“I can see clearly now the rain is gone. I can see all obstacles in my way. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind. It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day.” So goes the positive message of the Jimmy Cliff song. I like it!

To me, it’s a second kind of seeing, the kind that has me tell my friend that everything’s going to be all right when they are in a dark time. It’s positive, it’s supportive, it’s imaginative, and it often turns my seeing away from the purely physical and the mental and emotional dark hole that swallows my worried soul and the tough time I am going through.

The first kind of seeing, of course, is physical seeing…what I experience with my senses and the reaction I have to it.
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The third kind of seeing is what I aspire to always, but especially when the dark clouds loom. It doesn’t depend on physical eyes, but on spiritual eyes. Those eyes look within and thus see beyond the circumstance to what I truly desire and what I have come to believe. They use my powers of faith and imagination and my skill of visualization to create what I want to see. This is true vision. Let me see clearly!

It’s spring! I love to garden, and before winter had ended, I was contemplating what I would grow this year. I looked through my leftover seeds, poured over seed catalogs, visited my local nursery early and often. I made my plan and carefully chose the varieties of seeds I would plant, imagining the mature plants and the harvest I would enjoy and share. Oh, what potential is in each of those very small seeds!

My thoughts are seeds with an even greater potential than those I bury in the soil of my garden. Sadly, it has not been my habit to contemplate which thoughts I would sow in my consciousness, and correspondingly the harvest that I reaped from my thoughts has been meager. I have not produced anything of great significance.
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I am, however, establishing the habit of choosing thoughts. I am not content with letting grow whatever will. I am unsatisfied with a meager thought harvest. I want to experience the potential of my considered thought. These days I bring the sowing of my thoughts to my awareness often. I’m going for a great harvest and intentionally planting the thoughts I choose in the soil of my consciousness.

“And so it is,” I regularly say as I close my prayers. I say that because I pray in faith, affirming that which I desire, resonating with the truth that I know.

So is such a little word, but a powerful one. I like the Old English meaning…”in this way.” For me it’s very positive and affirmative. ‘So’ indicates that what I am seeing with spiritual eyes, what I am intending, and what I am believing comes from what I am knowing deep within. It is real in that way, contrary to how it may seem to the senses.

Sounds pretty presumptuous, doesn’t it? But why not “so it is?” So much of what I have thought to be real was illusory. So much that I thought to be absolute has withered in the byways of relativity.

These days, I try to see beyond the problems, through the circumstances, and past what seems to be so.

​I see differently…I see the real, the opportunities that transcend appearances.
And SO it is!