I think back to late last fall when the Witch of November
was terrorizing the neighborhood, and everything fell down quickly and died as
if on command. Indeed, that is exactly
what it was: A command. And then there was nothing. You could have looked for tiny green shoots
from sunup to sundown, and you would not have found even one. Everything obeys the command in its season.
There was no guarantee that anything would ever live
again. No guarantee of sun—stories,
hopes, and dreams, yes. But no certainty. Yet that did not stop Her. Remember I told you that Nature does not plant
in the springtime like mankind. She
always plants in the fall, when all is lost.
Throwing seeds down when subzero temperatures and sheets of ice are on
their way might not seem like sound reasoning, but that is what She does. She plants on Faith alone, and how fortunate
we are that She has belief even as we curl up in despair.
Faith is the substance of things as yet unseen. All things have their origin in the spirit
world, in the unseen, in the as-yet shapeless.
Just as a beautiful building exists first as a thought only, so it is
with the entire world around us. And we
could go back even further: Before
thought comes desire. The architect has
a desire to create a building. The
desire becomes a bit more solid and turns into thought, a tiny electrical
current in the brain. From there it
solidifies into a drawing on paper, which gives it existence in the material
world, and now it can be transferred to the minds of others. From the paper it becomes a small working model
on a table. Now it has dimension. From the table, it goes to the field, where
many bodies and minds work upon it until the desire comes to fruition: The beautiful building stands upon the field.
But it first had to stand in the heart and mind of the
architect. So it is no different with
anything we see—anything at all. Every
single thing you can point to at one time existed in the unseen only. From your furnished surroundings to your pets
to your children to the woods . . . Everything was once just a tiny flash in
the heart and mind of its creator. And
the only thing required to make it all work is faith. Belief.
There is an old man who roams the woods, grey beard,
heavy pack on his shoulders. He stops to
drink at a stream that is running again.
It is always running lively in this spot this time of year. Later on in the summer it will dry up, but
for now it gushes forth, clean and strong and cold, just as it did last year
and the year before that. It is a good
place to be. He does not stop to think
where the water comes from, but it too has its origin in the unseen, following
a familiar pattern. He does not have to
understand the whys and wherefores. It
is enough that he believed it would be there, and so it was. Did his experience over the years form his
belief, or did his belief over the years form his experience?
