The Fire and the Stillness

A true awakening is not a single moment of light. It is a continual dissolving.
Over time, the self begins to thin, to merge with everything around it — the divine, the ordinary, the sacred, the mundane. What once felt separate becomes fluid. The borders between “me” and “the world” start to blur.

This dissolving can feel like chaos. The equalization of energy — the merging of inner and outer — destabilizes the old idea of a fixed self. The mind, used to identifying and defining, finds itself unmoored. But what falls apart in this process is illusion, not truth.

Awakening, in reality, is not peace at first.

It is eruption. It is the volcano on the mountain of God. Life rushes in, unexpected, uncontrollable, to reveal every part of you that has not yet been met: the fears, the clinging, the defenses, the places not yet softened into love.

You will experience both quiet days and cataclysms. Moments of peace, then deep unrest. Each one serves. The stillness reveals truth; the eruption reveals where truth has not yet taken root. Neither state is better. Each is an expression of God moving through you.

Over time, the storms settle. The self integrates what it once feared. The landscape quiets. What’s left is not perfection. It’s presence.

And yet, even here, no state is preferred. Peace is not superior to turmoil; the mountain is not better than the eruption. Both belong to the same sacred rhythm.

After my own inner deaths, I longed for what I called “a year of real.”

I got it.
And it hurt.

It is hard, this being human, to hold the divine and the ordinary in the same breath. But that, I’ve learned, is the work.

Awakening is not an escape from the world. It is learning how to hold it all, the fire and the stillness, and to love it as it is.