Holding the Thread of Life

Dear SAND subscriber,

In her poignant article No Time To Lose, Joanna Macy says, "The truest form of touching the reality of this moment is this: to experience our capacity to praise and love our world, as it is. Even when it’s on fire." But how can we fall in love with what is, as we experience the loss of species and collapse of ecosystems, face the effects of climate change in our own backyards, the injustice in our own communities. As the heartbreak rolls through our collective heart, perhaps the better question is how can we afford not to? Why should our love be conditioned by whether our world is healthy? It is a time of terror and promise. Loving what is is the only way forward. Far from bemoaning it, Macy sees calamity as a sacred mirror that ultimately reveals our own true nature, our own deep heart.

"We will probably not know in our lifetimes whether we are serving as deathbed attendants to a dying world or as midwives to the next stage of human evolution," she says, and it is not up to us. We simply can’t know, and that’s the blessing. Our job is to be willing to show up anyway, to keep our eye on the Great Turning and our hearts together, to offer ourselves fully to this world that needs us so, without hope of results.

As Michael Mead says in his drumming, mythic, transfixing SAND talk, "we are at the edge of all we know." Here we cannot fix, we cannot see, we cannot proceed as usual, and that is our medicine. It is in this darkness that the path reveals itself, he says. "We have to stand in the places where we no longer know and then the answers come from unseen places if we only have the courage to face the dark, whether it’s the dark inside or the dark outside. It’s the unknown that is holding the answers."

Love,
Vera and the SAND Team

The storms and tragedies of contemporary life can be termed a spiritual crisis, in which we must awaken to a greater sense of self or else become more isolated and subject to increasing feelings of isolation and helplessness. Because all things are ultimately interconnected, the challenges we face and the changes underway signal a genuine transformation of the world. Change can be disconcerting; yet in troubled times the inner threads of genius, imagination and wisdom become both more important and surprisingly more available.

Upavita is an old Sanskrit term for the eternal thread of golden imagination that makes each life valuable and noble from the beginning. This sacred thread of life connects the mind with the heart; it ties us to the dream of life and leads us to the purpose of our soul. While holding it, all the moments of our lives make sense; without it, all can seem accidental and pointless. Call it dharma or the inner law of our being; call it a life dream or a spiritual calling; we are each called to awaken to the inner plotline of a story trying to unfold from within. In learning to express the mythic pattern woven within, we learn to contribute to the renewal of community as well as a restoration of nature.

— Michael Meade

In this 3-part webinar series, Bayo Akomolafe invokes the wisdom of his native lands in West Africa: "The times are urgent, let us slow down." Reading this humbling vocation to "slow down" as an invitation to rethink our imaginations of activism, justice and power, and attend to the more-than-human processes in and around us, Bayo will present his concept of postactivism. The series will:

Integrate story, indigenous inquiry, critical race concerns, new materialist insights and scientific explorations into the nature of nature.
Talk about the pressing imperatives to rethink what it means to be human.
Conduct exercises that bring us into emancipatory connections with a world alive.

Series begins this Sunday, Feb 9. Click here to learn more.

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