Vachon Imagined

The world is your own thinking. It is shaped by your own mind. All discouragement lives here, and all praise does too. Together they form a single life that eventually leads back to the Life that neither ends nor dies.

It does not give up on you, nor does it necessarily encourage you in the way the mind understands encouragement. It is the encouragement. The peace is the encouragement.

It is the place from which all things flow and to which all things return.

Marriage comes and goes. People come and go. Fame, approval, likes, disapproval—each rises and falls like a wave. One moment you are lifted by success, and the next you are crushed beneath its retreat.

It is a long way down for anyone who lives by the mind alone—by their own strength, their own conclusions, their limited perception.

Yet beneath every rise and fall is something that does not move. Beneath every gain and loss is a peace that asks for nothing and cannot be taken away. It remains when praise arrives and when criticism follows. It remains when love stays and when love leaves. It remains when the world of the mind exhausts itself.

And perhaps that is why we return to it again and again—not because it promises success, certainty, or protection, but because it is the only thing that was never passing through.