We have all had moments when we were lost, and someone appeared out of the gloom to help us. Friend, stranger. A hand was offered, and we took it.

An electricity was joined, and we were brought to a clearing in the woods and a path back home.

We are all having a spiritual experience in this physical world, and we are learning, as we go along, what that experience is. Here and now.

Life is the place where we learn it. There are cosmic jokes and tricks and pain and suffering and joy. But we persist. It is in our nature. In order to provide help. In order to learn and know. In order to express courage and love and imagination.

In order to be more of what we are.

So when an experience or a person whispers, “Courage, my friend,” this is a great lesson in the great school.

Strength means creating the energy to keep going.

These are not abstract matters. They are alive.

“The only riches, the great souls,” DH Lawrence wrote.

We are driven by events to see great souls. Finally, other items are filtered out, and we are left with the essence.

Suddenly, we see the sun coming up over the horizon.

Suddenly, we see we are participating in something greater than we supposed.

Suddenly, we understand there are far more great souls than we imagined.

Suddenly, the walls and barriers go down, and we can come out of the cold and back to the familiar place of the human hearth.

We are stronger than we believed we were. We will do whatever it takes to help those we love.

“Courage, my friend.” Institutions may be built to exclude us, but we are beyond them, and we always were.

Yeats: “And I will pluck, ‘til time and times are done, the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.”

Souls are in this world and also beyond it. We are those souls, having a spiritual experience and learning what it is.

In all the lands of this place, someone in need reaches out his hand and you give yours in return. This act is irreplaceable, and yet it has few banners to mark it. So I am raising one.

Twenty-five years ago, when I met my wife-to-be, Laura, I was in my gloom. To me, she was both incomprehensible and familiar. She was someone from a world I seemed to remember, where joy-spring actually came every year, in renewal. She was rescuing me, but she had no plan for me. Her plan was to be in the moment. Giving and receiving in the moment with me. I looked for an ulterior motive. There was none. I hoped to find in myself what she had. I hoped to find out how she had what she had. Finally, I realized all this was nonsense, because I had found her. I didn’t need to travel any farther. This was the jumping-off point. All the excuses turned to dust. As it turned out, she was miles ahead of me; she already knew we would be together. All I had to do was let go of a ridiculous mirage, some sort of self-defeating idea that was backwards and inside out; a crazy idea in a language that no one spoke, including me. So I let go.

And then I was on the road to a new experience, an experience I am learning about as we go along. Right here, right now. It doesn’t end. The “me” part is relentlessly interesting, but the “her” and “us” are far more than I could have imagined. Mysteries up into sky and down into the core.

But so simple and present, as I look at her.

People may weep for lost worlds, but the tears end when two are together.

Keep the faith.