Mother Mary Statue - Mother Mary’s Garden, San Luis, Colorado
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Rumi
I felt drawn to Rumi this morning and as I searched for his volume on the shelf another book caught my attention. Muse seemed less surprised than I when I opened Carolyn Baker’s Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Collapse to a chapter that began with the above quote. Ahh, the magic of life.
The surprise continued as I read the first paragraph where Baker cites the John O’Donohue book I turn to often, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, quoting a line that I used here just a few weeks back:
When we walk the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us.
My smile meets Muse’s knowing twinkle. THIS is the magic of how life flows. THIS is life that dances and wants to rise. THIS is who we are.
I felt as if I’d come home to discover surprise guests, gifts both comforting and unsettling. I felt comfort in the wise words, of being reminded of the power of beauty, and of beauty’s existence in so many forms. When we look for beauty, it is either present to be discovered or we encounter a space, a longing where beauty beckons us to create its essence. As O’Donohue suggests, beauty comes to trust us when we hold reverence for her and for all life.
At the same time, I was present to the unsettled nature of this time and to inhabiting my own unsettledness. It feels to me as if the cacophonies of chaos are raising their voices in every domain of life. The pace toward and of the collapse of the world we have known seems to have quickened. We are gifted with the challenge of navigating life in uncharted waters. Beauty offers to light the path.
Navigation is both a solo journey and one of community. We each have our own path of inner work to engage as well as engaging in maintaining our daily life on the physical plane in outmoded, crumbling systems. This is no different for communities large and small. Each must reckon with the past, create its identity in the present, and maintain life as it looks ahead to new futures rising.
It is a time of beasts, but it need not be a time deficient of beauty. At the heart of the collapse of systems built on the lie of separation are the emergence of systems and structures built on the truth of unity, our interconnectedness with one another and with ALL of life. Our dance encompasses both – the dying along with all that is gestating and being born.
While we hospice the disintegration of that which we once knew, let us midwife the birth of that which wants to rise not from the greed of separation but from the true nature of our loving hearts.
Sunset Moon Over the San Luis Valley