The Life I Can No Longer Refuse.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sarahblondin.substack.com A restlessness that won’t settle, the sense that time is running out, the pressure that gathers behind the breastbone, these are not signs of lack or failure. They are calling you, not to run toward more things, but to come closer. What we mistake for urgency is often a summons to return to what is directly before us, to inhabit our lives more fully than we ever have. If you’ve felt an uneasiness inside you, as if you’re descending into unfamiliar terrain within or around you, this essay will help you steady. It will show you where to look, what to hold onto, and what to remember as you pass through the many gates of revelation and change. It is a story of lost words, a boulder of presence, and the returning of your attention to the living world. There is an ancient Sumerian myth about the goddess Inanna that feels strangely close to this moment of my life. She is summoned downward, called to enter what she has not yet known. To pass through, she must walk through seven gates, and at each one she gives up something she once believed she needed. Her crown, her jewels, her robes. Everything she used to move through the world. At the end of her descent, she hangs in the dark for three days, stripped of everything but her essence, before she rises again. “Midway upon the journey of our life, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward path had been lost.” These lines from The Divine Comedy have been rattling inside me as I pass through what feels like one of Inanna’s gates. Words are hard to find, and in my dreams I am trying to read a language I can’t yet understand. Pages of books with illegible words and unfamiliar tongue. I imagine each of us giving up our own crowns and ornaments as we step into what we do not yet know. Each of us entering our own descent. And though I understand this letting go, this slow passing through, is essential, I struggle to welcome the discomfort of being unmade. The tenderness of the way. The wish to meet it willingly and with reverence, while feeling mostly displaced and unmoored, as if I’ve entered a place I don’t yet know how to walk. It is no small thing to lose the landmarks we trusted, but growth is born of unsettled ground. Disturbed earth is what quickens the seed.