Something Like Spirituality
“Think of the big moves you have already made, from a single cell to a human being. Stay light-footed, and keep moving.”
Think of the big moves you have already made.
Go on. List them. Bring them to mind. Wake those memories.
You’ve done things. You’ve made things, learned things, survived things. You’ve seen and touched and tasted and heard and smelt your way through a life. You’ve moved through childhood, through whatever version of adolescence was yours, through school and work and love and heartbreak and the long strange middle of becoming someone. You’ve moved through more than you give yourself credit for.
You’ve been moved, too. Moved by music and tragedy, by a child’s hand in yours, by a landscape that cracked something open in you. Things have moved into your chest and rearranged the furniture. Changed the shape of what you believe. Changed the way your cells hum when you wake up in the morning. Changed how you move in the world.
And you move things, too. You’ve felt it. The quiet authority of your own choices. The devastation of their clumsiness. The wild, uncalculated beauty of what you’re capable of when you’re honest. This power you carry (and I mean the real kind, not the showy kind) is strange to hold. Hard to harness. Impossible to fake. And when you’re in it, it just feels like being alive.
Think of the big moves you have already made, from a single cell to a human being. You wait and hope and sometimes beg for miracles, and all the while they’ve been happening inside you. Quietly, constantly, without permission.
Stay light-footed.
The weight of life can land heavy. A thud on the back. Digging its heels in. Asking you to stop, stand still, take its seriousness seriously. And you feel it. I feel it. We all feel it, in some season or another.
There is a weight to it. And we do have to take it seriously (I’m not suggesting we don’t). But Mary Oliver, in her poem The Summer Day, asked the question that has done more work than most in recent memory:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Asked from fear, that question will push you one of two ways. Denial, or obsession. Numbing out, or tightening the grip. Neither of those is living.
But asked from love? That question does something else entirely. It brings you back. Back to your body. Back to your actual day. Back to the shared, terrifying, unbelievable fact of being alive at the same time as the rest of us. And it lets you stay light-footed with the weight. Not crushed by it. Not running from it. Just carrying it the way you’d carry a bowl of soup across the kitchen. The way you’d carry a child who’s fallen asleep on you. The way you carry yourself when you remember you are both fragile and tough as nails.
That’s the practice. Keep moving.
You’ve made moves. You have what you need. You can learn to be light-footed again - to dance and swim and walk and climb and sit still and just be. None of it requires you to be further along than you are.
Because the spiritual life was never about reaching a mountaintop of superiority or holiness or supreme knowledge. It’s not a ladder. It’s not a leaderboard. It’s movement. It’s how you keep going. It’s how you move through all the evolutions a life will ask of you.
And you’ve been moving this whole time.
CARRY THESE WORDS: When the weight lands in your chest today - and it will - put your hand on your chest and say out loud: I’ve already moved through more than I thought I could. See what it does.
L xo