to grow nor–and this differentiates them from many humans–resisting growth. The seed becomes the mature plant, naturally, at the perfect pace for it, given its conditions.
There is no straining, no resistance, no resentment, and obviously no self pity. Life works to life, and when that becomes it impossible, it dies. Every winter countless individual plants die. But they have left seeds, which will renew their species in the spring.
Jesus called this faith, but I would simply call it not putting up artificial barriers based on fear. Faith in some respects is the antithesis to fear, and it need not even be a positive emotion, so much as the lack of a negative one, of relentless dark imaginings.
Faith is what is left when you subtract fear.
I had a really good neurofeedback session the other day, and when I came out I said to myself “I am ready to die”. It was as if I were on a sick bed, giving up after a long struggle.
But why not give yourself that gift now? Approach every day ready to die, and ready to undergo difficulties, always one step at a time, always allowing life to do the work?
In important respects the Nye of Kum Nye is nothing but Life, moving as it ought to, moving without resistance, moving because that is what it does, carrying us to whatever is next, and never objecting in advance to what is next. Life ready to die. Life reaching, knowing that some day there will be no next step, at least in this world.