Radical Openings: Potentialities in 2024

As we begin the month of February 2024 – this Year of the Dragon, this Leap Year, and this Entry into the Age of Aquarius (finally … after all, some of us have been singing about it for decades!) – I invite a pause to take a breath … and create a little spaciousness – an opening – for wandering and wondering …

The other night, I was gazing at the sky – filled with clouds lit-up by the moon, showing-up as white, shining amorphousness  in the darkness. Slowly, a few of the clouds began to separate and an opening emerged. Through this opening, I could see a few stars twinkling in the vastness – little points of light that had been traveling through space for thousands of years, now arriving in my room and in my pupils, just because I happened to be looking when the wind moved some clouds and their light was no longer blocked. If the wind, the clouds, or I had been differently positioned or engaged, those stars would have remained unseen to me – I might not have even known those stars were there, much less experienced their light. 

“Enlightenment is an accident. Zen practice makes us a little more accident-prone” – (attributed to Shunryu Suzuki).

As you are fully aware, we are living in a time of individual and global change, uncertainty, transformation,  collapse, and emergence … and there is no road map or previous experience to rely on. There are no experts because no one has been through this experience at this whole-world physical and interspecies’ level before. We are discovering more of what we don’t know, as we realize much of what we assumed to be the way things are and the way things work … just isn’t. How do we know this? Well, after about 400 hundred years of destroying a large number of living species and a large portion of self-balancing systems, this way-of-being is now in the process of destroying itself.  

So, how do we choose to be in relationship with what I’m recently hearing named as “the predicament?”  How do we learn to be in this world as it is right now?

Welll … lll, our reactive nervous system activates all kinds of ancient strategies for survival – fight, flight, freeze, fawn – and that is usually the first impulse. However, attacking, closing-up, shutting-down, and/or collapsing only increases separation, isolation, enervation, and domination … all of which played a significant part in landing us where we are right now. What if we followed George Costanza’s strategy in “The Opposite” episode of “Seinfeld” – doing the opposite of what we’re used to doing? What if we listened, leaned-in, warmed, and rose-to-connect with what is here? What if we realized that there is more available than the clouds that we see? What if we opened – radically opened – to uncertainty, not-knowing, and discomfort as invitations to sense and live deeper in relationality rather than separation, as entanglement rather than straight lines, through creativity rather than Modernity’s programming? What if we followed the teachings of other life forms and evolved our way-of-being as an eco-system rather than through isolation, hierarchy and domination? Hmmm … mmm?

“...one of the things about a deep-time view of reality that gives me hope is the fact that the main thing that has driven creativity and transformation for billions of years has been chaos, breakdowns, and bad news. When I trust this process in my own life and in the world, I’m inspired to be in action without fear.” - Michael Dowd

Of course, just saying or thinking this shift doesn’t make it happen, unless you’re George Costanza (but even with him, it didn’t stick). We are complex systems of physical, emotional, cognitive, and cultural habits. At the same time, we do have the capacity for healing, adaptation, learning, and transformation. And, perhaps, we are being called/asked/demanded to tap into and cultivate that capacity – to live in the bone-knowing that Life seeks life, and that we are Life Forms. It might also be helpful to remember that we are particulates of Universe – seeking and evolving as increasing levels of complexity and connection.

"If the dynamics of the universe from the beginning shaped the course of the heavens, lighted the sun, and formed the earth, if this same dynamism brought forth the continents and seas and atmosphere, if it awakened life in the primordial cell and then brought into being the unnumbered variety of living beings, and finally brought us into being and guided us safely through the turbulent centuries, there is reason to believe that this same guiding process is precisely what has awakened in us our present understanding of ourselves and our relationship to this stupendous process. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture." – Thomas Berry

So, how might we cultivate this way of being? What practices, perceptions, and “persons” (human and more-than-human) might guide, support, and inspire us in this process? Hints: We’re walking around in them. They are right outside your door … maybe even in your room. Sometimes we embrace them; sometimes we destroy them. Often, we just ignore them … walking through them like walking through a hallway on our way to somewhere else.

What if we open – radically open – our minds and hearts to listening, learning, and loving ecosystems (beings of relationships) with all their players, forms, and ways of living? What if we let the clouds of our assumptions, reductionism, and materialism part so that we could see into a field of greater possibilities?

Here’s a peek behind the clouds into a few aspects of thinking and functioning ecosystemically:

• Flexibility is essential for adapting and integrating coherently with an ever-changing reality;

• Relationality is omnicentral as it is the seen and unseen connection of the whole;

• Unpredictability is accepted with the humble realization that human beings are not the end-all/be-all – there is much that is not and cannot be known by our embodied and limited physical selves;

• Spaciousness is honored because it is in the gaps that potentiality exists, creativity sparks, and emergence occurs.

Radical Openings, indeed! … Radical in the invitation to engage and embody a shift at the root level of Western culture, a.k.a., Modernity, and Openings in the call to live in/with/as  mysteries of what it is to be alive, of what it is to hold Life in reverence and awe. 

Through this way of being in relationship with ourselves, with all beings, and with Life, we experience daily life very differently …

• Facing sudden changes in a travel itinerary becomes a practice of Flexibility;

• Being in conversation with someone who holds a different perspective becomes an invitation for Curiosity;

• Dealing with technological glitches (she says as she’s right now experiencing on/off power fluctuations while working on a deadline for this blog) becomes a mindfulness bell for a One- (or 15-) Breath Meditation;

• An over-full schedule becomes a call to go Off-the-Clock – i.e., cover-up all time devices, set an alarm if necessary, and move through a couple hours (or a day) by listening to your body and intuition for what you want to tend from your Menu (formerly known as your To-Do List). Once you release the habit of running the List in your mind, the feeling of Spaciousness emerges. 

Daily life is chock-a-block loaded with mini-modules of practice opportunities to cultivate a new way of living with ourselves and each other … a way that is congruent with how  beyond-the-Western-cultured-human Life works.

I invite you to let the clouds part a bit and play with little practices of Radical Openings, to discover more of what’s available, and to enjoy a sense of belonging beyond what you might imagine.

Here in MBMS, we are dedicated to co-creating and growing a new way of being in support of ready-ing ourselves for living ecosystemically. You are invited to join us in this community of mutual learning and exploration as we cultivate and environ relational and potentiating spaciousness.  

“The most important task of this moment is to generate a base of people who are eager to practice perceiving the complexity and interdependency in every aspect of our lives.” – Nora Bateson

Marianne

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