We’re living on a threshold. Life doesn’t fit the way it did. The rules don’t apply the way they did. We try harder. Push harder. Pull harder. But something’s off. Something’s changed. We’re called to change. In order to change everything.

But the thing with living in the threshold is that we don’t know what to change to, where to change what. What we worked for, what we wanted, what we created, doesn’t answer to our efforts anymore the way it used to. Something else is needed, but what?

I’ve been living with this question in my heart for the last year and a half. Watching things fade away. And fade away even more. It started with an overwhelming feeling that ‘everything’ was too much and with an intuitive image of an arm that wipes a stuffed table clean. A clear message. And a message of clearing.

So I started sorting out our stuff and getting rid of things. Then my son fell ill from an accident and stayed home from school many months. Then I got stopped in my tracks. After that my husband. My daughter. My other son. One by one we got taken out of our daily lives, put to a full stop each in our own way, and were asked to only take what was needed to move on.

For me that was not much. I needed my heartbeat, my horse, my home. And maybe my writing. I needed simplicity. So I stopped all my work, closed my practice, did no promotion for my new book. I cleaned, I cleared, renovated small parts of our house. Read many books, cooked many meals, made many fires, and asked over and over: But God, what do you want me to do? Where do you need my gifts? How do I fit in to this ecosystem you built? And -living in times of the Machine- how should I earn my money?

Question I don’t get an answer to, at least not in the way I would like an answer. Because the divine’s answers are not logical, they are organic in nature: the divine answers by the way I feel exhausted and get headaches the moment I get ‘back to work’, by the way I cannot come up with anything to do as a job. The way the land answers when I taken care of it, by the way I know exactly what to do when someone’s in pain or fear, and by the way how quick those healing remedies work. By the way I don’t want to work, just with some people, at some point in their lives. By the way I feel sad when my writing is misunderstood, or not understood at all. And by the way I get goosebumps when people write to me saying yes, I really needed to read this. To know this. To allow myself to believe this. Yes.

With Machine-eyes, I feel frustrated that the world will never be ready for what I have to offer. That I will never be able to offer the full stretch of the wisdom that lives inside of me to a world that needs it to survive. That I will never be able to contribute fully to the ecosystem that supports all life. With soft eyes I know I am where I need to be. Doing exactly that what I need to do. Working invisible layers out of sight.

Sometimes the work is placing a stone just with another stone. Opening one field or closing another. Sometimes the work is loving what remained unloved. Sometimes the work is praying. Mostly the work is trusting my guidance. Keeping alive what seems dead: our finly woven threads to a breathing, living, ancient network. Keeping those connections alive in a world that needs it more than ever, but denies it in any way they can. A connection to that what is fully alive. Uncontrollable and therefor impractical and even dangerous. A connection that everybody craves but nobody seems to want.

Because it brings truth.

As a mystic I live and sleep with that what it true. Not true to just me or just you, but true to the skies and the trees, to dutch people and native americans and aborigal people and to polar foxes and all of our ancestors. That what in essence is true about being alive.

And right now that is a table wiped free of all the stuff. All the ideas. All the things we do that require more things to do. All the things we want that require more things to want. All the things that distract us every day.
I started the simple life over a decade ago. In a world of too much, it is an ongoing path to come to enough, to come to balance. In take off one more thing at a time. And no, I’m not a minimalist, I don’t make a sport out of not owning anything. I really like to own the things I have, I like to take care of them, to love them, to live them. To come to balance we have to be courage and recognise that what we no longer need, what dresses up like safety or comfort, what is sold to us to make life easier, and get it out of the way, so we feel liberated and lighter and clearer. Because simple is not easy. Simple is needing less and less. And recognising that what we do need maybe very different from what we’re told.

Simple is making hawthorn-berry sirup and offering a sip to hearts in pain. Simple is putting a hand on a tense shoulder. Simple is cooking a meal. Simple is lighting the fire. Simple is thanking the tree you pass everyday. Thinking of someone and saying you love them out loud, before you form the opinion. Simple is asking for what you need (and knowing it first). But mostly simple means becoming honest with yourself. Transparent. And finding the courage to act on the truth you find within yourself. To pass the threshold to truth into yourself first. Even if you don’t know if the world is waiting for it, or in what way the world is waiting for it. Even if you have no idea how it will sustain you in an uncertain world. Because it will. Life answers to truth more than to anything else. I know this. Because I’m sitting at my empty table, waiting for what comes next. Because I know what comes next will be better than anything I could come up with on the old side of the threshold.