The Intermediaries

Something watches over us and we know it when

we follow the little voice inside or heed the warning

or inspiration that arrives as if on wings.

We need the intermediaries that keep us close to

the spirit of life, to the wonders of nature

and to the subtleties of our own inner nature.

Michael Mead

I love it that a full grown oak - waxy dark green leaves, craggy trunk and broad, outstretching branches somehow lives nestled inside its very own acorn. I also love it that at the moment a creature suffers a scrape or is invaded by a predatory virus, a whole host of antibodies races to the scene to apply immediate care like a little EMS team always on the ready. I love it that embedded inside the very fiber of all living things, Nature is organically equipped to bring about our highest good, our healing, our growth and expansion. I love it that the Creative Life Force is innately conspiring on our behalf. But, it gets even more exciting for those of us within the human species. Programmed right into the system of what it means to be human, there is even more of this natural Benevolence. Just like the mighty oak incubated inside its protective seed-pod, our souls, the truest part of who we are, are also tucked safely inside our outer beings - just waiting to be discovered, waiting to be invited into existence.

The fawns and the ferns, the frogs and the fungi - all other living things on the planet don't have either the privilege or the responsibility to choose their own further evolution. They just let it happen without any conscious recognition of it, much less conscious participation. But, we, those of us with the developed frontal lobe, we get to partner with the whole thing. We are not the ones who know how to make it happen. We couldn't possibly know how to do that. But we are the ones who invite it to have its way with us. And when we let it, we unfold - beyond our ability to imagine - into who we were meant to be all along. Don't you just love that?!

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Here is what I have noticed. There is a quiet, open space inside myself where I often hear the voice. Sometimes it speaks to me when I ask a direct question. Other times it comes in the form of a vision or as a character in a dream, personified as an angel or a guide or a soul keeper. Sometimes I just feel its presence in my body. Regardless of its presentation, I don’t experience it as my voice and it’s not a voice that is audible out there in the world. That is, this other voice, this other viewpoint does not come from the part of me I identify with most of the time, which lives on a roller coaster of felt-sensations and heart-felt emotions. That’s the me I identify with most of the time. This other voice of the “intermediaries,” this other energy is always bigger and broader and deeper, steadier and more peaceful, more wholistic in its vantage point. And it is that bigger-than-vantage-point that I have come to rely upon.

  After living years out of my own best thinking, there came a time when I was compelled to let go and venture beyond the boundaries of my habits of mind. And thankfully, that compulsion has come again and again. If you haven’t already discovered it on your own, let me invite you to be open, invite you to get curious about the possibility that there really is a “…Something that watches over us…,” that lives in a place inside of us that is sometimes terrifying – sometimes delicious – that liminal space, that is neither here nor there, physical nor ephemeral, fact nor illusion – the dark, mysterious, transformational chrysalis of the human experience.

To avail yourself of Nature's alchemical magic, you have to be willing to set your rational thinking aside long enough to step right past the boundary of your known reality, right past the borderland of the you, you know yourself to be. Because that’s where our human souls break out of their sheltering husks, into that exquisite place that lies just past the expected - into the birthplace of all unfettered creativity – into the sacred space in the center of our hearts, right where the winged ones hover close.