How was your 2009? For most people I know it was a year in which there was a lot going on. For me it was a year of dedicated hard work, slow ox-like gains, opportunities disguised as sudden losses, and oases of soulful creative joy.
I started writing this a few days before the end of a six month visit to England, my birth country. Sometimes during those six months I lost touch with the human being I had become and regressed to human doingness. This was my own personal form of chaos and a reflection of the collective chaos and driven-ness I see all around me. As our planetary crisis becomes more evident I see several trends of behavior: some go deeper into denial and run themselves ragged trying to avoid their feelings, some work harder and harder trying to maintain the status quo and keep their lives functioning, and some work harder and harder in an attempt to avert disaster and create something new. I’m sure there are other options but whatever choice we make the result is stress. The Earth herself is stressed and we are all connected with the energy of the Earth, so to be anything other than stressed right now would be superhuman or out of touch. The best we can do is learn to manage stress and not take it too personally.
Back in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s when I was practicing as a Gestalt therapist and leading lots of workshops and trainings, I discovered Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms, a dance practice which explores the rhythms of the creative process or the rhythms of life: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. A 30 minute dance work-out moving through the rhythms gets the creative flow going and brings awareness into any resistances and stuck energy.
I used to love the point of abandonment and ecstasy when the rhythm of the dance raced ahead of the mind and the life force danced me. I became the dance rather than doing the dance. The root of ecstasy is ex-stasis, to be beside oneself, to get out of yourself, or over yourself. This is chaos. In chaos we let go of the fragments we’re holding together and trust that when they settle they will fall in an orderly way, maybe even in a higher order. Chaos destroys in order to remake and there is always an opportunity to remake consciously in a new way once the dust has settled.
As I was driving in my hired car from middle England to Northern England I listened to a cd by Caroline Myss, called Spiritual Madness (published by Sounds True). She talks of chaos as the bringer of change and how necessary it is to live with chaos and not resist it. Oftentimes when we find our spiritual path we hope our spiritual practice will help us to control life. Maybe, if I meditate every day I will become calmer, sweeter, more loving; that’s what happens to spiritual people isn’t it? Doesn’t spirituality make us nicer?
The way of the mystics is not to seek to control life but to allow oneself to be broken open by it. It is the way of surrender. We have to be prepared to let go and surrender to the bigger energy that is pulsing and dancing us: the energy of chaos.
The value of chaos is that it cannot be controlled; it is a bigger energy than us. When we try to resist or fight it, chaos bends and ultimately breaks us. It is the energy of Kali, of Shiva, destroying in order to rebuild. Chaos carries the opportunity within the crisis; the gift of transformation.
Nature is an energy bigger than us. Scientists, industrialists, capitalists and politicians have done their best to dominate and control nature. I hope they never succeed. I value wildness and being part of a world in which I know there are forces outside my control. I don’t want to live in a controlled and sanitized world in which every apple is the same size, every fish has been farmed by humans and even the trees are cloned.
I was listening to Caroline Myss speaking about spiritual madness as I was driving up to Cockermouth, the small town on the edge of the Lake District, which was recently badly flooded when rain fell in a deluge and the Rivers Cocker and Derwent burst their banks and poured through the streets, blasting through doors and windows, destroying homes and livelihoods, devastating farmland; altogether a catastrophe. Where’s the opportunity here?
There is an opportunity in loss. We humans are comfort loving creatures. We define ourselves by our comforts: our things and we use our comforts to separate ourselves from others and mark out our own little private space. We all need comfort at times; life can be tough and demanding. Yet comfort can be the compensation we take in exchange for giving up our freedom. We identify with our comforts and become bound by them.
When life rips away who and what we love and comfort ourselves with, there is an opening; what Eckhart Tolle calls a portal. Whether the door is ripped off its hinges or gently and silently swings open, we have the chance to walk through into a bigger space, a more expansive and inclusive identity. Whether we lose a loved one, a job, a fortune or a cherished belief or illusion, we are rendered vulnerable, and in our vulnerability we are more open for change. I saw this openness and vulnerability in my father after my mother’s death, in my best friend Woods when he was preparing for major heart surgery earlier this year, in my community in Nelson NZ when we received the news of 9:11. There is an opening, a portal, an opportunity for transformation but the door always closes again and, if we don’t choose the transformation, habit and comfort move back in, the old order is restored and life goes on “as normal.” We have to be ready and willing to walk through the door without any thoughts, plans or expectations but with a willingness to invent and discover in the now.
In David Attenborough’s stunningly beautiful “Life” series, (published on DVD by BBC Earth)there is a scene of thousands of crabs scuttling across the seabed, shedding their shells. Having outgrown their shell they have no choice but to risk for a while being soft and vulnerable to predators, until they grow a new one. We humans are the same aren’t we?. We build shells around us to protect ourselves from the chaos of life. Some of these shells are habits like smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, watching tv, playing computer games, shopping, over working, whatever keeps other people at bay. We try to make our homes havens of order; we make rules or live alone, whatever it takes to escape from the chaos of life. But if we are lucky the flood of life finds us in the end and the world spins, like the world of the dancing dervish, and we are left disoriented and pointed in a new direction.
This is chaos
The purpose of the spiritual path is not to avoid chaos but to allow ourselves to be moulded by the movement of this bigger-than-us river of life. The flood strips away outworn illusions, carries away chunks of ego, dissolves who we thought we were and where we thought we were going. It stops us in our tracks and suspends us, like the Hanged Man or Inanna hung on her peg, we are forced to question anew and more deeply: Who am I? What is the most important thing for me to do here and now? What are my priorities? What is trying to emerge here? How can I best serve this emergency?
And when the river of chaos flows through a community what happens to those who are dispossessed? Who is responsible for them? Who takes them in? Who turns a blind eye and clings more tightly to order? Where are the boundaries of our communities? Are those people and animals now starving in Africa and Bangladesh and Peru and Russia and Alaska as a result of climate change, part of our community? Are we responsible for them and if so, how?
Collectively we are in the chaos of global crisis now. It is a portal to a larger identity, to recognizing the essential interconnectedness of life and becoming One Global Family. Chaos is the Great Leveler. Life is bigger than us, it breaks us open, teaches us to surrender and how to serve and co-create.
After the chaos, comes the sweetness of the lyrical and the profound simplicity of stillness. I hope your Holy days are bringing you some of these fruits.
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