Nights

It is fall and autumn in the far north. The nights are getting longer. Each day, at a dizzying speed, sunset leaps earlier and earlier. It feels like we’re hurtling into the equinox.

If that sounds out of balance it is, at least for me. I am not used to being so close to the arctic circle. Moreover, our interiors, feelings and thinking patterns move somewhat in synch with the physical pieces around us.

Plenty of those external pieces are pretty crazy. The meta-crises like climate, spiraling inequity and plague feel wildly out of whack.

From heroic solutions to emergence

What do we do? We’re conditioned to be heroes. We are inoculated with our modern world perspectives that we are separate individuals.

Those modern-world ideas are strong. They leave me feeling, regardless of what I know, I should be able to stand apart from pain, overcome direct environmental challenges and hold rock steady. Succumb to crises? Me? Not me!

This is bizarre—I know it’s not true yet I am captured by it regardless. And, like many paradoxes, I think it holds keys for generative change.

Reconnection

You and I can feel these keys.

Rather than simply writing and thinking about it, try it.

Joanna Macy’s Breathing Through video is a practice for us, a practice that reconnects.

Watch it, she engages you-I us in cultivating compassion.

It is below/right>

Connecting and transforming

What you and I have just done helps us move from a head-based, cognitive understanding. We’re shifting from knowing we are connected, connected to the webs of life around us, to a felt awareness (and awareness of that awareness). 

It’s not glossing over how challenging our circumstances are. We are enhancing our capacity for compassion by letting the experiences around us in the world flow through us. This opens doorways, for you-I-us, to the emergence of a new order. Our next thinking patterns are linked to global actions that see us thrive.

There’s another practical part of this for me. It is a significant motivation to be involved with the Transformative Climate Advocacy program. More on the program here>

Awareness

Many people I know are experiencing disequilibrium. I don’t know about you but I find this hard to express. Consequently, metaphors help and coming back to the equinox:

Cast your mind over time.
Go back three months and in the south there was a lot of daily darkness.
Here, in the north of our world it was nearly 24 hours of daylight.
I and those around my latitude are now steeply swooping towards many hours of darkness.
My body moves with that.
Like half running, half hurtling down a steep mountain incline.

I can feel that shift,
I can feel the speed
particularly as I hold the differences over time.
Particularly as I watch the changes
my belly feels like it is moving, swooping with those sunlight speeds
and glissading down the cliff of change.

Grace

There are many gifts too.

Just one, the magic hours expand.

Video right/below>

Holding these gifts with the disequilibrium is a place of grace.

A source for magic and miracles.