
My late friend Joanna Macy called this time period the time of the Great Turning, one where humanity was being called to make a great shift in how we interact with the external world, each other, and our internal worlds. While things may seem difficult, there is a great hope that lives within each of us which we can always call upon. Just as the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly through the imaginal cells within the chrysalis, so too do we have the opportunity to become the imaginal cells of a new world.
~Jack Kornfield
what is my new lesson learned?
inquiry for today~ merriment in the moment please….
Beneath the plots, where the neurotic
baker ruins his hands by twisting all that
dough, where the dreamer twists his dream
by insisting it’s superior, where the saint
grows oppressed by the steel of his ideals,
where the conqueror runs out of wilderness
to conquer, and the victim runs out of con-
querors to fear, beyond the shrines we build
that bright children resist, beyond all paths,
where the Puritan has his fill of soap and
the lonely are secretly tired of flesh—what
is laid bare is a very tender ark like the air
between weak palms in prayer.
And there, the mathematician loses his urge
to count, and the skeptic can find no thrill
in doubt, and the analyst is bored with his
ability to lubricate small human gears and
it seems presumptuous to know what
we’re after.
There, the thoroughbred can’t distinguish
between riders, nor our spirit isolate
what provides it.
On Earth, as within us, God comes in
thunder and in sparks, in danger and
softness and unintended remarks, like a
sneeze in a crowd that infects us all, like
a flood through your knees till each step
is a shovel, till you plead with no shame
for fewer truths to choose from and
the Universe just keeps coming.
~Mark Nepo
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?