We’ve had fog in Istanbul for the past two days. It is not so common, we have it only few times a year. This one was especially thick in the morning and at night, and some of the regular ferry service on the Bosphorus had to be cancelled for hours at a time.
I somehow like the fog, especially in Istanbul because when fog comes along, I loose the sight of buildings and construction and all I can see is the few trees immediately outside my window. I feel I am almost in the wild, not in a city. It reminds me of the mystery. It slows the city down, covers it like snow and silences it. It almost says nature’s flow above all else.
This time I noticed it accompanied some kind of fog inside that I have been experiencing at the exact same time. Coincidence? Who knows?
I have been feeling a flux of feelings and thoughts, like a big knot of unknown stuff entangled somewhere around my heart. It is a period when I am opening to life in a different way, leaving the comfort zone –again- and maybe it is the whole uncertainty and some resistance to this opening that is the reason for all this. I really can’t tell, is it the present, the past, the future – the now that has it all- I don’t know. It is foggy to say the least.
Esther Perel says “Trust is an active engagement with the unknown. Trust is risky. It’s vulnerable. It’s a leap of faith…The more we trust, the farther we are able to venture.”
Lately I have been working with the trust muscle inside. I am learning to listen to and lean into my own intuition, my own body, my own feet in a whole new way. We are living in times when everything in life- the country-the world is in a constant state of change, flux and uncertainty. We are constantly on shaky ground. We are forced to reach in for something deeper for balance and direction and not for something outside. The visibility is forced to now, now, now.
Just like the fog, I can only see my next step. I feel into my next move, if my feet, my intuition somehow makes me take this step ahead, I trust it and take responsibility for the move. I say to myself “OK, I said yes to this, so there must be a reason, a learning, an experience so I trust it and go ahead.” It is still challenging, I still feel vulnerable and it is still a leap of faith. Just like Esther Perel says it is an active engagement with the unknown. It is saying yes to the experience, not to an expected result.
Once I wrote this haiku-like poem,
Deeper and deeper into the fog
Suddenly the sun…
And just like that, I can trust my own fog to take me deeper into my sun, to a source beyond the current story, to a new clarity woven into the heartbeat of this magical universe.
Deeper into the fog, suddenly the sun!
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