35 & 36 — Grace of Trusting

There's a particular kind of vulnerability in objective attention — in holding a clear picture of who you're becoming and walking toward it with intention. But intention alone doesn't carry you the whole way. At some point, you have to let go of the map and trust the path.

That's where these two Sundays met me — and, as it happens, where a birthday met me too. I'll admit I nearly let it pass without pausing to mark it properly, which feels like its own small lesson: even the milestones worth celebrating can get swallowed by busyness if we let them. So this week's reflection carries a double gratitude — for the ordinary grace of trusting, and for another year of living, loving, and learning.

On my walk the last weekend of August, I found myself thinking less about where I was headed and more about whether I actually trusted the ground beneath my feet to hold. Not in a fearful way — more like a question I hadn't thought to ask myself in a while.

Parker Palmer has a phrase for this that I keep returning to: the "circle of trust," a space that honors the soul rather than demanding it perform. Palmer's work concerns the cost of what he calls a divided life — one where our outer actions and inner truth quietly drift apart — and the slow, often communal work of becoming, in his words, undivided (Palmer, 2004). What struck me is that trust, in Palmer's framing, isn't naive. It's not pretending the ground is solid when it isn't. It's closer to what Jung meant by individuation — the willingness to keep walking toward wholeness even before you can prove the path is sound.

That's the bridge between objective attention and something larger. Objective attention gave me the clarity to see where I was walking. Grace — real trust — is what let me take the next step without needing to see the whole road first. And a birthday, I think, is what reminds you why the walking was worth it at all: another year of living fully in the days as they came, loving the people who walked alongside me, and learning — sometimes the hard way — what still needs unlearning.

Then, almost as if the universe wanted to underline the point, September 6th handed me a small, ordinary moment that felt anything but ordinary. I won't bore you with the details, except to say it was the kind of accidental discovery — a name overheard, a book falling open to the right page, a stranger's sentence landing exactly where I needed it — that Jung would have called synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence not explained by cause and effect, but by resonance (Jung, 1958). Rudolf Otto had a word for the feeling underneath it: the numinous — that sense of something mysterium tremendum et fascinans, both overwhelming and magnetic, that arrives uninvited and leaves you slightly rearranged (Otto, 1923/1958).

I don't think it's a coincidence — pun somewhat intended — that this happened in the same week I was wrestling with trust, and the same week I turned a year older. The numinous doesn't announce itself to people who are gripping the wheel too tightly. It seems to prefer the loosened hand, the open question, the person who has already decided to trust the path even without seeing its end — and maybe especially the person pausing to say thank you for the path itself.

Wayne Dyer used to say that when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change (Dyer, 2004). I'd add a footnote this week: sometimes we don't even have to change how we look. We just have to loosen our grip long enough for something — a birthday, a synchronicity, a small grace — to slip through and show itself.

This week's invitation: Where in your life are you still gripping the wheel — needing to see the whole road before you'll trust the next step? And when did you last pause, birthday or not, to give thanks simply for living, loving, and learning? What would it look like to loosen that grip just slightly this Sunday, and let gratitude and trust meet?

Walking, as always, has been where I do this work best. Maybe it will be for you too.

References

Dyer, W. W. (2004). The power of intention: Learning to co-create your world your way. Hay House.

Jung, C. G. (1958). Psychology and religion: West and east (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy (J. W. Harvey, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1923)

Palmer, P. J. (2004). A hidden wholeness: The journey toward an undivided life. Jossey-Bass.