It’s afternoon in the forest and the light is yielding to the darkness, just as the stars yield each morning at dawn. One moment they’re here; so close, luminous, that beauty, and then they’re not. It’s like this also in inner nature, where in one moment things can be so clear: who I am and what I’m doing here. Only for it all to be dissolved in the next; my life and the way it was all supposed to turn out. The capacity to grieve the death of an old dream is the portal to new life: To go into the broken and feel, to meet the shattered pieces with presence and with love. The soul is always speaking to us, the Friend is always nearby and offering its essence, its body, its being. At times, by way of beauty, joy, connection, and peace; gratitude, flow, wonder, and awe. We can give thanks for the sweet forms of grace as they nurture and hold us. At other times, the dispatch from the Beloved will emerge out of the underworld, an eruption of the dark, and can be deflating, fierce and untamed. It is ego-dystonic, and cannot confirm who and what we think we are. This particular emanation of the Beloved can ache in the pathways and burn in the heart. And will unlikely feel all that nurturing: a surge of activation in one of our relationships, an out-of-the-blue experience of anxiety or depression, an unexplainable symptom in our body, the loss of meaning in our work, a dark night, the collapse of the known. To perceive this activity also as grace, as one of the many arrows in the quiver of the Friend is not easy, and will often take us to the ground. But it is on the ground, in the earth, in the mud and in the colors of the forest that we may be crafted as a vessel in which love can come alive here, incarnating through each of us, in a world that so badly needs it.Learn more about Matt’s online group and communityView Matt’s YouTube channel here