Daniel Boone once said, "I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks".
Can you relate? Ever feel like you had it, and then you lost it? You were doing so well and then it was gone? Or maybe it just trickled out so slowly you never even realized it had left.
Sometimes it seeps away and it can be lost for a long time.
So how do you hold on to something when everyone around you is telling you to let it go? You don't.
Hold on, that is.
But you can sustain it.
And that's slightly different.
Sustainability is the ability to sustain.
It applies to a good habit, a discipline, an endurance feat, love.
But how do you sustain the energy and the focus? The commitment and the passion? The belief and the trust? If you ask yourself what you are really trying to sustain, the answer is at first, is a lot of things, but really, it's your spiritual connection.
Everything else funnels down from there.
Your spiritual connection is the depth of life - of feeling life.
You know what it feels like.
It's a knowing sense of certainty.
It's an arrival feeling of coming home.
It's love in full bloom.
And you can let that feeling flow into every area of your life, affecting your very perception and attitude of how you understand and make your way through the world.
Your spiritual connection is in those moments.
Maybe it lasted longer than a moment.
Maybe it lasted a day, a weekend, a season, or a year.
Maybe you felt alive and awake and connected to all that is for even longer.
And then you didn't.
Then a crisis occurred or a karmic challenge: something that would cause you to doubt, to question, to let go.
And you lost it.
For some, you're left in a depressed state.
You sink into a feeling of disconnect and remain there.
Or you go into panic and anxiety.
You are disconnected as well but are feeling the pain of it.
Or you go into distraction, drama, or addiction, attempting to fill the void that has been left.
It can be a frightening place to be and to experience.
You will mistrust the safety and belief in the world.
It's an ungrounded place.
You may run around and carelessly gamble with your life and the lives of others, using anything to leverage your mistrust.
Either way leads you further and further away from connection to your spirit.
Instead, it cultivates disconnection - the inability to sustain the connection.
Now the very thing that may have caused you to lose your way, is the same thing that stands a chance of re-connecting you: a crisis or a karmic challenge.
Something can cause you to doubt or question and finally to let go.
Something can affect you enough to show them that your disconnection doesn't work any more.
It's the same intersection, but - eureka! This time you'll turn the opposite way, and you're back on the highway again.
To sustain that direction now - that connection - you'll need something different than a crisis or a karmic challenge - for those are the events and experiences that connect or disconnect you.
Bumps in the road and you get a flat tire! This time you need to go deeper, to an effortless place, beyond the bumps.
You won't need to hold on there; you'll be free to let go.
A subtle difference.
This time you need something new.
Sustainability requires it.
It's a new level: a deeper, more intimate connection of the heart centre.
It's a combination of personal and universal, of subjective and objective.
This heart connection feels different from what you have ever experienced, because you're different now.
There are many, many layers of the heart - more than you could ever imagine.
To arrive at a new level of opening, and to celebrate it, feels as though you have journeyed long, and you have been challenged through much, and you have now exhaled and can look back and see those challenges, those potholes and bumps, and can love them for all they have brought you.
You can squeeze every ounce of love out of them for providing you with such an amazing ride.
You can love them objectively and even more importantly, you can love them subjectively - intimately - as your greatest teachers.
You can love the crisis, the chaos, the pain and even death if you want.
You can see it as more than the judgment of it.
You can go deeper and open that level of the heart even more.
And this is how you sustain your spiritual connection.
You have learnt from your loss.
You have learnt from your gain.
You see there is no difference.
You have experienced it all - connection and disconnection - and know it for what it really is: seasons of grace.