My week has been quite a journey because of the passing of Dolly Parton. I wrote a blog about how the love she expressed in life was released into the world through all of us — the tributes, the songs, the essays, the photos. It was as if love had been plucked from a turbulent world, only to be released a millionfold. That is how powerful love is.

When someone passes, we cannot help but contemplate our own death. But death comes in many forms beyond the physical: the death of a job, a relationship, a way of being. I am thinking of myself, and of many who come to me for conversations and sessions. Sondheim wrote about it in “Our Time” — that sense of something stirring, the ground shifting. Many of us feel we are on the edge of what’s next. We can’t define it, but something is changing.

I believe many of us are in the liminal space. We are not there and we are not here. We feel the change before we can see it. And we can get very demanding. “Okay, Universe, if something is changing, tell me what it is.” We want the five-year plan. We want the security. We want tomorrow’s wisdom today.

This leads us in one of two directions. We can wait for life to show up and show us before we feel safe enough to move, or we can have enough faith to begin and let life meet us there. I have felt this before surgery, on a plane I thought was going down, and each time I have moved.

I used to move just to move — “I gotta get out of here” — into another job or another town. Once I decided I needed to live in the country, though I was already living in Farmington, New Mexico. We moved the family a half hour outside that big city (LOL). It never released the feeling, because the feeling had nothing to do with location. It had to do with what I was becoming. I had to become the new version of myself, and then the place could meet me in consciousness.

When my mother was near the end of her life, she worried she wouldn’t have enough money to support herself as she aged. She had prepared, and still she worried. She was a devout Catholic, and I told her, “God hasn’t let you down up to this point. What makes you think God would leave you now?”

Throughout my life, I have been supplied. I’ve always had the answers I needed when I needed them. My faith lies in knowing that I will know what to do when I need to know it. I don’t need today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.

I read a beautiful passage in the Hindu Monastery newsletter this week. Science of Mind draws from the great philosophies of the ages, Hinduism among them. The writer said that when you tell yourself, “I am all right right now,” you immediately bring the forces of mind together: fears and doubts cease, and a sense of dynamic security permeates your being. Everything starts in mind, and we set spiritual forces in motion with our word.

If I imagine future versions of my circumstances without imagining future versions of myself, I will live in fear of the future. Instead, I tell myself, “Wherever I am, God is there.” That is my truth. I am not walking into tomorrow empty-handed. I am taking God with me.

Faith is not: everything will happen exactly the way I want. Faith is: whatever happens, the Presence will be there, and therefore I will have what I need.

Should I move? Should I look for a new job? Should I have that surgery? Science of Mind teaches that we are the only ones who can answer our own questions. There is that within us that knows. Ernest Holmes wrote, “We are surrounded and infused with Infinite Intelligence and Infinite possibility.” So, when we ask, “Will the Universe be there for me?” the better question is, “Could I ever actually be somewhere the Universe isn’t?”

The liminal space isn’t nothing. It’s not yet. The seed beneath the soil looks like nothing is happening. But something is happening.

Can we say yes before we know the answer? Or are we saying, “Not yet, Universe, not until you provide the full itinerary”? What if the answer is, “I am available for the answer”? This doesn’t mean we stay passive. It means we listen, we watch, we respond, taking the next indicated step. Step by step, moment by moment.

Instead of obsessing over circumstances and what’s going to happen, wouldn’t it be better to ask, “What is life calling me to become?” More loving? More courageous? More visible? More creative? More generous?

We cannot become the next version of ourselves until we are ready to release the present version. The future isn’t something we’re waiting to encounter. We are becoming the person who will meet it. The Intelligence that has brought me this far hasn’t disappeared, and the love that carried me through everything behind me is already present in everything ahead of me.

Instead of asking, “What’s going to happen to me?” we can stand here and say, “Universe, here I am. I’m listening. I’m available. Show me what’s next.”

Love and Aloha,

Rita Andriello-Feren, Author of Where is My Red Dress, Co-Founding Spiritual Director CSL Kaua’i

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