Reflections

Rooms With a View

There’s a point where even your best systems start to feel like cages. The calendar is full, the apps are synced, the habit tracker is green—and the soul is still winded, like it’s been sprinting after something that refuses a leash. If that’s you, this page is a chair by the window.

At Soleraine, we carry a question that humbles and steadies: Can you control God?
Here, “God” is our metaphor for everything vaster than our plans—the pulse beneath love, time, creativity, nature, grief, grace. Call it Spirit, Reality, the Pattern, the Deep. The label is human; the immensity is not.

We all build rooms—routines, rituals, doctrines, dashboards. Rooms are good. They give weather to the soul. But trouble begins when we confuse the room with the sky—when our system tries to become the source, when we start policing the tide and calling it discipline. Control isn’t evil; it’s scared. It wants guarantees. Honor that impulse. Just don’t hand it the keys.

Every force worth loving refuses captivity. Love won’t be managed into staying; it’s nourished into wanting. Creativity doesn’t clock in; it visits rooms that feel alive. Time isn’t your subordinate; it’s your teacher. Nature doesn’t negotiate; it invites alignment. Grief ignores your calendar; it follows its own sacred weather.

So we trade control for stewardship. Control seizes outcomes; stewardship tends inputs with devotion and lets outcomes breathe. A gardener doesn’t command spring; she prepares soil. A surfer doesn’t order the wave; he trains balance. A parent can’t script a child’s heart; they create a home where truth feels safe. This is old wisdom meeting a new world: discipline without domination, structure without strangling, devotion without delusion.

How do we live it?

• Move from command to choreography: Name what you cannot control (traffic, opinions, headlines) and what you absolutely can (attention, breath, promises). Master the second list.
• Move from extraction to invitation: Keep a tiny creative ritual too small to fail—ten lines, one sketch, a hummed melody. Kindling first; blaze when it wants.
• Move from hoarding to honoring time: Protect two “Wide Open” blocks a week. Serendipity needs oxygen.
• Move from manipulation to witness: Before hard conversations, carry this: My job is clarity and kindness; their job is their response.

And make awe a habit. Awe is not weakness; it’s a reset. Stand before something larger—cathedral trees, a newborn’s breath, Coltrane in the rain—and your body gets the memo: you are not required to manufacture the universe today. Pressure eases. Perspective widens. Curiosity returns.

A small litany for the road:
I am not the ocean; I learn its tides.
I am not the fire; I tend the flame.
I am not the river; I honor the current.
I am not the wind; I lift the kite and laugh when it pulls.
I am not God; I listen.

Build your room. Keep it honest and kind. Then, when the walls start to shrink, step outside. Remember the sky. Surrender isn’t quitting; it’s cooperating with reality so fiercely that it begins to look like grace. Guard your peace. Sow good seed on rough ground. Great times ahead.