A STILL POINT IN THE VORTEX

and moving

It’s more than clear we are all swirling in a collective storm of destructive energy right now. Surely there is no need for me to delineate our global polycrisis, but I offer an invitation to slow down and clarify our personal role in response to this. Our place in it is essential! Have you been noting how many voices are saying that same thing? I keep attempting to write as my soul response from my/our place.

This morning I write from a still point in the vortex of a life of a 76 year old. From Boulder, CO where a few days ago, a severely damaged man intentionally set people on fire with his rage. Human lifetimes of choices made and not made. I sense the potential paralysis of being in both a personal and a communal tipping point, under a towering tornado of unstable energy. A multicrisis. A whirling collective field which is building in scope and dimension beyond our imagination.

As ones who all our life have been big-picture thinkers and wildly entrepreneurial visionaries, this is also a still moment in time. As Lao Tzu said, “Nothing ‘more’ to do. Nowhere ‘else’ to go.” We are trusting for a fresh renewal of our collective work as global partners. I have spent many years contemplating and living in the concept of energy spirals. It has been a core part of my soul journey - a live thread that keeps me moving!

Tornados. Storm systems. Cosmic revolutions. Circles within circles within circles. Spirals of often unseen energy moving with enormous power from the tip of the vortex.

It is human to experience the chaos of collapse inside storm vortices. Overwhelm. Often seen and felt as life ‘on the edge’. These are places where the nervous system threatens overload and coming back to center is a constant practice.

I offer that finding the still point – not just a still point in the storm has been profoundly grounding for me. I differentiate in order to focus on the moment-by-moment capacity to enter both the individual and collective experience. Now that’s a challenge!!

It seems to me that we have been mostly taught to find ‘my’ personal still point in most of our self-help/spiritual journeys. To let ourselves be whirled along the chaotic threads around us recovering our individual strength to act, resist and find our words etc. It’s an essential step forward, yet it does not easily help when everything material that we see is in ‘tilt and whirl’ state.

How do we find our unique way to come back to our embodied and aligned reality with All That Is?

Is it possible to find awe and be curious about our place as reciprocal community in the collective soul emerging?

Are you being led to some unique personal experiences of creative meditation or movement as you capture your own place in the order of greater things?

This morning of writing is a still point for me, while also feeling gripped by long days of personal anticipation. When most in our culture at our age are slowing down into retirement, I trust for fresh, clear directional movement. ‘Being the change we seek’ moves us out of the paralysis of fear, one often scary, step-by-step. The soul shrieks when trapped in the drilled-down energy of waiting for change to happen. Waiting to see the material world change is dreadfully hard – don’t we know it! Yet my experience has been that it is in waiting when the underworld can open delicious new passages of juicy connection that enlivens spirit and body.

Here’s an excerpt of a poem that comes to me as I write:

The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz from the collected poems of Stanley Kunitz.
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings….

Hmmmmm. What words grab you?

Here’s mine ….“I look behind gathering strength … abandoned camp-sites … scavenger angels …”

Thomas Hubl said in his post today, “when we transform fear, we change the energy of the world.” Our lives can still continue to move in a rapidly ever-revolving vortex – but without fear. Our strong, often-unwieldy egos are being apprenticed to truth, being made malleable in the fiery furnace of reality. May all of us who seek to live from our elder souls serve as human portals, door-openers on behalf of the generations to come.

Indeed, we trust that the journey-out will not be solitary, but instead as a thriving vortex of living community. That’s what I most long for. That our final legacy in this world will provide opportunities for an abundance of communal creativity to be fleshed out into action towards deep change on behalf of those that follow.

I end with the last stanza of Stanley Kunitz poem.

…Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice directed me:
“Live in the layers, not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

You are a place where Earth matter and cosmic Spirit meet.

What are you learning these days about being a physical body responding to a universe of moving, spinning energy?