Lately, Sage and I share a cup of coffee at the breakfast table until Jasper decides it’s time to go outside and take his morning nap. I strap him to me in the carrier, grab a blanket and a scoop of chicken feed, and wander outside to greet the day. He serenely peers up at the sky, blue eyes lit up with a wonder I hope to learn from. He gently coos and takes in the trees, birds, cows, and hills around him. At some point, he puts his head down and closes his eyes to sleep.

I open the coop door, and the chickens and runner ducks spill out, quacking with excitement. I fill up the feeder with their fancy organic food, and dunk the water feeder into the cow trough until it’s fresh and full. I often stand around for a while, gently rocking back and forth as I watch the ducks splash and slurp and make a glorious mess of the water. It turns brown with dirt in no time, but they don’t mind.

The cow’s water troughs get filled up next, but only if the sun is out. Our well pump is solar-powered, so we have to be extra mindful about that. No sun = no well water. (It’s not a perfect system, we’re working on it.) Depending on my mood, I’ll either go inside or find my abandoned coffee cup and walk around a bit, savoring the last lukewarm sips. Looking up at the sun as I stroll around, I find myself slipping effortlessly into my deepest thoughts.

I have been diving into my faith with gusto lately, which, truthfully, is the status quo for me. My relationship with spirituality isn’t a new one, but it seems to always get freshened up when it needs to. Throughout the seasons of life, my beliefs and practices have taken different forms. I have always had a significant yearning for God, for closeness, for understanding, for this tangible, sweet essence of love that blesses all things. I have always yearned for tenderness from a deeply loving God, who welcomes me as a devotee in return. I seek to know the feeling beneath the word, an embodied experience that kisses/shakes/shivers/trembles/caresses me awake.

And I have.

While I embark on this next layer of understanding, my bed has become riddled with ancient texts of all kinds, my browser history flooded with theologians, mystics, and scholars, my conversations often single-pointed, curious, and seeking. Sage knows this well, and he smiles softly and shakes his head. She’s at it again.

My everlasting quest for God.

I wondered the other day why this lightning bolt of curiosity appeared at this time, right when things are sort of starting to finally chill out in my life. Then I remembered a poem I wrote last year while I was physically bent over from the loss of my daughter. Shoulders hunched, wind knocked out of me, sobbing on the bathroom floor -

“What an excruciating blessing

this Sudden Death

Down I go

Ridden of all that became of me

This hollowness feels good, for now

Down, down to the marrow I go

Stripped once again

I prayed for this holy crucifixion

Whose form I cannot choose

Let all that is in the way be burned to the ground

Let the path open for me

Dear God,

Let the path open.”

Ahh, yes. Of course.

I quite literally begged in prayer for this.

I begged for a path to open that would lead to deeper understanding.

If you have ever prayed while your heart is truly broken,

you, too, know how powerful those prayers are.

~

Walking with the spring grass under my feet, I begin my morning meditation. It’s not an official thing, distant are the days when I started each morning with an hour of uninterrupted silence, cross-legged on the bedroom floor.

And yet, the effect is often the same.

The sweet sound of Jasper’s breath, the birds chirping, and the cars in the distance lull me into a deeply reflective state. My vision softly blurs, and a question arises -

What does it take to know that God is real? To really know?

Why is my belief so much stronger now than it was years ago?

When have I truly experienced the presence of God?

An answer arose as I closed my eyes and brought forth memories of the embodiment of God’s presence. If I could attempt to describe it, I might say this -

It’s a sweeping feeling that begins from nowhere and everywhere. Armhairs stand on end, breaths halt, and time pauses. Like the quiet calm before the tornado rolls in, there is a brief second of anticipation. Then, woooooosh. The lid is blown off, the tears roll down my cheeks, and all there is to be found is grace, grace, grace. Love cascading through every cell and every sensation seems to scream: all is well. all is well. all is well. The emotions flood, the truths are known, and the cries for help land on hearing ears. I know for that brief and wondrous moment that I am so, so very supported. That I could never be alone. That there is goodness at the core of me/us.

I didn’t experience this extreme closeness with God on many of my spiritual escapades. Not when I sat with Ayahuasca in the Peruvian jungle, not when I went to Younglife bible camp as a teen, not when I took 4g of magic mushrooms in the forest, not when I listened to 2-hour cellular upgrade meditations daily, not when I chanted kirtan for 3 hours straight, not when I held crystals and sat before my manifestation altar, not when I pulled tarot cards or received astrological readings.

Although these things all gave me different necessary experiences for my path, the recipe that brought God’s pure, potent closeness was = be utterly destroyed by grief.

I think Richard Rohr summed it up well -

“Only great love and great suffering are strong enough to take away our imperial ego’s protections and open us up to an authentic experience of transendence.”

When I have witnessed a display of pure, raw, humble, honest, yearning, unfiltered human emotion, I feel God in the room. Every time. Whether it’s my own heart’s utterances or another’s.

Experiencing the shocking deaths of my Mom and then my Daughter back to back pummeled my ego into a meek voice that was barely audible compared to the voice of God. That loving, compassionate voice that speaks through us all, depending on how open and receptive we are. It’s the inner voice that says: *hold the door open for her*, *check in on your Dad*, *look again before you cross the street here*, *invite her to dinner*, *read this book*

It’s the voice that told a kind woman in the Whole Foods grocery line to pay for our groceries, little did she know we had lost our daughter a month prior.

She said to us: “I don’t know why, but God told me to do this for you.”

It’s the voice that told my neighbor to bring over some hot dinner on the very same night I was solo with Jasper for the first time, stressed, hungry, and exhausted.

It’s the voice that told me to “look up” so I could see the perfect rainbow in the sky over my daughter’s grave.

~

Sometimes I wish I could simply transfer this belief to others. So they might know that they are loved unconditionally. That they’re not a singular human having an isolated human experience. Sometimes I wish the culture would quit telling us to focus on ourselves so closely, because that only helps for a blink. You can’t self-help your way into surrender. When we’re introduced to deep suffering, we need something bigger than us to hold our bodies while we bear it all. What if we could shift the narrative? That life is not about “me” but about what I am here to do - how I am meant to love others, how I am meant to be a help.

I asked someone in my family who was struggling recently if they had tried talking to God about it. They said it felt too ‘pie in the sky’

I replied with,

“Okay, but could you try?”