My mother has often told me, “There’s no distance in the spirit,” throughout my life. She would encourage me to center myself through prayer (for others it might be meditation) so that I might be able to be “led of the Spirit,” meaning register the divine knowledge that would lead me in the right direction. Now as a middle-aged adult, I place my own sense of faith within a context of many peoples & different beliefs that share a central core of connection. For example, in the Star Wars saga, we’d call it The Force, & in Hinduism we might call it shakti or in Taoism chi. There’s the binding energy that is life, animation, what illuminates the complex circuitry of the human body. We know there’s energy inside of us, just as we all possess a natural frequency that physically resonates when met with the right pitch, like the glass that shatters from singing.

And, yet, even though we can’t see energy with the naked eye & only its effects, we know it exists.

Years ago, when I was in recovery from a surgical procedure, I encountered a nurse who introduced me to reiki. What she described reminded me of my mother’s laying of hands on me when she’d pray for healing. The nurse gave me a session, & I can’t really explain the level of heat I could feel radiating from her hands over me. When the nurse met my mother, she told her that she’d never seen anyone with a energy field around her as powerful as my mother’s. Now, I knew that my mother did have quite a force within her. She could intuit & predict events, & things that couldn’t be explained by convention or science would happen when she prayed. That the nurse, tapped in to that greater energy, would have sensed or felt my mother’s energy so intensely seemed reasonable to me.

For me, I can only explain feeling energy in terms of hot & cold, which again makes sense since we measure energy in calories which are used to generate heat or coldness.

And yet, here I am, a mid-career academic administrator in higher ed, surrounded with people with multiple advanced degrees & driven by observable things–evidence-based decisions in the era of Big Data. I remember that a CAO I worked with once communicated out to a server list an email lauding data, predictive analytics, trends & probabilities over being led by experience or a “gut feeling.” I also remember how I then compiled a reading list of all of the articles & books substantiating the importance of intuition & gut feelings. The overwhelming narrative reinforced the importance of intuition, pieces like this one from Forbes, which points out that 40% of CEOs base decisions on that gut feeling.

One thing I say over & over is, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Intuition could be a tapping into that energy force, something binding all of the cosmos together but we just don’t know how to understand or measure it yet. Like early explorers navigated by stars & wind & sun, we can rely on our sensing of the world around us if we slow down to listen.

This week, we just saw a picture of a black hole for the first time. And how were we able to see it? A grad student developed an algorithm that could predict & fill in pixels that were missing from a picture capturing a black hole’s effect; in other words, we developed a means for completing a picture of something we previously could never see by filling in the negative space. But we knew black holes existed before we ever saw it with our own eyes. I find it so ironic that people often cite science as a means for defending the world as certain & measured, as if the evidence-based findings are always fixed, stable, undeniable truth. But I grew up believing our solar system had 9 planets & that margarine was healthier to eat than butter… And now? Science conjectures & tries to prove hypotheses all the time, & all the time previous theories can be overturned due to some new knowledge or evidence-based finding.

How is it that the most important things in life like faith, cosmic energy, & intuition, the very things that give existence meaning can be so easily discounted? In a prevailing STEM-based world, we are seeing the erosion of the arts & humanities, the disconnection of self, as if these things don’t matter. And so, here, I find myself sharing more of my experiences & vulnerabilities in blog entries like this one, with the hope that others might connect. Like Whitman’s spider, I will keep throwing out the gossamer threads of my soul.