There is a vital place for disappointment on the spiritual path. Not the kind we quickly metabolize into meaning, but the kind that actually disappoints us—that removes an image we had been living toward and does not immediately replace it with another.

There is a lunar dimension of the path that asks us to allow what is waning to wane, to refrain from rushing toward the next illumination, to let certain dreams, identities, and images of the future lose their light.

To be made into dust. And to grieve all that is inevitably lost on the path of healing and awakening.

Disappointment can be an extraordinarily intelligent movement of the soul. Something that once carried meaning no longer does, and our instinct is often to repair the image—to find the lesson, recover the meaning, locate the hidden gift.

That can be a noble move, an honorable and very human one, and at times a kind one. But sometimes it comes too soon.

The alchemists understood that there are moments when the material must be allowed to blacken, when what has been carefully constructed must lose its coherence. The *nigredo* is not a problem to be solved on the way to the gold. It belongs to the gold.

There are times when healing asks us not to become more luminous, but less certain. To wander for a while without the old coordinates and allow ourselves to be changed by what could not become what we hoped.

Perhaps some disappointments are how the soul releases us from a future we have already outgrown.

~Matt Licata

from the underbelly of love…

inquiry for today~ take the moments as fresh dew….

making time…

When change comes, you gotta slow down and take note of it.

In the midst of that change is all the possibility in the world.

~Bertice Berry