There is a creative state of confusion that is incredibly special: bewilderment. Ordinary confusion bothers us because people find it hard to live with uncertainty. Stress is increased if you don’t know what’s going to happen next. But instead of being an anxious state like ordinary confusion, bewilderment is the exact opposite: it leads to creativity, wonder and awe. If you are really bewildered, you will experience bliss.

There is no more important question than the following: Is Nature on the side of human beings? If you answer immediately without a second thought, your answer is very likely to be no. The reasons behind the answer are emotional—the power of the weather, just to mention one force of Nature, is terrifying in its might. Someone with a scientific bent would support a “no” with two plausible arguments. The first argument is that natural forces operate at random and have done so for 13.8 billion years, the current estimate for the age of the cosmos.

Often there are very subtle threads that hold us to life and to the belief that everything is ultimately worthwhile. They reveal themselves in sometimes overlooked daily details: the smell of freshly baked bread from the kitchen, the way the sun highlights the red amaryllis on the dining room table, a snatch of song from a neighbor’s apartment. All these make up life’s tapestry and fill us with delight if we are able to fully receive them. They balance out any sadness or dismay about how things are unfolding and uplift us at the most unexpected moments. This is the magic of allowing your life to carry you to the heart of all experience: Heavenly gifts are always arriving.

Vacillations in how we feel are part of life, particularly now as the planet lives through a pandemic. We have unexpectedly come face to face with potential illness and mortality, as well as the relative shortness of one lifetime. It can shake our emotional foundations. Yet, wherever we are on the timeline of life, most of us gradually reach some kind of resolution. We come to terms with life and death. The wisdom of the ages reaches into our souls and awakens awareness. We realize time is an illusion and if we don’t fully immerse ourselves in “now,” we miss both the mundane and spiritual impacts of life. This is the soul’s journey, right now being played out on a world canvas, as we pass from dawn to dusk and finally see the full illumination of midday (or the “present moment”).

Have you found yourself rolling through life expecting the same thing day after day? Maybe you have forgotten how to anticipate and allow new opportunities in your world. Keep reading and discover what playful energy is and how it can change your life.

One of my favorite tools for quick inspiration is getting outside, preferably on a hiking trail. I do this because I love the sense of freedom, and expansion of playful energy. It clears my mind and brings me joy.

This morning was no exception. I left my house at sunrise, with my four-legged trail companion. As we climbed up into the valley, we could see hot air balloons in the distance. A couple minutes later, a coyote with a stunning coat of reds, browns and white colors, met us on the trail. He paused, and looked at us before he dropped off into a ravine.

For many years I had a garden filled with a variety of flowers in our yard in Massachusetts. After we moved to Florida, I created a smaller “garden” of potted flowers on our lanai. Now, back home in the Boston area, the backyard we share with our downstairs neighbors really has no room for a garden like my previous one. Instead, I have begun taking long walks through the neighborhoods of our town to delight in other people’s gardens. I have found this to be an unexpected gift of my return to New England. I loved having my own garden, but now I am enjoying the entire town’s gardens, as well as those at nearby Mt. Auburn Cemetery. Suddenly, the whole world has become a garden—or I am realizing it always was.

We have all felt moments of loneliness in life.

That sense of feeling disconnected to yourself, those around you and nature. It’s painful to feel that you are the only one going through your experience, or that no one understands your pain.

The truth is that you are not alone. There are millions of people around the world going through what you are and feeling similar emotions this very second. There are billions of people in the past that have as well.

We may seem different on the surface in terms of religion, skin color, political beliefs, but at our core we all share the same humanity, the same desires, the same fear, concerns and pain.

We all want to love and be loved.

When stuck in the feeling of loneliness, take a look and see if you are obsessing about yourself. This creates a sense of feeling disconnected from all those around you.

The loneliness may also be a signal about certain things in your life that aren’t working which you need to pay attention to and change.

What is it that you might need to change?

One of the great failures in science is still haunting us, the failure to discover why living things are alive. One of the most promising theories was known as vitalism, which held that some undiscovered “life force” or “spark of life” is what separates living things like trees, cats, and amoebas from non-living things like rocks, water, and salt. Vitalism was once so promising that the Nobel Prize was given to a champion of vitalism, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, in 1927. But significantly, the prize was in literature, since no one, however enamored of vitalism, could provide scientific evidence for any kind of life force.

The tables were decisively turned to the opposite of vitalism, known as functionalism, which breaks life down into processes like metabolism, growth, reproduction, adaptation, evolution and extinction.. That’s where we find ourselves today, which poses a huge problem. Vitalism and functionalism are opposites, which implies that in the game of either/or, if one is false, the other must be true. But unfortunately, functionalism doesn’t explain life, either. It explains how life behaves, which isn’t the same thing.

My second chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer took place on 2 Qanil in the Maya calendar. The sacred symbol Qanil stands for “the seed that generates life and creation.” For me, a perfect analogy, because I envisioned life’s seeds of light and love being transmitted to me via the infusions, at the same time that I felt them radiating out from me in my own vibration. This is the circular process of God creating God in the world. We each embody God in our physical forms, and God experiences life through our experiences. As we create, or express our soul selves, God is creating simultaneously. The entire universe is a divinely designed participatory symphony of living light and love. I feel this almost continuously now.

Life is Fantastic! Nature is teaching us in every way. Just this morning I saw the most beautiful rainbow, between the clouds of rain. Life is fantastic and I am so happy. I don’t need to justify it, or apologize for it. I am just happy. And, I think what’s keeping you from being happy too, is the fact you feel it’s not okay to be happy. As much as you want to be happy and want to feel a sense of joy everyday and feel a sense of vibrancy and aliveness, you won’t let yourselves have it because it’s raining in everyone else’s reality while you’re living in the world of rainbows. 

You need to realize that people are exactly where they are, just as you are where you are. It’s time you write yourself a happy permission slip. Where you would ordinarily pretend to be miserable, or pretend to not be happy by dimming down your happiness in the presence of other people, I want you to not be afraid of being happy. 

Since no one wants to age, there is a tremendous incentive to prevent, slow down or even reverse it. But all these efforts run into the same obstacle. No one actually knows what aging is or precisely what causes it. On its face, this riddle shouldn’t exist. The universe is subject to entropy, which causes everything, including the universe itself, to run down like a child’s toy whose battery slowly runs down. Biology chimes in with the obvious fact that all higher living things grow old and die.

But reality changes depending on your viewpoint, and one viewpoint tells us that aging, especially human aging, could be a mistake. First, we need to counter the evidence that living things must grow old and die. This is more easily done than you might suppose. Here’s a thumbnail sketch of the counter-argument against aging.

• Entropy refers to the dissipation of heat by which warm things grow colder. But those are inanimate things. Life preserves and increases energy. Putting on a coat in winter effectively defeats entropy, and so have all living forms for at least four billion years.
• The universe may die a “heat death” as it approaches absolute zero, but in the meantime, complex forms keep arising and surviving. The force that creates them is evolution.
• Unique among the living things yet discovered, Homo sapiens can consciously choose to evolve.
• Long ago Homo sapiens escaped the prison of Darwinian survival of the fittest by moving in any direction that offers more complexity, creativity, and discovery.