Tangles, Blooms, and Mountains
The jumps we make in our own thinking can create a leap in the overall consciousness of our planet. From the perspective of the quantum, the next step in humanity’s evolution is not to grow bigger, but to reclaim the transformational power of the small. Asia Suler (Mirrors of the Earth)
I opened Suler’s book to the page where these words did a leap of their own. From the page to my heart, they arrived amidst a week of contemplating an ever-present question: What is mine to do now? ‘Rest.’ The not surprising answer came quickly, followed by annoyance, resistance. ‘Rest? Really? But I have things to do.’
Things that apparently the time has not quite ripened to. Things on my list that perhaps won’t matter once I surrender to the call to rest and lean into the contemplative space that rest offers. I feel that I’m in a deep internal reset. Something that, by the way, is aligned with planetary movements and aspects over the past many months and is coming to some pinnacle of conclusion, so you might be feeling some of the same. (And, no, this does not mean that all the chaos and disruption in the world and in our lives is suddenly about to end and life will return to some mythical version of ‘normal’.)
Today finds me in contemplation of the possibilities and choices before us in this chaotic time of dissolution. I feel that what is being asked of us is to ‘serve Life’. This is of course not some sudden, aha moment of ‘oh, that!’ for me but rather a deepening of the question: How? What does it look like to truly serve and align with Life?
While we must each discover the answers that are unique to us, we find clues in the multitude of people engaged in answering through service as outgrowths and expressions of who they Be. Recognizing that we are all kin and that Mother Earth is our home, they serve that.
Small, random acts of kindness serve Life as do great acts of courage, creativity, and boldness. Acts of resistance against the oppressive, extractive, unjust systems that serve at the whims of the few and at the expense of the many and of Life itself. Acts of emergence, creating new, bold, Life-aligned systems. Imagine, for example, an economy based on all Life thriving, not just human life. It’s not only possible, such systems are being created now. One needs only open mind, open heart, and search as it won’t be covered on mainstream news.
As reflected in the decades-long work and writing of Wendell Berry who died this week, this is not new. His shared experiences of Nature invited us to engage with Her: And so I go to the woods. As I go in under the trees, dependably, almost at once, and by nothing I do, things fall into place. I enter an order that does not exist outside, in the human spaces....I am less important than I thought. I rejoice in that.
But Berry also went deeper into systems. Although I’ve not been a student of his work, of particular interest to me is his deep thinking and writing about economic systems and contrasting ‘The Great Economy’ with ‘the little economy’. It’s not what you might think, but that’s a pivot for another day. For now, I step back into the call for rest and reset, knowing that amidst tidal waves of destruction are waves upon waves of regenerative, Life-aligned possibilities emerging. Let’s ride those waves together!
Clark’s Nutcracker - Doing What’s Mine to Do!