Letting life lead

The subtle magnetism of being guided

I picked up Butcher’s Crossing last night and read a few chapters before bed.

This morning, I brought it with me into the woods.

At some point, I stopped following the trail.

It didn’t feel like a conscious decision. More like a quiet drift.

I let my feet choose where they wanted to go. Or maybe I simply stopped choosing at all. And something in me relaxed when I did.

I wandered without an agenda. No destination, no outcome to arrive at. Just a steady flow of movement. One foot in front of the other. Floating and grounded at once.

And because of that, things began to appear. Or maybe I should say, I noticed them. But can anything appear without us noticing it?

A hawk perched.
A flower I would have otherwise passed.
A narrow path I never noticed.

It felt less like I was moving through the woods, and more like I was being moved through them.

Like something else had space to take over once I stepped aside.

The forest led me to a clearing.

I sat down in the grass and opened my book.

And, a few pages in, I landed on this:

“In the sunlight he paused. He wondered if he wished to go back to the town just now. Unable to decide, he let his feet carry him vaguely along the wagon tracks to the main road; there he hesitated for a moment, to turn first one way and another, as the needle of a compass, slow to settle, discovers its point. He believed—and had believed for a long time—that there was a subtle magnetism in nature, which, if he unconsciously yielded to it, would direct him aright, not indifferent to the way he walked. But he felt that only during the few days that he had been in Butcher’s Crossing had nature been so purely presented to him that its power of compulsion was sufficiently strong to strike through his will, his habit, and his idea. He turned west, his back toward Butcher’s Crossing and the towns and cities that lay eastward beyond it; he walked past the clump of cottonwoods toward the river he had not seen, but which had assumed in his mind the proportions of a vast boundary that lay between himself and the wildness and freedom that his instinct sought.”

This was not a coincidence. Or perhaps it was (I believe that coincidences are simply effects with unseen causes).

The same quiet pull the author describes is the same one that guided me there.

I don’t think this guidance turns on and off. I think it’s always there.

It’s subtle.

But it becomes visible when we stop insisting on our own direction. When we loosen our grip on thought. When we stop treating every mental movement as something that needs to be followed or solved or acted on.

There’s a different kind of intelligence underneath all of that.

Quieter. Wider. Unconcerned with control.

And when aware of it, even briefly, life feels less like something I’m managing and more like something I’m living.

Not even. For I’m not doing it.

It feels like life is happening through me.

No. For there’s no separation.

It feels like I am life.