Today, with a big old sigh, I pulled my gym card, MTA card, and library card out of my wallet. It was an acknowledgment that there’s no way I’ll be comfortable working out in an indoor public space or riding a subway or checking out physical books anytime soon. That these cards I used daily only months before have become obsolete artifacts in the tesseract that is virus time.

Without unifying municipal or national leadership, there’s no obvious end in sight to the COVID madness, the chaos and cruelty that has become American life. Thus in my clients and community I observe a rising existential despair—an overwhelming sense that life in its current incarnation is unlivable, pleasure is mostly toxic, and meaning elusive at best.

One thing I never do in my practice as an intuitive is bullshit. So I won’t sugarcoat this grief. I won’t meme or om-shanthi or psychobabble it away. Our old way of life was very very flawed–untenable for many–but knowing it is gone is fucking hard, especially since our present existence feels confined and loveless.

Change is invariably and powerfully painful. It strips us of hope, because it suggests we don’t know enough about our future to attach dreams to it.

But hope is a fool’s errand—the imposition of ego–because it stems from the belief that we can and should will our projections into being. Limited to what humans can imagine, it is the clumsiest sort of spellcraft, the fumbling of the faithless.

Most of us live without faith since it was the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater of religion, or because it was disrupted by trauma and injustice. But faith is what we need. Because faith is the knowledge that that so long as we are honest, engaged, and loving—so long as we actively honor the spirit living in everyone and everything— we can find our way to a divine flow that guides us, sees us, supports us. The flow that does not coddle us but always holds us.

Faith is a marriage of fate and free will, reception and inception, personal intent and the good wind of the universe. it is working with rather than against the rhythms of the seasons, the laws of the land (not the government), the call of our true heart. When we lose this faith, we experience increasingly jarring course corrections until we recalibrate or life is recalibrated for us. When we find this faith, we can dare and dive freely because it is as simple as stepping into water–sometimes delightful, sometimes bracing, always liberating.

With faith, we can rise from this collective horror rather than trudge blindly forward.

But to find faith now, we must first mourn. For only when we experience our rawest feelings can we experience anything else, just like infections can’t heal until we lance them. Emotions are not our true selves, but they are the breadcrumbs that lead us to them. So light a candle, put on the saddest music you can find, and surrender to your sorrow.

Somewhere in this shit lives the fertilizer for beautiful growth.