In all your sacred glory.
Surrendering to the broken mess.
In all her glory
A massive tree fell outside my window over the weekend. The thickest, proudest eucalyptus, pushing 80 feet at 150 years old. She was still sprouting new growth, not even close to dying. I’d woken up and walked down the hall not more than a minute before hearing the thud. The wisdom of the body is beyond profound.
Since I cannot help but dig out meaning from everything, I lay awake for hours afterwards, thinking about the relationships between sacredness and decay, stillness and chaos. Nothing like reckoning with mortality to feel more connected to god, right.
The rain has been pounding California, leaving behind wreckage and clearing the way for what’s next. It’d be difficult to witness the raging force of the river and not feel awe. Is it fair that homes are flooding and ancient trees are crashing and power lines are snapping? No, but life doesn’t promise fairness.
Principle #1 of the Void: in order for anything new to grow, there must be space for it to do so. Sometimes new growth can only emerge in the wake of destruction. For whatever reasons, the foundation of the old is not always viable to build atop of. Nevertheless, the old will always have been there. The reality of the past remains.
Some of the most solid recovery wisdom teaches that you cannot go backwards: every time you relapse, you don’t then return to square one, but simply try to start again. New chapter, same book kind of thing. You have already lived through all the work you’ve done until now, and nothing can take that from you. To paraphrase Heraclitus,1 no one ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and they aren’t the same person. Every moment is different, and we are different in every moment.
When parts of our lives decay or fall away entirely, may we remember with reverence what once was there.
Not up to you or me.
The process of maturing includes discovering the places where we have agency, and where we can take responsibility for ourselves and our choices. So much of ‘self-development’ is about reclaiming and standing in our personal power, and acting in service to who we really are and what we really want.
The process of maturing is also about surrender. It is about knowing when to surrender, and to what. For all the agency and personal power we each think we have, and do have, what ends up unfolding is ultimately not up to us.
We cannot control who lives or dies. We do not decide when the sun comes out or which trees stay standing or whether what we want to happen will. We do not control much, really.
Good things sometimes end just because. Relationships run their course. People die because they did. Trees just fall. Sometimes there is a list of reasons why, and sometimes there isn’t. Surrendering does not require adopting the nihilistic perspective that everything is meaningless. In Michael Singer’s2 words, “You don’t surrender the outside world - you totally accept it. What you surrender is your personal, made up judgment of it…you are not surrendering life, you are surrendering your resistance to life.”
Perhaps when something beautiful is ending, the invitation is not to mentally agonize about why it happened, but to surrender to what is unknowable and unexplainable. To the divine order of things. God. Nature. The Universe.
Perhaps when we are left with massive holes and broken fences, we are being asked not to rush to immediately fix, but to sit in the sacred mess for a moment, first. Perhaps we are being invited to feel what is here, and to listen.
The sacredness within.
What do we hold as sacred, and what do we have reverence for?
Discussing sacredness in an increasingly secular society continues, to me, to feel and be important. I wonder if by individually exploring what is sacred, while it may vary widely, we might find many universalities. After all, “what is most personal is most universal,” said Carl Rogers.3
Maybe the sacred is found in daily ritual, in the feeling of sunshine, in the love of someone or something. Maybe the sacred lies in stillness, the soft awareness of that space between the inhale and the exhale. Maybe still, sacredness resides in the moments in which you feel connected to something greater than yourself.
During this short span in which we grace this devastatingly beautiful earth, may we hold ourselves, and each other, in all our sacred glory.
Perhaps that is all we can do. Not much to control around here, anyways.
Maggie
That good old pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. He’s one of the people credited with the idea that the only constant in life is change.
Michael Singer of The Untethered Soul & Living Untethered. Books that changed me a lot.
A rather excellent American psychologist, see any of his books on client-centered therapy.
Wow, Maggie. So glad the planet has decided to keep you here, but how wonderful the insightfulness you brought to this incident something for all of us to ponder.