Survival

The skies are clear, the moon still shines with half its face showing, and the temperature sits at 50 degrees, fahrenheit. Today is Tuesday.

The world continues to be in a tailspin and we so far are alive and still moving forward with daily chores - but it just feels like survival. There are many others who are not surviving so well, the conditions are dire and the ability to control those conditions are simply gone. What comes to mind is that those who have the ambition to become "leaders" perhaps knew that survival and quality of life depends on gaining power and authority. Plenty of people are drawn to such things and when capital comes into the picture, well – it seems people go crazy and forget themselves (and others). Leaders seem to have blown it.

I wonder how we have navigated as a people, to this place. A few hundred years in the scheme of life on this planet is nothing. Right? And we had such a moment of hope when finally, we created a space for those who had been left on the margins. But generations of being in a constant state of danger also created a capacity to make something from nothing, to find that what was at the center of life was not more stuff, but more love and care. And not only did people survive, but they actually created vibrancy and joy in ways that did not rely on more stuff. Intelligences other than what comes out of books and degrees and credentials were affirmed as being real. Quite real. Indeed, those intelligences were the tools for survival through disasters of every kind.

Rituals and ceremonies opened portals to other worlds - through these, we learned to occupy spaces that invited us to see things, feel things, know things that are actually vital to holding on to our humanity. We forget how important ritual and ceremony can be when caught up in the daily tasks of living our lives. When we go to memorials, celebrate two people who decide to commit themselves to relationship, anticipate the arrival of a new life - these are spaces in which we enter the possibility of deep reflection together, and celebration is always at the center of such gatherings. Maybe we need to think of more ways to come together and to create the kind of joy, both simple and grand that keeps us going.

There are reasons why survival through times of discomfort and dis-orientation are essential. Those reasons have to do with a reality about life that we don't yet have: the Future. The future is calling on us to recognize that we first must survive the physical and psychological destruction that happens every few decades among people on earth. Our tendency toward insecurity and fear is so easy to trigger.

Beyond survival is the building of a reality that many of us can envision and are constantly supporting. Humans only have a few decades to get the assignment to build toward understanding and care for our relations and earth – all the while being challenged by the loss of our collective true north. So it is important to gather, to be taken into ritual and ceremony, to build our skill in staying with another natural and powerful tendency: to survive.