We tend to think of spiritual experience as the beautiful moments.
The meditation that drops you into deep stillness. The walk in the forest where everything suddenly makes sense. The moment of grace that arrives unexpectedly and reminds you that something larger is at work.
But what about the rest of it?
The argument that goes too far. The diagnosis that changes everything. The ordinary Tuesday that feels like it will never end. The grief, the confusion, the days when nothing feels sacred at all.
Here is what I have come to know, slowly and not always gracefully:
Life is a spiritual experience. All of it.
The hard parts are not interruptions to your spiritual path. They are the path. The places where we are cracked open are the places where the light gets in — where we are invited to go deeper than comfort would ever take us.
You chose to come here. To this life. To this body. To this particular collection of experiences, relationships, losses, and loves. Not because you needed to be punished or tested — but because you wanted to feel. To know what it is to be human. To grow in ways that only embodied life makes possible.
This week's plant is Elder — Sambucus nigra — a plant of thresholds and transitions. She grows at the edges of things — the edge of the forest, the edge of the field. She is a guardian of the in-between places, the moments of change and passage.
Elder says: you are not lost. You are in transition. And transition is sacred.
Whatever you are moving through right now — let it be sacred. Let it be part of the journey, not an obstacle to it.
In the green and the growing,
🌸 ginakearney.com