Don't be afraid to get lost.

 

Foggy Freedom

“Sometimes when you lose your way in the fog, you end up in a beautiful place. Don’t be afraid of getting lost.”

Mehmet Murat Ildan

          I had a real-life experience of this several years ago in Costa Rica. We got lost on a mountain shrouded in fog. We drove for miles in the wrong direction inside a cloud, through dripping forests, past a butterfly preserve, in a country we did not know, where we could not speak the language. It turned out to be the very best part of that trip.

          This morning in Birmingham, AL, my neighborhood is so socked-in that the trees across the street are only dark shapes in a mass of white. This is an unusual condition for this area and brings back memories of hundreds of mountain mornings in North Carolina, where fog rises off the creeks and rivers like holy ghosts almost every day. Those mountains owe their smoky appearance, and their history of spooky legends from just this sort of morning. The writer Mehmet Murat Ildan speaks of it this way: “Without trees, mountains, fogs or rains, the Sun cannot create its own magic.”

          The Dutch Christian watchmaker and writer, Corrie ten Boom, who helped many Jews escape the Nazis and ended up in a concentration camp herself, said, “Faith is like a radar that sees through the fog—the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.” Fog is a recurring phenomenon not only in our weather but also in our lives. We all go through periods of time when we cannot see what’s coming. When we feel as though we are walking in a cloud of unreality. If we can be patient and unafraid, the fog will burn off and the world will reappear with crystal clarity. These periods of murkiness are meant to slow us down and teach us how to wait and trust. If you are going through one of these boggy, clouded times in your own life, do your best to sit with it, be the container, and wait with faith. The way will be revealed to you, so don’t be afraid of being lost.

          The poet, Carl Sandberg, who lived the last several decades of his life near Flat Rock, NC, and was thus well acquainted with fog, penned these famous words: “The fog comes in on little cat feet./It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.” The nature of fog is to lift. And then the sun can do its magic.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane