This last few weeks have been a really tough time for many of us. There was an astrological structure called a “Cardinal Grand Cross” that has left just about everyone I’ve talked to with a “boxed in” feeling- like there were these really significant tensions in life, that didn’t seem to have any resolution in the moment, and didn’t seem to have any resolution that would be possible in the near future. Just look at the congress and the debt ceiling.
The worst time was about two weeks ago, when an eclipse of the sun triggered an emotional cascade on top of the whole structure of feeling boxed in. The Fourth of July offered some relief, but not in the way we thought it would.
Now the pattern has opened, though some of us are hanging on for dear life to those structures that held us back because that’s all they knew, many of us are already moving forward, into the unknown, step by cautious step, wary of the cartoon-like yet somehow very real falling anvils or pianos that split the sidewalk as they land inches away from us, along with the circus music that accompanies such near-misses.
It’s like we’re trying to awaken from a disjoint dream, only to realize that what we have awakened to is less real and even more disjoint somehow than in our dreams.
Yet there is a theme of sanity underneath it all- like when we recognize friends from a distance, or hear something on the radio or see something on a video that is an example of clear thoughtfulness in the midst of what seems like so much craziness and polarization.
Lao Tzu and Confucius went through times like these- and found that there was little that was more important than a quality of genuine loving relating between human beings. That the cosmos would continue to do what it does, whether the humans who lived in it were sane or not-
It occurred to me this morning, on my morning walk, that so many people have forgotten that they are actually examples of what the cosmos is doing, rather than who they think that they are, and are attempting to do in the cosmos. These are both sort of the same thing- and yet its important to recognize that what you think you have accomplished today was actually something that the cosmos was doing. You couldn’t have done it if there hadn’t been a place for it. People talk about “making their own luck,” and I suppose some of that is true, in being attentive to certain momentums and people who hold those momentums that we can align with.
Yet I have found, again and again, that if something is possible and one attends to it, the probability of it happening is higher than if one didn’t attend to it. And if it wasn’t possible, no amount of effort or attention would make it happen.
The twelve step people have a saying about this; yet there is always a next step, that one can choose to expand one’s awareness to take in the harmonies and dis-harmonies that paradoxically occur simultaneously.
There is an old poem by the Sufi poet Rumi that is something like: “For years I pounded on the door- suddenly it opens- I’ve been knocking from inside!”
©2011 Anthony S. Wright, Ph.D., All Rights Reserved.
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