Wide Awake Living Newsletter

by Alice Gardner

Our 2008 World:

Opportunity or

Catastrophe?

This week my father sent me an article that likened the world political and economic scene at the present time to "playing frisbee on a precipice"! What an image, especially for the mother of children who love to play frisbee. Certainly it is an image that underscores the need to be careful about what we are paying attention to while we play.

Most of us are not the individuals who have to make hard decisions that turn the tide of world events one way or another. Of course we do that with our votes to some extent, and we do pay attention to how the power of our votes may affect things and vote accordingly, but we are also able to pay attention in other ways that can affect our world.

We can affect our world by paying attention to what is going on inside of us as all the outer changes happen, particularly when we notice fear. Many of us have studied the work of Abraham Maslow in school and are familiar with his hierarchy of needs. The bottom rung of his hierarchy, if you remember, is survival, and whatever is left of our survival level fear becomes evident in situations like this current one. We are being invited to explore this deep area of our human-ness and I want to affirm that this is possible to do while staying aware of the fullness and the unchanging still center of who we really are.

The economic and political tumult of this past month has been an opportunity for many of us to check out what is happening down there in the basement of our psyches and let in some fresh air. We are suddenly in a world where NOBODY knows what is going to happen next and there's no way to know if we are going to be all-right. All the economic models of how things are supposed to work are in shambles, and we are on new ground where we just don't know any more, even Alan Greenspan!!

Life is giving us a real-time readout on how deeply we have accepted the unknown quality of life beyond the mind, and how much we are still relying on our idea-based future predictions and models to confine life to a narrow spectrum of possibilities that make us feel safe. Life is so much bigger than all of our ideas about it and it is telling us so in no-nonsense terms!

This world situation is an invitation into a deeper acceptance of life as it is, which includes the truism that we just really don't know, and really never did. No matter how sophisticated, our mental conceptualizations can never contain the fullness of life-as-it-is.

Life just doesn't confine itself to our ideas about things and thank goodness! Otherwise how could we have ever thought up things like Yosemite Valley at sunset? No--life is doing its own thing, and our thoughts and ideas keep needing expanding and updating as they try to limit and confine it. Sure, its not always fun. Getting in touch with fear of survival isn't my idea of a good time either, but seen in a larger context, it may be exactly what needs to happen. I don't know.

Is the mess on the world stage an opportunity or a catastrophe? I don't know, my best guess is its probably both, but I'm cool with just doing whatever life wants of me as best I can in each moment, and seeing what happens next all the time. There is something peaceful about having let go of the need to know, and even the demand, however deeply instinctual, that we somehow live through it. However much we each have gotten to know our own fear of survival-- that is how much we are now free from having to act on our fears. We slowly can step away from needing to find enemies to blame things on, and begin to find peace in ourselves, becoming clearer vehicles for just plain knowing what to do in each moment. This is where a peaceful world begins--not with a lack of outer change, but with accepting life as an opportunity to explore and discover who we truly are.

**********************

I was blessed to be able to visit Yosemite this fall and the photos are from that visit, and so is the poem below. I hope that it is evident to the reader how the "Bedrock" poem relates to the topic above and broadens the perspective. I personally find it amazing what the humble rocks have to say.

The Bedrock

Below the bustle
of our coming and going,
beneath even
the rich topsoil that feeds us,
lies a heart of rock.

Hot and fluid
at its core
the bedrock firms under us
with the seeming constancy
of granite, appearing
here and there
in soaring cliffs, in open rock,
cut by stream beds
or simply lying, like a floor
at the bottom of a hole
we labor to dig.

Deep rock supports all our land-forms,
underlying them with a slow-moving
ancient stability
on which life
can rise and fall.

The rock appears to us
in the high places of the mountains,
but it also holds the oceans
as if in the cup of a huge ancient hand,
with a steadiness that allows
the pull of the moon
to move the tides, to and fro.

This ancient rock
spanning millions of years
spanning galaxies also
lives a broader life-span
within which our human lives
are a flicker in a broad expanse,
within which stars are born and burn out,
planets cool, life arises and passes,
in the same way
that morning passes here,
bringing afternoon.

The bedrock lets me know my place
in the larger scheme of things.
My human life is a flash
in a broad interplay of life and time,
insignificant when seen separately
yet held inseparably
within the greater life
animating the whole.

The bedrock speaks
in a language without words
that feels familiar,
that beckons, no, welcomes me
back to the sanity
of something quieter and more steady
that I had nearly forgotten.

It is an open invitation
to relax into an expanded perspective
that includes me in something grand,
beyond the breadth of galaxies.
Something vibrantly alive, and close,
Something right here,
in the center of this human life.

© 2008 Alice Gardner

If you wish to explore these subjects further you are most welcome to visit the Wide Awake Living website and blog, and/or to consider purchasing my book at Amazon.

Alice

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