Description

It is difficult to overstate the need for us to have phrases, mantras, verses, lines, intentions, scriptures, words, or whatever else we want to call the signposts that point us home, remind us of home, or, at least show us the next step when we have lost our way.
As a middle school student, I went through several years where I could not sleep at night. I was distraught with anxious thoughts, especially about having to go to war and kill someone. I might have been 12 or 13, but the absurdity of such a task and the kind of terrible energy that is released in the taking of a life weighed heavily on me. I could not grasp such a thing or make it make sense.
There were other ruminations of my mind as well and if I didn’t fall asleep by 11:11 p.m., then I wouldn’t sleep at all that night.
This happened more nights than not.
There is a reason that sleep deprivation is a highly successful and unusually cruel form of torture.
I was coming apart at the seams and no one knew what to do.
I remember the terrible weight that overwhelmed me one night when I realized that my parents couldn’t help me. My sleeplessness had been going on for many, many nights and they had to sleep. It wasn’t going to work if none of us slept. So, my mom closed their bedroom door and I was left standing in the hall outside my bedroom.
Nobody could help me.
No one could be with me through every night of not sleeping.
Interestingly enough, it was that same moment of feeling overwhelmed in the hall of our farmhouse, feeling on my own, that I also noticed something that, looking back, felt like strength.
I had to figure this out. There was no other way and no one could do it for me.
This was my part of the journey to figure out.
It was after 11:11, so I wouldn’t be sleeping.
I went into my room and for whatever reason I began to read through the Psalms.
And in those songs, I found the words of other souls who knew what I was going through. It was as if they were writing and expressing the deepest longings of my heart.
I read, “As the deer longs for water, so my soul longs for love, for connection, for union, for peace, for rest.”
Yes. My soul is full of longing.
“Be still, O my soul. Why are thou disquieted within me?”
Yes. I am asking the same thing! Someone else knows this anguish that I feel.
“Weeping endures for the night, but a shout of joy comes in the morning.”
Yes. I know that to be true. Each morning, as dawn approaches, I feel as if I have survived another battle. There is hope and joy in the rising of the sun. But, oh, the night can be so long and painful.
“Be still. And know. Know that love holds you.”
I am longing to be still. I feel so restless. How can I know? What is it that I might know?
Know that I am inseparable from love.
Trust this. Know this.
I am not alone. I cannot be alone.
Each night during this season of life, I would read and reread and memorize and rehearse these words.
Each night, alongside of the terror, I would begin to feel a calm balm soothing my aching and distraught mind, rocking me to sleep, assuring my heart.
Often, I awoke in the morning, holding the words not only in my heart and mind, but clutched in my hands and gathered to my chest.
Looking back, I can see that this season was a gift.
Yes, it was an unusually early dark night of the soul and, to this day, one of the most intense of my life. But it opened my heart to love and be loved and it prepared me for a life of living from a deep, deep source.
The longing and aching and yearning were home calling for me.
Years later, I would find myself traveling to northern Idaho to celebrate my friend Jeremy’s 40th birthday. My job was to follow him and drive the support vehicle while he rode his bike through the Magruder Corridor, which is one of the most remote roads in the lower 48, sandwiched between two of the largest and most primitive Wilderness Areas in the lower 48.
An unimproved dirt road without any service for over 100 miles.
I was feeling especially fragile and vulnerable and was still in the midst of recovering from my brain injury.
The night before we were going to enter the corridor, I found myself in a full-fledge panic attack. I felt paralyzed as we lay in the tent and couldn’t think of any way possible that I could enter that corridor the next day. We would just have to call it off.
My mind was racing and racing and then I remembered that I had committed a phrase to memory earlier in the day, one that I knew that I might need.
I searched and searched for it, but my mind was scrambled and chaotic.
So, I finally gave up trying to think of it. 


I knew from experience that the felt sensation of the words was still in my body. I had felt it earlier in the day.
I began to rotate my awareness around my body and when I got to my heart, I felt a warm glow and a sense of “okayness.”
Hearing Jeremy breathing on the other side of the tent, I thought of how he had been one of the few people in my life who figured out how to be with me in the many years of my recovery. He had never left me, he hadn’t given up on me because I changed, he didn’t grow despondent when I was unpredictable and unreliable. He was just always my friend. And here he was. Here we were. Sleeping in a tent in a forest about to engage on a journey he had been dreaming about.
Gratitude for his friendship and understanding was like blowing on the embers of a fire. The warmth in my heart began to glow.
I found my breath.
Breathing in, I calm myself.
Breathing out, I smile.
Yes. Just force it. Make yourself smile. I know it’s hard. Just do it.
Over and over.
The panic began to lift a bit.
And then the words I had memorized earlier that day arose into my awareness:
“Just do the next thing in love.”
Ahhhh…yes. Those were the words my friend Brennan had talked about. At the end of his life, he said that if he could go back 30 years, he would tell his younger self to stop worrying, to stop trying to be more spiritual, to stop trying to figure out the meaning of life, to stop trying to wrap his mind around all of the why’s,  to stop trying to do better, and to simply just do the next thing in love.
Just do the next thing in love.
In love.
Not out of love.
But in love.
Like, in an ocean of love.
In love.
Just do the next thing in love.
I found myself lifting fully out of the panic as I began to feel sensations of love and well-being throughout the body. 




Immersed in love.
In love.
Be still. And know love. Know that I am in love, inseparable from love, joined with love, abiding in love, held by love.
In love.
Right back where I began, all those years ago in my small bedroom on the farm somewhere in the dark hours of the night after 11:11, finding the light that was guiding me home.
Peace.