Michael Meade

Something watches over us and we know it when we follow the little voice inside or heed the warning or inspiration that arrives as if on wings. We need the intermediaries that keep us close to the spirit of life, to the wonders of nature and to the subtleties of our own inner nature.

The hardest thing in life may be to learn to truly trust that there is something noble and generative in ourselves. This is a greater sense of the notion of believing in our self; to truly believe in oneself means to uncover the inner core of imagination and authenticity that can also be called the genius within us. When we connect to the inner resident of the soul, we also learn how we are woven to the Soul of the World.

The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern world. Part of what has been lost in the reckless rushing of modernity is the sense that each life has an authentic interior that shelters important emotions as well as inherent purpose, and that the dignity of existence includes a necessary instinct to unfold the unique story woven inside each living soul.

Set within the seed of the soul is not jut a fleeting image or a vague pattern but a lifelong story enfolded within, waiting to be cracked open and lived all the way out.

In the end, as at the beginning, the divine turns out to be most interested in the unique life of the individual soul. That__ what was meant by the old idea that __nside people is where god learns._ This is not a religious notion, but more of a spiritual insight. For this conversation god is simply the shortest way to refer to the divine. When a unique life becomes fully livedeveryone involved learns something and it becomes clear that god was involved all along.

One of the open secrets of life on earth is that the answer to life__ burning question has been inscribed in one__ soul all along. The soul is a kind of ancient vessel that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need to find our way in life. Each life is a pilgrimage intended to arrive at the center of the pilgrim__ soul. From that vantage point, the issue is not whether we managed to choose the right god or the only way to live righteously; such notions fail to recognize the inborn intimacy each soul already has with the divine.

In these dark and uncertain times, there can be great value in imagining a bit of star in each human soul. Not just that it gives some hope for humanity at a time when man__ inhumanity to man seems ever on the increase; but also because it points to an inner brightness that can light the way in dark times.

There is a poem at the heart of things and a mythic story in the heart of each of us.

To become nobody but your true self and to struggle against the tide of sameness and the false security of simply fitting in is a fight worth having. To become oneself by contributing one__ native gifts and talents to this troubled world: that is the job to keep applying for and a work worth spending an entire life doing.

Everyone who enters the world comes in with hidden gold, it's called your natural gifts. The job of a person is to find the hidden gold and give it. It turns out that when you give it you get more than when you hold on to it, that's the economy of the soul.

The thread that ties us to the center is the hidden cord of the heart, it is the thread of genius that can connect the mind with the heart, that allows the mind to feel and reveals the thought set within the heart.

A true pilgrimage requires letting go of the very things most people try to hold onto. In seeking after what the soul desires, we become pilgrims with no home but the path the soul would have us follow.

Our answer, our opportunity, our chance to change the world has to come from the poetry that is already written on the walls of the soul.

Life roars at us when it wants or needs us to change. Ultimately, change means trans formation, a shifting from one form to another that involves the magic of creation. The trouble with entrenched oppositions is that each side becomes increasingly one-sided and single minded and unable to grow or meaningfully change. In the blindness of fear and the willfulness of abstract beliefs, people forget or reject the unseen yet essential unity that underlies all the oppositions in life.

The ship is always off course. Anybody who sails knows that. Sailing is being off course and correcting. That gives a sense of what life is about.

The divine is at the edge of our awareness and vision, but it is also within us as the first seeker found when all seemed lost completely. In order to find the dream of life again, we must first find the way that the dream exists within our own souls. We may be daunted by the surfacing of all the dilemmas and trouble of this troubled world, but the deep self and soul within us already knows how we are intended to swim in the blessed turmoil of the waters of life. For humans exist to bring meaning to the surface of life and awareness to the dream of existence.

Each soul lives on the verge of remembering the forgotten agreement and original dream that it carries; yet each moment can be another point when the dream of life becomes lost again. Each meaningful step we take on the path of life involves some tension between the needs of the common world and the dreams of the soul. This inherent tension can stop us in our tracks, yet can also be the source of vital energy needed for the soul to grow. Each time we remember a piece of why we came to life we pull the seeds of eternity farther into the world of time. The inner seed keeps trying to sprout, but often our fate must place us in a crossroads or nail us to a cross before we pay proper attention to it.

At critical moments the veil between the little-self and the deep self thins and a meaningful self-adjustment becomes possible. If a person does not become paralyzed with fear or frozen in hatred, the wise self hidden within will rise to the occasion.