Opening Ourselves Like A Root Or A Leaf

A guest piece by ✨ Josie George ✨

Twice in my life, I have had the supreme pleasure of falling head-over-heels in love with someone’s writing and then becoming their friend.

Photo by Ch Photography

The first was Terrance Keenan - Buddhist monk, artist and author of the brilliant Zen Encounters with Loneliness. We lost Terry in 2024 and I miss him very much, and, he’s still with me.

The second is Josie George, who I discovered through a friend and then by reading her stunning book, A Still Life: A Memoir. She also writes a gorgeous newsletter right here called Bimblings.

I am a sucker for excellent writing. I don’t really care what excellent writers write about - I just want to enjoy their sentences. Josie’s writing is like that.

And also, Josie also holds a quiet, deep wisdom. When I’d got to know her better I joked once that she was a Zen teacher in disguise, and it turns out that she does indeed practice Zen Buddhism - but she is also more than just Zen. She is very humble and might not like me saying this, but I think her experiences of her unreliable body coupled with her determination to enjoy her life have offered her a glimpse of enlightenment. She shares this with her readers generously.

This piece of writing (which Josie has given me permission to share) originated on a little Whatsapp group we formed to talk about Tosha Silver’s teachings. Silver talks about how we can trust the Universe - keeping an open mind about what is best for us, and handing things over to the Divine when we don’t know what to do. Her philosophy returns me to my years in a 12 step programme, and they were a lifesaver during our difficult house-buying process last year.

A couple of us in the group were struggling with the concept of ‘divine will’ in a such a complicated and cruel world. In response Josie wrote this - describing her own take on how the Universe works. It covers similar ground to my piece form last week: Is There A Plan. It is wise and clear, and I have returned to it many times since Josie first posted it.

I have found it useful, thought-provoking, and comforting. I do hope you will too. Over to Josie.

“The way I see it is that there are two separate energies at work in the world. There is human will and divine will, human energy and divine energy.

Human will creates these great long chains of cause and effect that ripple through history and we're entirely at their mercy. This is politics and climate change and capitalism and war and all of the complex threads of humanity that we’re tangled up in and can't avoid - we are seeing the consequences now of things that happened LONG before, and how they affect us is different depending on our circumstances and where we live. But there is this other energy present, the thing that makes the trees grow, our hearts beat, a kind of natural flow to things that is not about what humans want, that's nothing to do with human greed and desire or control or power. This is the divine to me.

If we take the Divine as a sort of parental or supernatural figure, it all gets very yucky very fast. It just becomes something with a HUMAN consciousness that gives or withholds, favours or punishes, which is horrible. It's just one big human overlord playing games with us, deciding who gets what and favouring the more fortunate. I reject this wholeheartedly. I think this is just more humanity projected onto a god.

But we can also think of the divine as nature, the Tao, Chi, even the collective unconscious - I think it has lots of different names and faces which we can learn about. It's not human, which means it has a wildness to it, but it also has a kind of order, balance and flow. A natural wisdom. And that's an energy you can tap into. It's a kind of guidebook to the best way to live, I think. And when we live well (which relates to the 'right' action, speech etc. of Buddhism, I think) we grow well, like a tree grows well - our lives work better.

When good things happen, this isn't the divine 'giving' me a new job like a present, it's more like my tree naturally growing into the shape it was always meant to be, that my seed carried the potential of, because I got out the way and let nature/the divine take charge.

Because everything works together - because everything is connected in strange ways we don't understand - tapping into a sense of divine energy can allow us to connect to OTHER things, drawing them to us, allowing us to draw them into our life, like open roots receiving water and leaves growing perfectly to receive sunlight. We just naturally receive the things we need when we grow in the right way and connect to the right things. I think this energy speaks through your own body (because our own bodies are made of it) - through our intuition - and through signs around us, because we're connected to everything else.

Nature can't give me a new thing like a job or a house, that's ridiculous, but it can give me strength, healing, and perhaps a sense of trust that is essential to help me relax enough to let the rest happen. It can teach me how to be more like *it* than a willful human being, and then the things I need to survive, grow and thrive find me more easily. I think speaking to the divine, putting things in the god box¹, is really more a kind of energetic alignment. Opening ourselves like a root or a leaf, if that makes sense.

I think when Tosha talks, THIS is more what she has in mind - I don't know, I might be wrong - but her language runs risk of having the flavour of 'parental god' sometimes which throws things off. I think she doesn't define it more specifically because she wants everyone to find their own interpretation of the divine, so it works for everyone. But if I read her words with MY version of the divine, it works for me.

Terrible things have happened and will happen - these are the great chains of human will and cause and effect at play. But WHEN they happen, there is another energy available to us, one of much deeper wisdom. This is always available, whatever happens, and will always help, I believe. If a tree gets a limb cut off by a human, there are energies that tree can tap into to help it heal and rebalance and 'the divine' can provide that and does provide that. I think the same is true of us.

As for whether things happen because the universe has decided we need to learn that lesson, I'm not sure about that - it feels too much like a projection of human will and consciousness onto the divine again to me. But the divine IS in everything, and the potential for greater flow and alignment is also in everything, so maybe that's the lesson inherent in everything - how to align better.

I hope that makes sense. Thank you for reading!! xx”

I kept in the kisses because I’m sure she’d be happy to send them to you all too.

Go gently today, and thank you for being here.

Here’s to leaning in.

Love, Satya <3

Tell me: How does Josie’s experience fit with your own experience of the world? What are you resistant to? How do your own beliefs help you to be kinder / to be safer / to enjoy the world?

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1. My friend Terry Keenan’s daily motto was:
   

   No blame, be kind, love everything.
   

   Impossible, and what a thing to aspire to! We say these words as a part of each Buddhist practice session we hold here at the temple. I sometimes wonder if we could cut out all the rest and just speak these six words. What more is there to say?

2. If you’re interested in trying some Tosha Silver yourself, I’d start with her book of short pieces about her life: Outrageous Openness. She also offers a forum and a weekly call. I listened to the calls for a good while and eventually stopped because she’s an astrologist and I’m just a bit allergic to astrology, but I still ‘take what I like and leave the rest’ and am hugely grateful for the life she models.

   Here’s her abundance prayer, from her book It’s Not Your Money - I say it most days and it helps me to stay open, like roots & leaves.

   

3. Here’s Josie’s new book: Letters From Wonderland. It’s the book she thought the world needed - I agree. Read about it in her own words here then order yours!

   

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Satya Robyn is a writer, psychotherapist & Buddhist teacher. She co-led the Bright Earth temple for a decade, has written ten books, and has taken part in eco-activist projects. She lives happily in Malvern in the UK with her spouse Kaspa & two little dogs.

If you’d like to receive regular love letters from Satya but you can’t afford a paid subscription right now, read more about low cost subscriptions here.

1. Tosha Silver encourages us to make or designate a ‘God Box’ so when things are overwhelming or we can’t untangle a problem, we can write it down on a slip of paper, put it in the box, and literally hand it over to God. We then wait patiently - keeping an eye out for wisdom or resolutions from unexpected places. It’s not that we don’t take action, but we wait for wisdom from somewhere else rather than forcing something that isn’t yet ready or that we don’t have the capacity for. This works for me very well although sometimes I take my problems back from God a thousand times and have to be persistent in handing them back over!