Her Hands are in the Fire.

When we come to the edge of something, when we have drained the light from a particular way of being, when what we know dissolves and all we can see is the vast, startling abyss of stars staring back at us, blinking, we have reached the Via Negativa, the lightless path mystics speak of. It is the way of unmaking, of coming to know what is by standing before what is not. Annie Dillard calls it “the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.” When I think of the words remake or reimagine, I feel an almost eerie loss of control. My limits, my smallness, come sharply into focus, and alongside them, a stunning force of creativity shimmering just out of reach. It takes me with it, willing or unwilling. The real challenge begins when we allow what is being undone to work on us. By this I mean learning to listen without ears, for the stirring of something beyond words. It may come in dreams or visions, or as urges and instincts that pull us deeper into the marrow of our lives, and often into the arms of the natural world. This essay is for all of us, each of us standing at the edge of something, seeing from our own angle, yet feeling the same heat as the Great Mother, our earth, places our hands in the fire. Fear comes with all transformation—not to punish, but to accompany a birth. To startle a bright-eyed awareness into form. I dreamed that a new kind of being was being born through us, a winged one.Maybe you can feel it too.May we not look away. May we not rush this process. Dream and vision first quicken in the dark of the body, the seedbag of beginnings, the lightless sea of salt. The origin of everything we now see and touch once lived, unseen, in someone’s quiet, holy ground. Life which affirms and denies, moves there first. There, in the center of our being, is a cave where a mystic sits weaving, moving through images that startle and wake the dreamer. We feel something stirring inside us, reaching toward form. “Take me,” the image says, “roll me out into the light, where I may breathe.” The fire passes through us, and the world takes new shape. Most of the time we are impatient with this process, for it can take years to bring something new into being. Before what stirs in the dark can open its eyes, we are often led through an inferno: coals underfoot, shadowed by frightening voices and visitors, suspended between worlds. It is not simply we bear new life; we must become new life within ourselves first. We are the ones who transform. Before a new world is made, life must be unmade. The burnished leaves fall. The grass silvers with death. The body meets what stands in its way. We pulse in and out this rhythm, as life surrenders itself to its next becoming. As I remake my world, I walk alongside fear. It chews on my ankle, and still I amble as best I can, all parts of me stretching forward, pulling the body home. I see there is no will other than the great cosmos. I follow orders as best I know how. On the days where I am most despairing, I make sure to remember the great song that lives, consecrated and untouchable, in the center of me. I turn back and back still, cupping my heart, listening for the faint tune of love settled deep in a body working through the things life asks it to. I remember being held in the jaws of a fear so great it threatened my life. It came all hours of the day, demanding my every cell’s attention. The greater its force, the fainter my own. I woke with a cry caught in my throat, and even as I plucked cherries from the branch, it would not leave. Relentless in its presence, its need, its proclamations, I learned to live alongside it, not well, but still—alive. The fear stayed with me through all four seasons that year. I remember bundling in wool, trudging through snow, eyes downcast, carrying a bottle of warm water, my journal, and a body that felt thorned, heading directly into the center of the worst part of everything. Daily, I would take myself into the woods, where a small cabin sits. I would start a fire and lay down on my back to hand myself to breath. I understood my instructions at the time, where to walk toward, not away from myself. The acuteness of my despair gave me really only one choice. Since the dark visitor filled all the rooms of my life, there was no outrunning it. I invited the fear to swell as large as it could in its contained quarters, until one day, it erupted—or I did. I spread so wide on the floor that the roof above my head opened. The sky emptied its endless grief into me, carved the belly of my boat deeper, peeled me, split me down the center. I edged toward this great violent storm and let it take from me what it had come for: the pain that kept me separate from life, from belonging, from the vast whole I have always been part of. Every day I allowed it to take more, until one day I exhaled so deeply, I swear I stood on the threshold of life and death, indifferent to either. It was there the fear decided I had had enough, that it had taken from me all that it needed, and I said a final goodbye to the one the fear was releasing from me. A version of Sarah flew into the room as I let her go. I watched her leave and fizzle into a cloud. The Sarah who left was the one who clung to separation, who did not yet know the world holds itself. The Sarah who left was the one who believed fear was her enemy. The work of fire was done. I stayed silent in the bloom of my new freedom, wet eyes fresh from dream. When I opened my eyes again, the trees stood in the same places, so did the walls of the room, but I was deeply changed. Something fell like a stone into the center of me, a steady place inside it all. Left to run unbridled, fear weakens the spirit, but met with breath and presence, it begins to guide. When I spend real time with it, when I listen, it teaches instead of destroys. Any feeling that burn fiercely asks to be met.I must meet its edges, watch it from all angles, sit still before it and move toward what I most wish to find on the other side. The way I meet it shapes what it becomes. Fear does not come to terrify the weak but to strip our weakness from us. Mystery moves through the open mouth of life. I, a star, burst into flame in the throat, a hot ball of delight finding its way through great darkness. I remake the world with the help of everything ordinary. What sits in the armchair of your room, the one you are pretending is not there, is the guest arrival that can summon for you the alchemy of your transformation. Behold your brave heart. Have courage. See for yourself what comes for you, what has come for you already. “What lies ahead?” writes Arundhati Roy. “Reimagining the world. Only that.” The Great Work has begun again. It never really stops. The world dreams itself forward through the small openings we make. I feel the world shifting its shape. My body too, as if it were following the same unsettled tides, the same slow rearrangement. Some deep, wordless part of me keeps angling toward another stream, one where I can hear the sound of bluegrass and the breathing of earth. It feels as though my body knows where to turn. It is looking to the steady and enduring. The fir tree that stands through war, the sun that continues to spill its pink light over everything. The stillness that not one of us can destroy. I am both afraid and completely trusting. The breath is hot across the land, a demanding, commanding presence. It feels just like my fear did that year. I notice how it moves through me first an ever-tightening band around my belly, a tremor of distrust; then the hollowing of apathy, a dead calm. Sometimes a sudden shimmer of light, a flicker of intrigue. And deep below, I meet a silence so old it seems to stretch back through time, a presence quietly watching through me. I feel the force of the Mother raking the earth with her all-powerful hands, her heavy knuckles. She is remaking the world. I watch as the hands of creation stir us, the people, awake, plowing us underground into water, then lifting us again to breathe sips of air. I feel my own being turning in that same circular motion, moving with the great round rhythm of things. I am watching the world remake itself. I am reimagining the world with her. I walk now as I did that year when fear came to me, chewing, spitting, taunting. I walk into the woods to the same small cabin and look out the window at the poplar tree growing taller and wider without effort. I center myself and begin listening. I release the Sarah that fear once came to claim, the one the Great Mother is coming to take from all of us—the part that believes itself divided, that insists we can go on living this way. Listening does not happen only with the ears, it happens within the whole body. There is a voice inside that speaks without words, drawing me inward toward what is most alive. When I listen in this way, I become an opening, a slit where the unseen can begin to move. It is not a doing, but a turning to the face toward what others overlook. It is this kind of listening that helps the mystery begin to hear itself through me. It begins as an urge to tend to life differently—a subtle, easily dismissed cry for stillness, for time spent in the formless. As Rumi writes, “Look gorgeous, not at the water, but at the thirst.” When we begin to listen, truly listen, by following our thirst, something starts to move toward us. The world, it seems, conspires with our listening. A few weeks ago, as I stood in this season of stillness, unsure what wants to come next, feeling only the need to clear space, a woman I barely knew turned to me at a gathering and said, “Maybe you just need to build a big garden.” She couldn’t have known that I had been dreaming of planting one, that my whole family had been talking of turning the front field into food and flowers. But this is how dreams and visions spark into reality. They begin inside the heart, and with our attunement, the outer world begins to echo the inner. Life sends its small prophets in human form, speaking the next line of the dream aloud. And so we began the next day, breaking the ground for a garden that had already been growing in the invisible. I reimagine the world. I will share the food from the garden with my neighbour. The ground will know the joy of small feet upon its skin. Any adversity will lead me into a deeper relationship with myself. My dreams and visions are not mine alone, but the earth visioning through me. I will make space to listen, and sing, and lift the roof from over me. I thought remaking, reimagining the world, had to reach farther than where I stood or had to be felt across worlds and mountain ranges. Instead, I find it here, under my feet, dirt between my toes. My body remembering slowness and care. A handful of seeds pressed into the earth, and prayed over. The Sufis have a story about a chickpea. It leaps from the boiling pot, screaming, “Why are you doing this to me?” But the cook keeps pushing it back down with the ladle. “You think I’m torturing you,” the cook says, “but I’m giving you flavor, so you can become the lovely vitality of a human being.” At first the chickpea fights, all raw and hard, desperate to escape the heat. But eventually it stops resisting and cries, “Boil me some more. I can’t do this by myself. You’re my cook, my driver, my way into existence.” The cook answers, “I was once like you, fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time, and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings, and boiled once beyond that, and became your teacher.” How does our experience change if we see ourselves as the chickpea in the pot, boiling in time, and boiling in body? Can we dare to believe we are being given flavor, becoming lovely, vital human beings, stirred by invisible hands, pushed toward growth, asked to reimagine the world? Strange and beautiful dreams have been speaking to me as I sleep. In one, I am pregnant and feel the baby moving down into the birth canal. My skin is translucent and I can see the child in my womb, fair-skinned, long golden hair floating like light beneath the surface. As she rolls over, I see in place of her nose a small hooked beak. She is a soft-winged creature, a new kind of human, part spirit, part earth, forming inside me and preparing to be born. Around my room, women are busy carving windows from stone, chiseling openings for light. In myth, birds have long carried messages between worlds, bridging the distance between ground and sky. They are symbols of spirit and our capacity to travel and see from above. Perhaps this dream is not about a child at all, but a new kind of embodiment being imagined through us, one that better unites the human and the divine. One with wings, one that can see expansively from above accessing big mind, sky mind, yet deeply connected to the earth. Even if there are no dreams, no visions, there is always a question, the thirst Rumi spoke of. To follow the unseen is to follow something that rarely speaks in words. It comes as a tug, a fever under the skin, a sudden need to walk into a river and lay yourself open to the current. There is no certainty, only a pull, like a hand reaching from just ahead, the one you can’t help reaching for in return. If you sit still, and close your eyes to the outer world for this moment, can you feel presence drawing you deeper into yourself, assisting you, orienting you toward a gentle kind of dreaming? Can you sit with me, for this moment, and take a few long sips of air? Turn your eyes inward, following your breath deep in the lungs, deep in the belly, to the cave where the mystic sits weaving. Where the world is first imagined. It does not force or struggle. The energy pulling you closer to yourself is more like blooming and softening into the watery world, the ground of life. Look for a soft flutter, the almost imperceptible pulse of life beginning, or preparing to take shape. Notice too the hollow space, not yet formed, but full of waiting. Sometimes what we meet here is not only the promise of life, but the presence of endings, of death and reckoning, the grief that changes you. We notice and listen. We allow. We bow gently to the silence. We release our urgency to see it take form. Believe the wisdom moving through you.Believe what the unseen is shaping.Let the slow, patient weaving of all that is beautiful, and hard, continue its work. And make sure to remember the great song that lives, consecrated and untouchable, in the center of you. Turn back and back still, cupping the heart, listening for the faint tune of love settled deep in a body working through the things life asks it to. Moving forward now, dream gently, dear one. On our land the bears are settling in for a season of torpor, of deep rest. Their hearts will slow to eight beats per minute while others prepare to give birth. A shimmering lime-green praying mantis sunned herself on my leg. The veins along her bright belly rolled with waves of blood. Soon she will lay her sack of eggs and die. Two hundred nymphs will wait for the warmth of spring to emerge, never to see their mother’s face. The earth dreams in cycles. We are part of the dream, encountering the aspects of ourselves that are willing and unwilling to hand ourselves over to this. We are remaking the world. It looks a lot like fear, and then you, taking yourself into the woods to look for air. It looks like you and I allowing her, the Great Mother, to take from us what burdens and erodes. We march forward into her hot breath. We let her drag us into the mud and back into the mountains. She keeps pushing us back into the pot, back into the fire that will flavor us. We are being remade. We are remaking the world. She, the Great Mother, keeps finding ways to wake us. She moves quietly through our sleeping bodies, speaks through chance encounters, and sometimes tightens her holdto steer us toward what we refuse to see. Everything that rises, everything that falls,finds its way back into her arms. By her, you are held. Listen closely, and you might hear her dreaming us forward.Nothing grand, only love for its own sake, beginning through us. Love, Sarah This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahblondin.substack.com/subscribe