“Maybe you have to tell the universe what you want.”
So said a life coach-type to me one time, which came as a surprise since he leaned corporate. Not trapped in the box, exactly, he was certainly not of a yurt guy either. Still, he wanted me to find a place in nature to tell the universe what I needed.
Yesterday I told a friend something difficult—about loneliness, about connection—something I had needed to say for a few weeks. Finally, I did not think it could kill any more days. It had to live in the cosmos.
A deity who reads my every thought and hears my every word seems implausible to me. Nor can I locate a network of angels and sprites, the active patrons of a spiritual world. For me, speaking to the universe is psychological, though perhaps “psychology” is just my placeholder for your God, what you call spiritual.
In any case, today, a day after saying what needed to be said, I sat in on a wonderful class: no one lonely, all connected.
And before that class, I met two new Mollys, the owners of a store I had passed by 1000 times before but never entered. And after class, during dinner at a usual spot, I had a lovely exchange about reading and writing with the chef, who I had not known until tonight cares deeply about both.
Our desires, needs, desperations, and states of confusion make us, as Hamlet suggests, kings of infinite space. Multiply every second of your life by each neuron and every synapse, pack that up as the unconscious and no wonder the ego demands a galactic audience: Listen up all your stars.
Or, as Chris suggested in that class, to speak it out is to put a size on worries and self. This is how you reconfigure gravity, draw serendipity into orbit.
Just beautiful, Ted!