It was evening on the hill,
and the two lanterns sat on the porch where they had weathered so many seasons.
That night, the first lantern’s flame wasn’t flickering.
It wasn’t dim.
It was simply out.
A quiet, exhausted out.
The second lantern saw this,
and instead of trying to explain why it wasn’t really out
or why it shouldn’t be out
or how to get the flame back —
she recognized the difficulty.
Not as a failure.
As a truth.
She sat beside him.
No distance.
No narrative.
No management.
And with a calm center —
hara steady, breath grounded —
she looked directly into his eyes and said:
“This is a hard moment.
My mantra is:
I can do hard things.”
She didn’t rush.
She didn’t push.
She simply held the connection
and then gently invited: “…you say it.”
Something in the air shifted.
Not in thought —
in the nervous system.
For the first time that evening,
the first lantern felt a flicker—not a flame,
but the unmistakable warmth of being met.
The collaborator circuit came online.
Not through analysis.
Not through strategy.
Through direct connection.
Heart to heart.
Hara to hara.
Presence to presence.
In that connection,
Driver woke just enough to feel the truth of it.
Visionary sensed possibility.
Organizer relaxed its grip.
And the first lantern smiled —
a small, involuntary smile.
Because he knew.
He knew this wasn’t about positivity
or denial
or turning difficulty into something else.
He knew this was stance.
A stance that didn’t pretend the situation wasn’t hard —
but also didn’t collapse under it.
So he said it.
Quietly.
Honestly.
From center instead of story: “I can do hard things.”
The moment was brief,
but it was real.
And that was enough.
A new stance was seeded in the body —
not fully grown,
not yet practiced,
but planted.
Afterward, they sat together in the evening air.
Not fixing anything.
Not rewriting the past.
Not negotiating meaning.
Just letting the body digest the stance that had been formed.
And that digestion —
the quiet metabolizing —
is what shaped the next day.
Because what grows from a stance
is not dramatic,
not sudden,
not loud.
It echoes.
Echoes in micro-decisions.
Echoes in which conversations open
and which ones stay closed.
Echoes in which paths feel possible
and which no longer do.
Echoes in what the nervous system can hold
and what it no longer needs to defend.
Difficulty didn’t disappear.
But it was no longer insurmountable.
Because the stance had changed.
And once the stance changes,
everything that grows from it
changes, too.
⛩️🌿
