Last evening I drove up to the forest outside of town just as a looming grey cloud burst forth it’s quiet contents. The world was white. Ubuntu was ravenous to get out and exercise his past life memories of being a sled dog. He plowed through, strong, unstoppable, joyous. A force to be reckoned with! At the top of a rise at the intersection of hidden trails, I stopped to imbibe in the silence that only comes with a forest in snowfall. I drank in something indescribable and felt the immensity that is ineffable and always here despite it all. My mind surrendered its fierce stance.
It is so hard to remember that everything is impermanent and that cycles are made for turning, when we are amidst the ache of the heart. The world goes black and our minds often cannot see any reason for anything. These are the times we are living in and it will take every wisdom we can summons to help us remember who we are and what response is being asked of us.
Gratefully, I recently had the good fortune to be reminded by spiritual cosmologist Brian Swimme, that we are the stuff of stars. We are the Universe in the form of a human…the Universe reflecting on Itself. I could almost feel this yesterday as I stood in one infinitesimal fraction of the wondrous immensity of this planet we live on and imagined that.…this cosmos is constantly unfolding in us and around us. If we are THIS…we are indeed fortunate beings whose celebration of, and thanksgiving for all of this is our greatest task!
Brian went on to remind me that the cosmos thrives on darkness….that it IS the place of Creation. Think of the womb…we live in a great universal womb and we are infants trying to grow up…the tension and tightness we feel in this dark space could be good news!!! Creativity and destruction are both happening!!! Now more than ever, we are asked to get very large…to close our eyes and step outward further and further to the longest view and largest perspective we can imagine. (Our imagination is crucial now) From this tremendous world view, we can sense that there is some global…even universal story that is unfolding that we are a part of. A story that we must come to know and name! Death and cataclysm, though our Industrial Society demonizes it, is actually a tool for evolution….extinction makes way for new forms to come forth. Hmmm….is it time for the current form of humanity to die off and make way for something else? Something wise and full of JOY for the extraordinary home that we live upon???
Friend and colleague, Sheila Belanger is an astrologer and as she looked into the birth chart of our country and researched a larger perspective for this time, she came to realize that the United States is entering its Pluto Return. Yep…just like the Saturn Return that many of us are aware of, whose orbit is much shorter so we experience the force of its return to where it was when we were born, every 29 years. Pluto however, has a much vaster, and so longer orbiting time…we humans never have a Pluto return because it takes 248 years to orbit around the sun. But countries do and can be at the affect of Pluto’s return and the US is just starting to. The US was birthed in 1776, so Pluto is now 241 years around its orbit and we are already feeling it effects….7 more years will bring it exact. And what ARE Pluto’s effects??? It is the great composter...an insistent instigator of rooted change…a transformer…it encourages conditions ripe for death and rebirth. Pluto does NOT demonize death or darkness, but relishes its essential place in the cosmos!!
And so in this gap between stories, as Thomas Berry foretold, it is essential that we remember our place in this great unfolding cosmos. Destruction is always accompanied by Creation.
We are the stuff of stars and, as poet Drew Dellinger speaks "this entire traveling cosmos is "the secret One slowly growing a body."
Take your place here.