Of miracles & the miraculous
By: Nicola Trethowan
Wait! Just Listen is a weekly Sunday newsletter on living a purposeful and meaningful life, in a digitised world of opinion polarisation, gratuitous commentary and click-bait.
Today’s essay is a guest contribution from the very talented writer and essayist, Nicola Trethowan, who runs Surrender Now , a newsletter that stunningly captures the cycle of life and living, all masterfully expressed through wonderous storytelling and reflections.
Nicola’s work shines light on the consonance between storytelling and life. It inspires readers, like myself, to embark on a journey into discovering the sublime and transcendent, as we navigate through the material joys and pains of reality. My sincere thanks to Nicola for very graciously contributing to this week’s newsletter.
The year 2021 was marked by loss and grief. These states have always brought about miraculous changes for me, and the point of Surrender Now is to relate how combinations of circumstances bring about powerful shifts in consciousness. I write through life experience to illustrate the flow of feelings and events that align with the miraculous.
But that is all quite wordy. Let me tell it straight.
Over Easter weekend in 2021, my friend Daphne ended her own life. Her death was the fifth of my Melbourne friends who died before the age of thirty-five due to substance-related causes or suicide (in her case, both). In the week that I mourned her I lay sleepless through the nights beside my son, who had just turned one, and whom I would also lose before the year was out.
As I lay sleepless through those nights, offering the breast to Raphael and thinking about Daphne, the thought that kept coming to me was who will be next? How many more loved ones will I lose to overdoses and deaths of despair? And it was then that I began to write Volume I of Surrender Now inside my mind; the story of my own recovery from substance abuse and chronic anxiety.
Somehow I thought that by writing down all of the preconditions and states of feeling that led to my recovery, I could prevent people from dying. That was probably just the insomnia talking. Even so, the project awakened the writer in me from a 7-year hiatus; I stole moments to write down the novella-length story whilst the little ones were sleeping, when I could forget the spell of motherly fatigue and focus intently on the story. And that is how Surrender Now came to be. I started publishing it in instalments towards the end of May.
Taken only in these terms, it doesn’t seem like much of a miracle. But you have to look at how these circumstances converge in the flow of life as a whole to see the grace in it: miracles only ever appear when you look at an event in context. So when I tell you what a lifeline, what a salvation this newsletter was to me in the wake of my bereavement, when Raphael died in July, once I had rekindled the discipline of writing and found something of a readership and community of peers through Substack, perhaps then you can fathom something more about what I mean when I speak of miracles.
Again I found myself sleepless in the first month of bereavement. Not because of a wakeful baby, but in the painful absence of a wakeful baby. He had slept every night of his life by my side. He was my world and I had been devoted to him. People took care of me during the days but nothing consoled me through the nights. Prayer and meditation did not work. Reading and listening to music did not work. Having a tantrum did not work. Blaming others did not work. The only thing that took me out of my misery was writing my stories down, and finding the meaning of what I have lived through in the process.
In those nights, it felt almost like Raphael was sitting beside me. And this angelic presence urged me, gently, to write about the miracles that have shaped who I am. For he was the culmination of every miracle I have witnessed on the path of life.
On the subject of the miraculous, Josh offered his definition as instances when a sense of spiritual and emotional equilibrium pervades our consciousness. I’ll qualify this by saying that this state emerges through a process of inner transformation – in my case, the grief transmuted into connectedness and awakening of creative purpose – which is a miracle unto itself. Again, it comes back to viewing this state in context: what were its preconditions, what were the circumstances that led to it.
The quality of the miraculous works through our ordinary experience to bring forth miracles: astonishing transformations are not alien to us, but part of us. Contained within the addict is the journey of recovery; the miracle draws that process out into the addict’s experience, making their healing possible. It truly does take a miracle to transform the belief that one cannot survive without one’s substance into the state of surrender that potentiates true recovery.
In recovery – from trauma, loss, addiction, illness – one has to commit to experiencing the pain of one’s condition in order to move beyond it and return to wholeness. Not everyone can make that commitment: the wounds simply run too deep, and if proper support and care is not in place then recovery is impossible. Even so, the act of storytelling plays a vital role in recovery circles; by sharing personal narratives about the pain of our struggles, we forge connections with each other that combine in a story of collective healing and affirms and supports our individual efforts.
As I have shown through the narrative of Surrender Now, in my life the miracle of recovery from addiction created the context for the transformations of my inner and outer worlds that followed. I found the courage inside me to leave my city life behind and drop out of society, pursuing something like a hero’s journey in the hinterland of Northern NSW. This led me to my partner and the ashram where we lived together and to the explorations in community-building and conscious living that brought us to Vanuatu.
In writing from my own experience – which I had never attempted prior to this project – my aim is to present a context for understanding the ordinariness of miracles: how natural it feels to be part of the story life is telling itself, how natural it feels to surrender to the flow of inspiration and alignment with authentic creative purpose. It is through devoting ourselves to ordinary pursuits – family, community, service – that extraordinary states of consciousness begin to emerge in our lives. And this is the provenance of the truly miraculous.
A soul-touching narration of the truth of being alive, which I am able to resonate with absolutely !! Thanks for sharing !!.
So beautiful and heartbreaking. Thank you for sharing your story with all of us.