It is funny how a person can go on a search for one thing and actually find another. This happened to me this morning as I searched one of the John O’Dononhue books that line my shelves. I was searching for a poem of his to send to a friend whose mother is dying. I was searching for words on comfort and death. But what caught my attention was something completely different.

Instead, what caused me to abandon the morning paper and sit down in a chair, were O’Donohue’s tender, reflective words on beginnings. “When we arrive into the world, we enter this ancient sequence…..Beginnings often frighten us because they seem lonely voyages into the unknown…….Goethe says that once a commitment is made, destiny conspires with us to support and realize it……A beginning is ultimately an invitation to open toward the gifts and growth that are stored up for us…..There is nothing to fear in the act of beginning. More often than not it knows the journey ahead better than we ever could.”

All these sentences taken from several paragraphs lured me into thinking about the challenge and treasure of beginnings. I thought of all the times in my own life when I have sabotaged beginnings by procrastination, excuses, and even sheer laziness. All these actions are driven to some degree by fear, aren’t they? It is easy to never begin so we never have to fail or we never have to succeed….because who knows what might happen to ‘the way we’ve always done things’ if we actually succeed? Who knows how our living might be changed and then what would people think? How might we be called to move differently in the world? What might we become responsible for or to? So many questions beginnings can stir up!

But the sentence that grabbed me most was his quoting of Goethe. The assumption is that once we make a commitment to a beginning, there are other forces of energy that are attracted to that commitment, forces that actually support us and help us move through toward the ‘what next’ a beginning always signals. It has certainly been my experience that this is true. If I make a commitment to a call for newness in my life, and if I am open to the signs and green lights along the way, I begin to sense that an action that seemed to be begun individually becomes supported collectively. Sometimes this comes in the encouragement of another person or in the more mysterious ways things seem to fall in place along the path.

Destiny? Fate? Coincidence? The movement of the Spirit? You decide. I just know that as I look back on the beginnings I have made there is a clear and certain sense of being surrounded by something larger than myself that opens the doors or closes them. That provides the insight or question. That makes the knot or extends the rope in ways that are unexplainable and sometimes unimaginable. That becomes, again if I am awake and open to it, a companion for the journey.

What to make of being lured into these words on beginnings? What to make of them on this day, at this time, when I was searching for words of comfort about death? Certainly, it is almost always true that for something to begin, something must die or be released. And even in these words about beginnings, I see some comforting wisdom about death.

And so the questions which will surround me this day might be: What is beginning for me? What needs to be released and allowed to fall into the gentle arms of Mystery? What fears do I hold that are keeping me from paying attention?

Beginnings are happening with the rising sun of each day and with each inhalation of our precious breath. These questions of beginning are not just mine. If you feel a beginning rising in you, I offer these questions to you and welcome your own questions about beginning.

May we each be lured in our own way and may we sense that wise companion at our side.