IGNITE YOUR LIFE: “Trust in spirit”
by Sarah Gish
Imagine yourself standing on a beach, watching waves roll in and out from the ocean. It’s relaxing because there is a rhythm and we know they’ll do that. We TRUST that will happen. The waves won’t suddenly stop and the water won’t roll up like a rug that’s being put away. Now visualize yourself in your house. You plug in your computer -- you know it’s going to start and you TRUST that you will be able to write all the beautiful words you want to.
I ponder those things when thinking about trusting in spirit. “Trust in spirit” is the first way to ignite your life in my “IGNITE YOUR LIFE!” art project and community campaign (www.IgniteYourOwnLife.com). I have twelve ways to ignite your life daily – ways that, if followed, will stave off depression, anxiety, loneliness, and isolation. Being ignited for your life does that. I am an artist and I create when I have things I need to work out in my life. My brother Geoffrey Gish died of alcoholism in 2004 at 43 years old and I not only wanted to deal with my grief by honoring his bright and loving way of being in the world but I also wanted to encourage others to be ignited for their lives so that they could hopefully avoid that same tragic ending.
Over the next 12 years, I wrote 12 ways to ignite your life and summed up each way with one word to make them easy to remember; you can see the full list on the IGNITE YOUR LIFE! website. I now volunteer with teenagers, teaching them about the 12 ways and making bracelets (one is pictured) with all of the words as a service project at their sober high school, Archway Academy. The bracelets sell at Lucia’s Garden and Unity of Houston bookstore and we are getting those concepts out into the world. “Trust in spirit,” and “Trust” are at the top of the list.
So…TRUST. How do you do that? Sure, you know waves roll in and out and electricity is there at our command. But how do you trust in spirit? And what is spirit? I chose that word because I wanted something open-ended, something that people could interpret in their own way. “Spirit” can mean God, Goddess, creator, universe, something mysterious – whatever works for you. Trusting in that spirit for me means to relax, to know that spirit (whom I choose to call “Mother Father God”) is in charge. I act as if I have a helper – even if I don’t always believe that – because as I learned a long time ago, your thoughts create reality.
And I trust in spirit by just doing it. I trust in spirit when I “let go and let God,” a concept I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous. I stand at the shore of my life and let the waves roll in and out. I plug in my computer and it works. And I walk labyrinths and ponder how they are a metaphor for life. Because I know that, like the labyrinth path, I will always find my way back by trusting – trusting in the path that has one way in and one way out. It’s a beautiful metaphor for life and always reminds me how to trust in spirit.