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Sustaining the Web of Existence, Human & Otherwise

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gn-dim-359346Photo by gn dim on Unsplash

 

What happens when human beings come to believe we do not matter? That we are needed for others but there is little to no need or use for what is within us?

What happens when we live our lives believing that who and what we are is not worthy of love? That there is something fundamentally wrong with us?

What happens to our connection to the whole? And what happens to the whole when this happens?

Our sense of disconnection as human beings doesn’t just affect our own psyches. It weakens the fabric of life, the web of human existence, and the web of existence itself.

This is much of what we are experiencing now on Earth. A weakened fabric of human existence and a weakened connection to the Earth and all that is sacred. We can’t necessarily see it in the physical realm, although we experience the disconnection from each other (and even from ourselves). But I see and feel it internally, on the inner planes.

I see and feel it and now know this because this was my experience — and I know I am not alone by a long shot. I sense the majority of human beings feel this way in varying degrees. I don’t know many who’ve been raised to truly know they matter not in spite of who they are but exactly as they are. That there is a place for them because they are who they are, exactly as they are.

As a young girl…

Growing up in a family with a lot of dysfunction, I came to believe I did not matter. This sounds dramatic, but I don’t mean it as drama. I am not saying my parents or the other adults in my life ever said that. They didn’t. Rather, it was the belief I came to hold about myself because of what I experienced.

We were a deeply disconnected family: emotionally, physically, and psychically. And that disconnection took hold in my soul. The soul longs for connection. Young children need to be connected. We, humans, hunger for connection. And when it’s not there as young children, we believe it has something to do with us. Children are self-referential. We make it about us because we desperately need to believe in the strength and wholeness of our parents and caregivers.

This belief ran deep. The wound was painful and it wasn’t until very recently that I saw it for what it was and is. What I now see is how disconnected I became from my instincts and from life. Our instincts come out of our connection to the instinctive nature of life and I became disconnected from my body and from the Earth.

As a very young girl, I see how my belief caused me to energetically and psychically disconnect from the fabric of life. I turned away from my own worthiness. I turned away from the Source of Life that gives me life. We don’t (necessarily) die when we do that, but we leave our existence by ‘going way’. By disassociating. By isolating. By numbing out with substance(s) or things we do repeatedly to get away from the pain of this sense of not mattering, of not being worthy of love.

And when I healed this wound of disconnection I saw how my connection to the web of life grew stronger.

Everything is interconnected in this web of life, but it is more than simply interconnected.

Everything on the web is the whole and at the same time is simply itself. This is what a hologram is — each part contains the whole.

“Thus each individual is at once the cause for the whole and is caused by the whole, and what is called existence is a vast body made up of an infinity of individuals all sustaining each other and defining each other. The cosmos is, in short, a self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism.” Francis Dojun Cook

If we come to believe we don’t matter (or we aren’t lovable or we aren’t enough or we aren’t ‘however you have this one wired’), and/ or we treat others as if they do not matter, then we aren’t being sustained and we aren’t sustaining each other. This is part of our job here on Earth — to sustain each other, to keep the web healthy and whole, to grow a vibrant community — and to be powerful, loving stewards to all of life.

We were created to be what we are.

If we come to live a belief that what we are and how we were created does not matter to creation itself, then we are weakening the strength of our link to the whole and the whole suffers for it. But when we are in the pain of the wound, we cannot see this.

While everything is connected, something profoundly damaging happens when we come to believe we are not…and that we aren’t worthy of this connection. This connection is sacred and when it is weakened we weaken our remembrance of the sacred in everyday life.

I can see it, but I still find this hard to put into words, to be honest.

But this matters greatly. Our human community must be strong and vital to evolve out of this mess we are in. We must be strong and vital to come to care for the whole of life as stewards on this planet. We cannot be strong and vital if we continue to live this western, patriarchal way of devaluing so many.

We don’t have to live as numb human beings, but to make the change we do have to learn how to feel and that means being willing to feel.

I am but one human being who has grown up in a kind of culture that devalues the incredible singularity, diversity, and creativity of each human being. My upbringing and family life were a reflection of this culture. My parents were/are good people, but they, too, were raised in a culture is deeply disconnected from this web of life.

Every human being not only matters; their voice, creativity, and uniqueness are vital to the health of the whole, and to the strength of the fabric that holds us all together. And many who are not in positions of power or privilege have been silenced, traumatized, and denigrated terribly.

Moving forward…

As leaders, we must ensure inclusion and diversity, as well as provide the opportunity for everyone to rediscover what they truly are and that what they truly are matters to the whole of life. As leaders, our job is to midwife this essential creative nature and create a culture in which people are free to express it. We need everyone’s creative genius in order to move forward. We need everyone’s happiness from being connected to the whole. We need connection, period.

We must come to know and live the truth that the expression of every human being, including that of our own, is sacred and vital to the well-being of the whole of human existence, and the whole of existence itself.

***

If you’re interested in finding out more about what I offer, including my one-on-one coaching and Writing Raw circles (current circle is still open for registration), please visit me at JulieDaley.com.

 

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Into the Flesh of Full Human Participation

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“Since suffering as well as joy comes with being human, I urge you to remember this:
Violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering.”
~ Parker Palmer

 

The other morning, I woke up with words hovering right at that edge between night and day. Words about grieving – grieving not just death but also life.

I had to get them all down. So, with a yellow, dollar store composition book in hand, I walked to my local cafe to write. Along the way, I passed by my favorite beautiful tree that sits at the end of my street, right at the entrance to the park. She’s stately. She’s broken off – branches ending without warning or explanation. With one of her limbs sitting atop another, she supports herself to keep living. It’s clear she’s been through events that have hacked away at her body. But she still stands, an elder, each morning taking in the sunrise from the east.

I feel like that sometimes. An elder, a bit worse for wear as I grow older, limbs helping each other to keep standing upright.

I got to the coffee shop, ordered my almond milk and cocoa powder hot chocolate, and sat down to write in my yellow book, the words still hovering right at that edge. With the sun rising through and into the window in front of me, the words began to pour out, words about how I had to find a way to grieve life – to actively grieve life – to grieve the pain I feel living in the world today.

The words came out in chunks, different chunks about grief and life and death and how hard it can be to just be here as a human being on this earth.

I’ve written so much about how beautiful it is to live life in a human body. But this was all about how hard it is and how so often I don’t want to be here – not in the literal way of taking my life but rather in the energetic way of wanting to just numb or distract myself.

***

It is incredibly vulnerable to be here in a human body. My life is a cake walk compared to the majority of people on the planet, yet for most of my life, I’ve had this underlying resistance to being here, completely and fully.

We are taught that grieving is for death, and sometimes we are taught that is for other losses, too. When my husband died, I didn’t know how to grieve. Grief is a natural human thing, but the truth is we’ve not been taught how, and we’ve not been encouraged, to grieve fully. We learn our emotions are too much. We learn to talk ourselves out of grief, telling ourselves to get on with life, to not dwell in the past, to not wallow in our feelings.

In my life, I’ve come to see that grief fully entered into and embodied is nature’s way of bringing us out of denial and into reality. It’s an intelligent process. When we feel it fully and wholly, it moves through us, cleaning out of us all the ways we fight reality, and leaving us with the capacity to know true and deep abiding joy.

When we feel great discord with the way things are, something is off within us. When we have no outlet for our suffering, we become disconnected from life – which then allows us to be violent and not feel that violence in our hearts.

Grief is our human way to be with our suffering. Fully experienced grief will bring us into right relationship with life. That is what grief does.

Thomas Berry wrote,

“Only now have we begun to listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.”

We don’t grieve the life we are afraid to live and the Self we refuse to be.

We don’t grieve the rage we feel.

We don’t grieve that life is beautiful, but that this beauty encompasses the totality of experience – the sublime and the horrific – and everything in between.

We don’t grieve, because we will not acknowledge that we are powerless to life and death.

We don’t feel our suffering because we are often taught that if our lives don’t go well, we’ve done something wrong. We are taught that if we are suffering we are at fault for that suffering. The cultural message is that to suffer shows weakness and to grieve shows weakness so we walk around all armored up as if nothing can touch us.

We do not want to see what is really here – the powerlessness we feel in response to life. Instead, we are taught we are all powerful so we attempt to control what we let in. Life then becomes something that can only be good/successful/happy (fake), sad (fake), not real, not alive, not spontaneous, not full of wonder and magic.

And when we control, we lose awareness of Source within us. This is the ultimate loss. Once we lose connection to Source, it becomes much easier to be violent.

When we grieve everything fully, though, we make our way back to this Source within. Our hearts break open and we begin to feel the distinct presence within of something greater than ourselves. We come down into our flesh. We begin to know the wisdom in our bones. We feel the depth of our humanity and our powerlessness to both life and death. This is what I felt when I was in the rock bottom depths of grieving my husband’s death.

Grieving fully is not quick nor is it easy, but it is the doorway into being fully alive.

***

As I finished writing, I noticed the sun had risen quite a way up into the sky, the entire population of the cafe had changed, and cocoa was empty and I was hungry, ready to eat breakfast.

I gathered my things together, including my now slightly heavier yellow notebook, and began my walk back home. As I came upon the tree again, the day was moving into mid-morning and the sun was now shining upon her.

I felt such love for her seeing her there in the sunlight and thankful for what she gives to me and my neighbors who live in her radius. I sense that in appreciating her and deepening my relationship with her, I am deepening my “human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe.”

Being here on earth offers the most amazing possibility: to know self as human and Self as Source, to become conscious of the love that we are so that we might live this love on earth.

May we all find our way down into the flesh of full human participation.

 

 

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