Believe

From Mark Nepo's A Book of Awakening, Believing -- a contemplative message for Christmas Eve, 2020, when believing in something is so important for all of us, young and old. May the vitality waiting in Christmas be yours.

“Believing is all a child does for a living.” Kurtis Lamkin

Picasso once said that artists are those of us who still see with the eyes of children. Somehow, as we journey into the world, more and more gets in the way, and we stop questioning things in order to move deeper into them and start questioning as a way to challenge things that we fear are false.

As a child I used to talk to things—birds that flew overhead, trees that swayed slowly in the night, even stones drying in the sun. For years, though, I stopped doing this freely because of what others might think, and then I stopped altogether. Now I learn that Native Americans do this all the time, that many original peoples believe with their childlike eyes right into the center of things.

Now, almost fifty, I am humbled to recover the wisdom that believing is not a conclusion, but a way into the vitality that waits in everything.