Prologue: The Mirror That Woke Me
I didn’t begin by seeing the world clearly.
I began by seeing Jesus.
Not as doctrine.
Not as debate.
But as presence.
He didn’t offer escape.
He offered embodiment.
He didn’t demand belief.
He invited becoming.
In that stillness, I saw not just Him—but myself.
And then, the world.
That mirror became a spark.
Not a spotlight. Not a savior complex.
But a fire that asked me to live awake.
To act from essence.
To choose with grace.
To stay human in a system that forgets we ever were.
This is where it begins.
In the mirror.
In the middle.
In the world between.
I. The World Between
There is a space most of us live in but rarely name.
Not quite captivity, not quite freedom.
Not quite belief, not quite numbness.
Not quite belonging, not quite exile.
It lives between the world inside us—
our ego, fears, performance, persona—
and the world around us—
our systems, cultures, roles, and scripts.
It’s the space between inner distortion and outer expectation.
Between the self we’ve constructed
and the society that shaped us to begin with.
This is the world between.
A quiet friction. A sacred tension.
The atmosphere of awakening.
To live here is to notice.
To name what was never named.
To begin asking:
What did I agree to?
What am I still performing?
What truth have I been afraid to remember?
This is the threshold where forgetting becomes remembering.
And where remembering becomes return.
II. The Long Surrender
We like to believe we’re free.
That we move by choice, by will, by truth.
But what if the truth is harder?
What if we’re not acting freely anymore?
Not because someone took our will—
but because we handed it over?
Not all at once.
But piece by piece.
Generation by generation.
One quiet compromise at a time.
Across time and place, we’ve traded freedom for the illusion of order:
- We accepted kings as divine if they kept famine away.
- We bowed to industrial clocks, chasing productivity as progress.
- We welcomed surveillance for the sake of convenience.
- We replaced wonder with standardization and called it education.
- We outsourced morality to party lines and called it loyalty.
- We elevated market logic above soul logic and called it realism.
- We began to believe our worth lies in what we produce, not who we are.
We weren’t coerced.
We consented.
Not because we were weak—
but because we were weary.
Hungry for certainty.
Thirsty for belonging.
Willing to trade our freedom for the feeling of direction.
We didn’t lose free will.
We gave it up—together.
III. This Week in the World
July 2025. We were here.
- Floodwaters swept through Houston. A hundred lives lost. Some still missing.
- France raised its retirement age again. The streets held candles and grief.
- Trump promised tariffs “so big they’ll heal the economy.”
- A ceasefire in Gaza was “discussed.” The dying didn’t pause.
- A new AI tool let users clone the voices of the dead.
- Europe baked. The Balkans burned. Hail shattered rooftops in Croatia.
- A pastor in the Bronx baptized people in a supermarket lot.
- Rent in Atlanta surpassed the average income.
- Somewhere, a child asked their parent if it was always this loud.
- And somewhere else, someone dared to speak softly—and meant it.
We call it news.
But it’s also a mirror.
A ledger of what we’ve willed—
and what we’ve become willing to accept.
IV. Becoming Sparks Again
To reclaim free will isn’t to rebel.
It’s to remember.
Not to rage against the world—
but to re-enter it, fully awake.
To live as a spark is not to burn everything down—
but to light what has gone dim.
It is presence where performance once stood.
Courage where consensus once ruled.
Grace where control once reigned.
Sparks don’t scream.
They shine.
They do not conquer.
They illuminate.
To live as a spark is to fracture the pattern.
To stand gently, humanly,
in the world between.
V. The Return of the Sparks
There is still time.
Not to undo the past—
but to meet the present with honesty.
We gave up our will together.
But we can remember it together, too.
And we are not alone.
We are not the first to awaken in a world that preferred we stay asleep.
We are not the first to say no in love.
To choose presence over performance.
To hold light in a system of shadows.
The sparks have always been here—
in temples and deserts,
in forests and fields,
in prisons and palaces.
Jesus was one.
So were Buddha and Krishna, and the voice crying out in the wilderness.
Harriet was one.
So were Mandela and Maya, and the mother who would not give her child to war.
Rumi was one.
So were Hildegard and Hafiz, and the poet who wept truth into song.
Miriam was one.
So were Fatima and Yaa Asantewaa, and the women who danced before the Red Sea parted.
Malcolm was one.
So were James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, and the child who asked why out loud.
Galileo was one.
So were Hypatia and Einstein, and the dreamer who questioned the stars.
Siddhartha was one.
So were Lao Tzu and the desert mystics, and the farmer who tended silence like prayer.
Ada was one.
So were Alan Turing and the unknown coder who believed tech could heal instead of harm.
The stranger was one.
So was the teacher who saw you,
the elder who listened,
the friend who stayed.
You are still here.
And you are not alone.
To awaken is to join them.
To reclaim your will—not against the world,
but within it.
To live like your life is sacred again.
That’s the return.
Not a revolution.
But a remembering.
Lit by many sparks.
One of them,
yours.