Cataclysm: Our defining moment, standing at the threshold, the precipice , looking at a horizon, we often name as the Ecozoic era. My point in my invitation was not to name a recent event , e.g. election, as called “cataclysm”, but to name it as another event in the larger scheme of things, our context. A sign of the times of our overarching cataclysm…again , linking the word also with the more than human domain. The end of the Era, and taking a stance of welcoming for a new one, knowing deeply as Douglas shares, our own involvement in the chaos around us.
Thank you for sharing your reflections of the experiences of our recent moments and where you are turning for hope, and where you are putting your action. We each have personal pathways for ‘dealing’. In reading and listening with you, I am learning and expanding my own ways perhaps previously unattended. Also recognizing my own strengths, or preoccupations, trying to muddle through. Engaged, not as a Cartesian, but in the context of Cosmogenesis.
Although I knew art forms were evocative throughout my life, it is only when I began to experience myself within Cosmogenesis, that I was educed by them, brought forward and deepened in understanding, and understanding of becoming, the yin and yang of death and birth. I began to recognize an “act” each was doing to me. Each was educing a memory, which then was digested and placed into some kind of action in community.
I have been spending a lot of time walking and looking around recently, digesting. Engaging art forms, the fourfold wisdom conversation. In particular, memory. Memory as Mnemosyne , and her children, the muses. Art forms educe moments of cosmogenesis, or at least in retrospect, translation of experience, in the scheme of things is possible!!
Because I am still digesting recent experiences, I will share ones from the past. It is only recently that I realize how art forms reach across and flood my semipermeable membrane, through the thin veil, to teach me something.
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Where The Mind Is Without Fear (Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941)
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Yeats and Tagore were two men in conversation with one another across continents and cultures, yet shared a common language to express their thoughts, poetry. Each shared the sense of poiesis. Each was in tune with the political and social struggles of their times (each man and country under British colonial rule, and still to attain ‘freedom’ from rule) Each poet points to another concept of freedom. Yeats nominated Tagore for the Nobel Prize in Literature, the win was the first for a non-Westerner to be awarded the prize. (1913). I find myself attuned to each of you knowing we share the sense of autopoiesis (self-making).
Years ago, I noticed many writers worrying about, or calling for religious institutional change. Referencing the poem of Yeats, they wondered whether the center, the institution they were writing about, could survive and buffet the changes. I, however was working with either patients in addiction counseling or those in spiritual direction, in conversation with people finding their center, interiority, site of emergence and becoming. In other words to hear the falconers call, come home, centered. Noticing this difference in interpretation, I suspected, came from a differing world view. Also around that time, I came upon an outdoor exhibit and sculpture with the name “Gauntlet” by Robert Cannon Gauntlet is the name of the glove used by a falconer. It was very large, perhaps 12 feet high. I was immediately struck by the ‘mudra’ quality of the hand posture, gripped into the vision of the human form becoming, covered in green, even resembling the Hindu childlike pose of baby Krishna at the base.
Thinking of this and particular other experiences of outdoor sculpture, another one comes to mind.
In the late 80’s or so I encountered this 1980 sculpture by J Seward Johnson named , The Awakening. It was installed at Haines Point and a place friends and I used to walk and picnic. It has since been moved from there. The encounter with it coincided with the process of the beginning of my own awakening, but I had no idea about ‘that’ at the time, I was just experiencing the struggle! The name of the sculpture did not resonate, although I was in the very same process. I was in some sense of denial. I could only name it ‘on the other side’.
The form shows a giant of a man embodied in Earth and in a great struggle to free himself. Years later I would encounter a poem that captures the statue in another aspect of the awakening process , being ‘woke’. I now see this giant remembering, they will never be ‘free ‘ from Earth, but is Earth on her own destiny, struggling no longer , surrendering and being held. Eyes on the horizon.
It’s a pivot of perspective poet Denis Levertov shares so clearly. As a swimmer, I know you can’t learn to float unless you enter a process of surrender. In stormy seas, I find it is a skill of somatic memory.
The Avowal
As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.
For me, this whole awakening has been coming into literacy, naming inchoate experiences held through time and now making sense. Experiences demanded of us by the Universe, to “come over here” , and then being able to be spoken of from the perspective of ‘here’. As Sarbmeet notes, ‘the solar system is cheering us on’ as are our ancestors, who have been, and our relations, human and non human who are still, suffering.
Thank you for sharing and may our ‘acts of contrition” and confession release us into new ways of being in communion together, inspired by Cosmogenesis.
