🍁🍁🍁Join me for Fall Equinox/Mabon community ritual space at Shared Ground (3401 W 29th Ave in Denver) on Thursday, September 22! RSVP here.🍁🍁🍁
Am I going to be at the Great Sand Dunes this weekend?
...I invite you to stay with the liminality before the answer.
What's there in the not-knowing?
*
*
*
YES I'm going: I have continuously talked about and promoted Moon Dunes Loons for five weeks now in these newsletters. Surely it is happening.
NO I'm not going: A lot of people were interested in joining, but nobody could make it happen ultimately. And surely I would be defeated if it was down to just me going there all by myself.
*
*
*
It is Friday morning, the first day of Moon Dunes Loons.
I learned last Sunday that everyone who was a "yes" or a "maybe" to Moon Dunes Loons, had become a "no."
I grieved. But then, a strange intuition came through:
I could not cancel the campground. I must hold it open.
I did not know whether it was going to happen. And I need to stay in the not-knowing longer. That is what I knew, and all I knew.
As of as late as last evening, the truth is, the answer was not yet known to me.
"I will know when and only when it is arising."
This morning, I awoke with my answer.
"Wisdom that is embodied is Knowledge."
I would go because I must.
Why "must" I? I share a glimpse below, and there'll be more on this matter in next week's newsletter.
Indulging Emergence
Over the years, in courtship and in love with emergence, I've glutted myself on it. Made ever more room for it in my life, to shape my life, to shape me. And the time has come when I may have finally maxxed out on emergence.
I began centering my life around the genius of emergence at least eight years ago. I gave it as much time as I could muster and manage... a choice which only grew. I structured my life around it, with a goal of remaining in embodied intuition and "flow state" as often as possible. I was all about intrinsic structure that let me pursue the most meaning, most avidly, with my available life energy. I worshipped these states as they tempered my ordinary lived experiences with spiritual power. I let emergence encompass all aspects of my life: my reason for being, my vocational pursuits, my relationships, my hobbies, everything.
Recently, I began noticing that this lifestyle was running me roughshod. Something was out of balance. In reflecting, I began to see that this emergence-worshipping lifestyle was not the perfectly fulfilling mode I made it out to be. Letting everything in my life be emergent was actually wearing out my nervous system. This right here was my first indicator that an underlying reason for the behavior pattern could be unintegrated trauma. And in reflecting, I found that yes, it was. My lifestyle has been unconsciously affirming and reinforcing the environmental chaos and overstimulation of my childhood experience.
It was time to want something different. To want more balance between emergence and stability, aka groundedness, and to have these components be in right relationship in my mature adult life. I wanted to choose a more sophisticated version of tending to my needs—including, my need for union with emergence. So I began choosing its opposite: choosing groundedness, awakely and on purpose.
A little over one week ago, I created an elegant decision tree that starkly reduced complexity in my vocational sphere. I have begun applying more discipline in organizing my time available for work and play. I began tending myself through being very present to my choices and how they met my needs (which could include tending others/relationships), rather than focusing on perceived "demand" from others for my help/love/attention. These behavioral shifts have helped me greatly stabilize my mind, and thus my nervous system and emotions, and thus my life.
Balancing self and Self Needs
I've recently learned the term "merging" to describe the phenomena of enjoining or enmeshing completely with a certain state or belief within the body-mind, or, with another person (codependency). When merging is happening, there's a loss of awareness of one's sense of self. It is all-encompassing and can be overall detrimental or depleting, due to the loss of self.
I reckon most of us yearn to experience more union with emergence, more of the time. But if you inhabit an especially bold spirit like me, you might actually be prone to overindulgence in spiritual modes, and have a hard time coming down or coming out of emergence/flow states.
In the past five years in particular, I notice periods—sometimes hours, sometimes weeks—in which I've merged with the sense of Spirit moving or speaking through me. I've merged with the pure "stream consciousness" of Emergence, informing (in-forming) my life. When I sensed Spirit wanting something for me or from me, I gave myself completely to it.
In giving myself utterly to this "higher purpose," all was not rosy. There were subtle, insidious consequences that revealed a bias in my consciousness of excluding myself. (Perhaps why a state of total absorption was so attractive in the first place! Emergence as submergence.)
In telling myself I was guided by Emergence, I would often ignore considerations for my human life, its basic needs and requirements. I would bypass my human-scale needs and desires, giving myself as though sacrificially, as though devotionally, to this "bigger" awareness moving through me.
This is a psychological imbalance, just the same as if it was happening with another person in a codependent relationship. Tendencies for codependence run deep, and may even function like a paradigm, shaping the organization of available information in one's life.
In sacred space, you can safely merge with emergence and unify with universe. Then you must come out of that space, and integrate. This is key for ritual space containers, that there is a beginning, middle and end. Preparation, initiation, integration.
We can LOVE these sacred processes with all our might, and yet we must recognize that without all parts of the process—without the beginning and end, without integration especially—our practices of reunification can become their shadows, actually enhancing and extending the spell of separation and dissociation already acting on us through unintegrated, internalized beliefs.
Emergence In Its Due Time
So in this maturation process, this awareness of a need for balancing, I get to build groundedness and stability for myself in my ordinary day to day—in my work week. I get to limit—and also concentrate—emergence into sacred containers once more. In doing so, I affirm that BOTH of these parts of me are crucial to living a complete, healthy life. I need to tend to myself and my basic life needs well, like a mature person, and, I need to tend to my connection to All, to Self, well, like a spiritual person.
The gift within this discipline is: I get to establish specific, sacred, potent containers for the mode of union with Emergence.
Moon Dunes Loons is that for me this weekend. Even if I am the guide, and am the guided—even if it is only me there.
There is nothing wrong with that, because I realized: I was never doing Moon Dunes Loons for people. It was arising, due to the confluence of cosmos and climate, and I was inviting people into the container. Having been initiated previously, I am capable of acting as a call to action, as an ambassador, to such rarified states. That no one chose to join at this time, in no way negates the truth of this confluent moment or what could be found or bound out there on the dunes. And I shall endeavor to meet this call as though under a spell—the spell of Now.
The more-than-human vastness, that immanent intelligence, that outrageous truth of sky and earth, shall surround and engulf me out there. This is the relationship, the union, I need—and that we need. And I will continue holding space for the inevitable time when more of us realize we need it. Realize we need to be overwritten and rewritten by cosmic time and natural forces. Realize that rewilding is a matter of full life or hard death. Realize that nature will make time for us, but we must heed HER timing. If you still think you must fit "nature" into your time, plugged in like a diversionary trip amidst your busy work week, you shall fall to meet Her where She's at.
If you're one of the few like me who've prioritized nothing more than emergence for the better part of your life, just know I see you, you fiendishly holy being. Your gifts are marvelous and yet, remember that you are here on earth, you belong here on earth, so welcome the feelings of being grounded once in a while.
If you want to make more space for Emergence: DO. I'm here to help you find out just how genius a partnership with the Whole is.
This weekend I'll be at Campsite 24 at Zapata Falls Campground, holding space for precisely this way. Maybe emergence looks like you joining Now.
Or maybe Not.
Or maybe something in-between, not-as-yet resolved...
Follow your truth and become more whole!
Love,
C.
