The world is burning, and we are the fire.
More, bigger, better. Control, Contort, Command. These are our marching orders.
I’m sitting here in a peaceful cafe in San Francisco, thinking about the weight of the world right now.
Everything seems fine, but bubbling under the surface is the sour fruit of our rotten labors.
Everyone around me is smiling but plotting domination. Everyone is silent but echoing a battle cry.
Our world is driven by violence, control, and competition, and we wonder why we can’t find peace.
Our hearts cry out for stillness, but our minds won’t pause and consider the lilies of the field. And we wonder why the world burns in its turning.
Here’s the venom I’m noticing, and here’s an antidote I’m feeling.
Our burning
We want to control the movements of the world, squeezing its tender rind until its juice stains the ground in longing.
We want to be god, but our desires are ungodly.
We want to own the world, but we don’t even belong to it.
In this push for control, our lives aren’t timeless jewels, but mechanized shells that push everything down the mountain.
We are burning and we are the fire.
Destroy or Melt
I look in myself and feel this coal fire crackling. It shakes with demand and starves in its nature.
It wants to burn everything.
There is never enough world to quench the thirst of burning, and never enough burning to consume the world.
A burning will within us that screams, “Make it all different.”
A burning that so fears inferiority it would rather destroy the world than melt into it.
This is our fire.
It’s a curse.
A curse we all live inside of.
A curse I occupy like a sentry to a forbidden city.
Its most sickly thorn is that we don’t play this game knowingly; we peck the ground, too scared to look up and see the sun.
Cure
Where is the counterpoint?
In the clean spring of wonder.
Wonder is the great breadcrumb sleeping in the desert of the world, waiting for us to follow in gentle spirits.
We used to hunt and gather, follow trails and scents.
We used to know how to follow the whims of the world, but we’ve forgotten in favor of our ungodly control.
We must learn to look around and read the clouds — to sense what’s needed, not impose what’s wanted.
Wonder is Escaping Escape
When we are unsure and fearful, we must stop and notice.
Noticing is our charm in this cursed place.
Our noticing is the beginning of wonder.
Wonder has no admission fee, no ownership or control. It's sonorous and ever-present past the fog of our games.
It’s easier to touch the fire than the wonder, even with words. I suspect that’s because we live in the fire.
Wonder is another layer of earth beneath the burning.
To enter this glorious cave, we find the fire isn’t a desire for anything but a fearful child pushing away with both hands a darkness it dreads to be lost in.
It cries and wiggles, but all it needs is to close its eyes and witness the grand oracle of our pitted olive.
The tremendous ease of escaping escape.
Wonder has nothing to prove, and so it never presses its presence. It’s up to us to discover its quiet hum with our devotion to fertile time.
Devotion isn’t a performance, and the altar stands regardless of its flock.
Behold!
I wish I could share more, but I can’t see far in the dark.
I hope that by letting words shape what I can’t see, I can form its outline in the absence of meaning and use this form as a cast for a new monument.
A monument that says “BEHOLD!”
A monument that leaves the tending of flowers to the bees.
Leaves the turning of the world to the wonder of being in it, of it, by it, and through it.
A wonder that exists in us pulsing beneath the fire.
This is the beginning of my digging.
(If you’d like to tunnel beneath the burning of control towards the healing wonder of being, I have a couple of spots open for 1:1 work this month. Get started to see if working together is a good fit.)
Warmly,
Lucas
P.S.
In feudal Japan, a renowned Zen monk constructed a small tea house on the summit of a mountain overlooking the ocean.
He then erected hedges and walls all around the tea house so the ocean was blocked from view, with one exception.
Next to the tea house was a natural spring used for filling teapots. Before a tea ceremony, he’d have his guest fetch water.
As they’d bent down to fill the teapot with water, they would see a small gap in the hedge close to the ground, only visible to those filling teapots in the spring.
As they’d bend down to collect spring water, they would catch a glimpse of the ocean.
It is only by gently lowering ourselves to the ground and filling our pots with spring water that we can glimpse the eternity of the ocean.
That is following the breadcrumbs.
Kneel slowly and do the small tasks that follow the tracks of awe.
With each drop, we find eternity and reclaim the wonder of the world.
P.P.S
Last week’s letter was supposed to be free to all. Here is the full piece on how to travel through time—apologies for the mixup.
See you next week!