When I was growing up, my dad used to tell my sister and me “take the hard trail” more than once a day. Like, all the time. So much so that it became a running joke in our household and often meant he was on the receiving end of a lot of eye-rolls from us. His point was, do the hard stuff, and you’ll get to where you want to go.
As adults we processed this with him; we felt that the message was: only do things if they are hard, so if anything is easy, it’s wrong. He’s offered that maybe a better message would have been “take the smart trail…”
But now, when I think about my journey and how I’ve ended up here writing to you, I have been on hard trails, and, truth be told, I’m still on one. The difference is: now, I’m walking the one I know in my marrow is the right one. It is hard, and I will be walking it for the rest of my life. You see, we all are a piece of the unfathomable, marvelous and inseparable existence called life – yesterday, today and tomorrow. Time is not linear here, and the connections between us, our world, our universe, our thoughts, all within our connected oneness are so many and varied and amazing that we are not in child’s play 3 or 4 D, but something so much more vast and intricate than that. I call that universal oneness God. You may call it the collective consciousness, Spirit, Allah, Yahweh, the transcendent state, or something else. It is all the same. We are all meaning-full, purpose-full pieces of the great puzzle of the great collective oneness - God, and our purpose – our Trail, capital T, is etched into every fibre of our puzzle piece.
Frustratingly, the free will of being human clouds our vision of our Trail. Obstacles spring up and distract us from staying on our Trail to Agape. The rain of separateness falls and washes away some of our path. Our ego fixates on that other person’s path over there and we lose track of our own for a while trying to walk hers. Each day we wake up and feel a bit off because we’re not sure where we are but just keep walking without taking time to orient ourselves to our Trail. Maybe one day the path you’re on simply disappears, and you look down at your feet and see a huge chasm before you and wonder where the hell you are and how you got here.
So often this is where the journey back to ourselves starts. This was where it started for me. I had walked for 35 years down many different paths – trails I thought were more glamorous, more responsible, more realistic. Sometimes I took paths just for fun, more often I took the quickest path to get me off the one I happened to be on.
After doing this for many years and forgetting to look up and figure out where the eff I was, suddenly the path in front of me crumbled away. It had been slippery for a long time, but I was too focused on rationalizing why I was on that trail – it was expected, people looked up to me for being on it, it was financially secure, it made people proud of me, it was a ‘responsible’ trail – that I didn’t realise I was running at full pace down a rocky, slippery path straight into a wide and bottomless crevasse. And then, just when I caught myself from careening down into the darkness, the edge of the cliff just crumbled underneath my feet. And my heart begged to God that I would do anything if he would just save the piece of my heart that was fading away.
In my dark night despair, he scooped me up and held my heart, and then he said, rest your weary soul, baby. When you’re ready, it’s time to get back on your Agape Trail.
What is your Agape Trail? It’s the action taken by you at your core – the real you. The only one of you there is, was, or ever will be. If you believe in reincarnation, you will know that even if your spirit comes back to live again and again, the quest of your spirit is to transcend. Your spirit is always you, and you have a job to do. One that only you can do. Only you can walk on this Trail. If you walk it, you have within you the power to change the world. But you must be brave, because your Trail is the hardest possible trail for you, and it is defined by the things you fear the most. Find what it is you fear, and your trail will suddenly appear before you.
Walking your Trail is a quest only you can take, and once you’ve reached the end, you reach full transcendence – agape – God, and then faith tells us that what you thought was the end is actually only the beginning.
So, my quest is to help you reach back and pull out who you really are and marvel at it with you, and then help and watch you get back on your Agape Trail. Because you know what happens then? You see God inside you, and agape shines forth.
The word ‘agape’ (ah-gaap-ay) is one of the 4 primary Greek words for love. It means unconditional, selfless love[1]. The other 3 are:
It is my quest to help each person I meet move toward wholeness through their unique purpose. I am fascinated by the process of uncovering purpose, and my guidepost for this is agape. My own experiences and research have led me to the conclusion that we are all connected, and that we all have the same desire to connect with each other, with ourselves, and with our true purpose.
[1] For a very interesting analysis of words describing love, please see Tim Lomas’s Lexical Analysis of Love: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322241158_The_flavours_of_love_A_cross-cultural_lexical_analysis
As you can see, the spirit behind the word ‘agape’ has no known destructive factors, and thus is why it has historically been linked to the love of God and love of the highest order.
