The Secret Growing

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Struggling with something, failing has a great effect--a gap opens, you realize you don't know everything--a little emptiness forms where you can receive something. Particularly in our Western ambitious, productive, drill, workout society it is hard to hear what's at our backs; we only pay attention to what's in front, advancing, a goal. Not succeeding brings us to the ground, to look outside our shell, to even use the small word we are afraid to use: help. [Practice is] something you choose to do on a regular basis with no vision of an outcome; the aim is not improvement, not getting somewhere. You do it because you do it. You show up whether you want to or not.

Life has been busy, and in the general rush of things, these vital fragments of my identity have been squeezed out. I have missed them, but in a shrugging kind of way. What can you do when you're already doing everything?  The problem with 'everything' is that it ends up looking an awful lot like nothing: just one long haze of frantic activity, with all the meaning sheared away. Time has passed so quickly while I have been raising a child and writing books, and working a full time job that often sprawls into my weekends that I can't quite account for it. The preceding years are not a blank exactly, but they're certainly a blur, and one that's strangely devoid of meaning, except for a clawing sense of survival.

And it came to pass that a certain Grandmother, when that she had come to nigh on two score years and ten; and had gotten long in the tooth, spake to herself thus.- Lo, will I now paint… and verily no man mote stop her.

Training yourself to do nothing really means training yourself to resist the urge to manipulate your experience or the people and things around you -- to let things be as they are.

Pay more attention to the mundane ... to find novelty not by doing radically different things but by plunging more deeply into the life you already have.

The ... important thing we can do as individuals in order to enter the experience of genuine rest, is simply to stop expecting it to feel good, at least in the first instance.

What is this phenomenon, you ask? Well, beloved, it is that which we want to call the secret growing. How often have we heard you say that everything is futile, that nothing comes of all your labors. Yet like amorphous buds your endeavors sprout in all directions. You see everything as formless and you forget that this is a sign of life. Gradually the formlessness takes on more precise contours and the steadily growing roots feed an ever stronger plant, which will one day explode with an abundance of leaves and flowers. You know this is so, but you must perceive this knowledge with such vividness that you dare to build on it. You have to feel with certainty that even the smallest effort to grow in goodness leaves a clear trace in you. When you do not see an outer result, this must not discourage of tire you in your efforts, for just as invisible hands help and tend every plant on this green Earth, so every budding sprout of goodness is tended and shaped and protected by invisible powers and when the time comes your eyes will open and you too will see the beautiful plant that grew in secrecy, the product of your noble endeavors and your pure intentions. Accept our account as a greeting from us so that you shall never tire when all seems lost.