Calling Forth Unity

Crestone Peak Peeking Through the Treetops

It’s time to pivot: calling forth and practicing unity, oneness, the interconnected nature of life. Time to cooperate and co-create.

This is week three of what has emerged as a theme of the weekly muse, consistent with observations and concerns about our world and with my heart’s deep longing that I live more fully into the reality of unity with each step I take and every choice I make.

Reading some new/old material from Gregge Tiffen, one of my greatest teachers, reminded me that our sojourn on this earth is not an easy ‘school’.  We are tasked with the challenge of working with/working on three levels that are often in conflict: body, mind, spirit. It was an important reminder as I seek to practice unity – inside and out – in a world that seems hell bent on division and separation.

As I sat in the quiet of daybreak this morning, it occurred to me that dark and light are not separate. Opposites, yes; but light and dark coexist, cooperate, and flow from one to the other and back. Whether in the dark of night of a new moon or in the light of a ‘Colorado blue sky’ day, the ‘woods out back’ are ‘the woods out back’. The degree of light or dark simply changes my experience of seeing the woods.

Perhaps we might consider the same of other ‘opposites’: good/evil (every time I write this word, I’m reminded it is simply ‘live’ spelled backwards); we/they; pro/con (vaccine, life, war, and the list goes on).  We are different, yes. We each have our stories that differ, sometimes widely. And we are the same: humans navigating a tough learning school at this seemingly pivotal point in time.

As I further engaged the muse, I wondered what all the aspects of the growing (and troubling to me) ‘vaccine divide’ and a recent movie, A Wrinkle in Time, have in common. Each presents the opportunity to ‘choose the path of love with conviction’. Yet each in their own way perpetuates separation: the movie with its classic ‘good vs. evil’ where one or the other must ‘win’.

The vaccine divide doesn’t look much different. Each side choosing language to vilify the other, claiming they alone are ‘right’ and the other is ‘wrong’. Neither side recognizing the truth in some aspects of the other’s story. The noise from both is deafening and the damage to families and friendships, heart wrenching (AND avoidable!). Much of the ‘information’ from both sides is fraught with assumption (at best) and both are guilty of fear mongering. Each seemingly wants to usurp my free will to choose what is right for me, my body, my mind, my spirit.

Is anyone reminded of the acrimony of the ‘choice’ vs. ‘anti-abortion/right to life’ divide? It’s enough to bring out my inner contrarian rebel and allow her to dance beyond the words of the weekly muse. I’m reminded of a favorite line from Rivera Sun’s awesome novel, The Dandelion Insurrection: When fear is used to control us, love is how we rebel.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have consistently expressed the idea that the best path forward is to build our individual immune system in whatever ways best serve the body we inhabit, as well as align with our individual, intelligent understanding of available information, and consistent with our personal spiritual beliefs. This should be front and center of public health policy and media attention. It isn’t.

Where is the love and care that providing such information widely would demonstrate? Why does it seem increasingly more difficult (and sometimes lonely) to follow this path? Where is our humanity in this great divide?

Why is it that those who offer information about this path must be cautious about how they speak about covid, natural health, etc. lest a ‘bot’ label their words ‘misinformation’ or worse yet, prohibit others from seeing it? How is such censorship any different than burning books – indeed entire libraries throughout history – to suppress views that challenge our own?

My aim is to not add to the babble of the divide, what a friend calls part of the ‘debris field’ of these times. Rather it is to shine light in the darkness, to rebel with love, sharing that which I find helpful in navigating the choices of this time with solid information, with love, and with care.

Neither I, nor the muse, nor anyone outside of you knows what choices are best for you. But each can offer information, insight, perhaps even inspiration to take the best care of you that’s possible and to be a part of bridging and healing the divide, not furthering it: to call forth unity from within and promote unity in our world. Toward that end, I found this recent video informative and rebellious in a most loving, caring, and unifying way: Strange Virus …

Whatever your choices, may this and other information in your field support you in unifying body, mind, and spirit and calling forth that unity in our fractured world.

Day Fades in the Sangres as the Sun Sets in the West

Strengthening Immunity

Morning Clouds over the Sangres

Every act of kindness on your part is a boost to your own immune system. Marianne Williamson

There are oh so many ways to strengthen our individual immune systems. It occurs to me that when we do so individually, we are contributing to strengthening the whole.

Whether through acts of kindness as suggested above, nutrition, exercise, or other means attending to your immune system is critical. Curiously, most media outlets do not add this to the list of ‘must do’s’. Rather they keep us in the drama of wearing masks, distancing, washing our hands, and, oh yes, when a vaccine will be available to erase this pandemic.

I’m not knocking any of these approaches, although I personally won’t be lined up for a vaccination when the time comes (that’s a muse for another day). Rather I notice that I experience deep disappointment that more attention to the importance of a strong immune system is front and center to our approach to Covid-19 and indeed to most illness.

A poem that made the rounds early in the pandemic when lockdowns and ‘stay at home’ orders first debuted greeting me upon rising this morning:

And the people stayed home -- by Kitty O'Meara
And the people stayed home.
And read books, and listened, and rested,
and exercised, and made art, and played games,
and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently. And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal. And when the danger passed,
and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses, and made new choices,
and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.  

It struck me that the poet has a strong pulse on the need to act in ways that support our immune systems, individually and collectively.

We need deep strength in these days. Not just to navigate to the other side of this pandemic, but to sustain ourselves and one another in creating the world, our worlds, anew. For the old world is crumbling. How we attend to its demise, how we hospice what no longer serves will in large part determine what emerges in a new world – the world that will be inhabited by our children, our grandchildren and beyond.

May we strengthen ourselves so that we are up for the tasks ahead. May we live fully into the words of activist, writer, friend Rivera Sun: Be kind. Be connected. Be unafraid.

PS – So often we think of the immune system as only a physical internal system. My colleague and friend, Kathy Wilson, expands this view in a recent post, a list of tools to support the immune system, developed over many months as she addressed her own compromised immune system (http://www.warrior-priestess.com/Newsletters/coach-newsletter11-15-20.html).

Sunset Moon