Anxious About All The Chaos? Here’s Hope.
A week ago, someone sent me this cartoon. A few days later we had dinner with our neighbors, one of whom is a therapist. She sat down—gladly taking the Manhattan I offered—with a deep sigh. She had seen clients all day, and she was depleted. “People are just deeply anxious,” she said. “It’s fall, and we see the biggest tremblors in the spring and the fall.” Whereupon someone remarked, “And . . .also the election.” “Yes,” she said, “and that.”
No matter who you’re voting for, everyone I know is worried. It’s not just election day, it’s what happens the day after, and the week after. We all know that civil war is possible. Literally.
All around us the world is falling apart. As Yeats put it so well, “the center cannot hold.” Yeats helps remind me that we are not alone in our anxiety. He wrote those lines in 1919, after the nightmare of the world’s first “total war,” and when the brutal Irish War of Independence was just exploding. He finished the poem during the devastating 1918-19 flu epidemic, while his pregnant wife, who nearly died, slowly convalesced. So remember: We’re not the first to witness worldwide cataclysm. There are wise and whole-hearted heroes and heroines who have gone before us, from whom we can learn how darkness is transmuted into light.
One of my heroes is renowned storyteller, author and scholar of mythology and psychology, Michael Meade. Our world is breaking apart and, Meade says, it will continue to fracture and splinter. What we need right now, he says, are stories of creation, or re-creation. Meade reminds us that the biblical story of creation begins with chaos, as do countless creation myths—Greek, Roman, Babylonian—and God is the one who separates the mass-mess, establishing order and harmony.
Many people confront the chaos and just instinctively withdraw in fear. But if we know that chaos always precedes creation, our awareness dramatically shifts.
“We’re caught in that space between chaos and creation,” Meade writes, and we need people who can trust that chaotic contractions are birth pangs. That doesn’t mean we sit and wait for a new creation to drop into our laps. It means we pray, spend time in silence, watch for signs. It means we listen and hold on to people. It means we speak the truth in love. And it means we act. When we begin to discern the moving of the Spirit, who brooded over the watery chaos, we get up and get to work, going where the Wind blows us. We probably won’t be in the majority, and you have to be ok with that. But great transformations always begin with a few faithful souls.
I want to be one of those.
Here’s to cultivating peace and calm in our inner lives and getting to work with a sense of purpose and hope! Thanks, David!
Exactly!
A Prayer – Jesus, my elder brother, while engaged in this pretense of being human I never really know what’s in my best interest. I really don’t know what anything means. To claim that I do is also a pretense. Therefore, I don’t know how to respond and all my past learning of the world is of no help. I cannot use it to be my guiding light. So my Brother, that being noted, you lead and I’ll follow.
Imagine a space that is not a space where there is no center, no edges, no sections, parts or pieces, no direction, no boundaries whatsoever and even though it goes on and on and on there is no distance. This space represents Oneness, the All That Is, Everything, Eternity, Love, God, SELF or whatever other label you choose to use to point to it. And all you can do is point to it for it is beyond symbols, words, concepts, definition and explanation. BTW, this space is YOU. It is the What and Who YOU really ARE. Now, within this space imagine that you notice an ever so tiny speck. This speck represents the dream of a sovereign, autonomous, individuated, self that has separated from SELF. This speck is what many refer to as being consciousness. Consciousness is fractal. It is the dream of an impossibility i.e., that Oneness has an opposite. Consciousness is the dream of existence aka a multiverse beyond Oneness that is an infinite, ever fragmenting and separating many-ness. Consciousness is never not dividing and subdividing and in this process space, energy, matter and time are projected (the Big Bang) and trillions upon trillions of galaxies and everything that goes with them (all the labels, all the laws, all the species, all the stories, all the timelines, all the fields etc.) comes into what seems to be an infinite existence.
Here’s a critical point to know about consciousness…consciousness cannot create it can only invent, substitute and replicate and nothing it ever invents lasts. Creation is the Extension of Oneness and Being Oneness, is eternal. Now here’s the paradox…from the viewpoint of Oneness the speck never happened. For in the very same infinitesimal instant that it seemed to be it wasn’t.
David, you have always been one of those! Remember the words of my favorite hymn, “I sing a song of the saints of God”: patient and brave and true
Thank you—now I’m singing that song in my head!
Honestly it seems like we’re facing something more akin to World War III than Civil War, though both do seem plausible. From Jamie Dimon yesterday, “The risk is extraordinary,” he said. “World War III has already begun. You already have battles on the ground being coordinated in multiple countries.”
From the AP – The U.S. said Wednesday that 3,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia and are training at several locations, calling the move very serious and warning that those forces will be “fair game” if they go into combat in Ukraine. I mean this has the makings…
In 2015 I simply couldn’t believe Trump was a legitimate candidate…I was pretty sure I was being PUNK’d. And this election I actually have no idea who to pull the lever for. This is what it’s come to.
Johnna said it much more succinctly than I ever could, but I think it’s the right recipe..I read, I stay aware, I have strong opinions (that no one in my family really wants to hear 😂), but at the end of the day I just try to get real with myself, find some time for quiet reflection and hope it translates somehow. And I do a pretty poor job of it if I do say so myself. I find myself arguing about the Middle East with someone across the globe on Instagram, finding it hard not to get the last jab in. And then after a few hours (or days) I laugh at myself and say “what a waste of energy that was!” Then I have back and forths on politics with family members and friends and realize I’m doing it again! Back to the drawing board!
I think you’re already there, Matt—you just don’t know it. You are wrestling with your views and your choices and trying to stay open and connected. That’s all that matters. In the end it doesn’t matter who you pull the lever for, it’s your state of mind and heart that matters. Just being awake and aware, knowing what’s motivating you and whether your intention is egocentric or seeking the good of all.
You’re there.