Where is your anchor in these times?

Goddess Durga, we ask your company in crossing

the ferocious swells of the ocean of life.

And to this end we burn everything in us

that will hinder this dance with You across the ocean.

-interpretation of Rig Vedic verses 

 I was watching a bird trying to drink honey from the flowers in my backyard. She was looking for a “solution” because the overhanging branches did not provide a stable hold. She considered the situation for a while and then she flung herself upon one of the branches. There she spiraled and swayed as she made forays into the flowers. So her “solution” was a complex dance with large measures of instability!

 Here we are in these times when we do not know where we can find “solutions”. No longer is it easy to bring the age old duality paradigm to bear upon life—right/wrong, good/evil, light/dark and known/unknown. These divisions have become intimate now. I hear from many of you that in the last two years your relationships with families, friends and workplaces have changed fundamentally. As also your confidence in what has been presented to you as reality for all of your life.

We have always been taught for centuries to be on the lookout for “solutions”, because that is the age old paradigm of the mind-dominated organisation of reality. Every complex encounter in life is to be solved, which usually means to be simplified and controlled using the tired paradigm of duality.

In the past we have anchored in safety, security, comfort and permanence. These manifested as lifelong jobs, family units, and the belief in the capacity of humans to control Nature to our benefit. In this framework of dualities, the only other possibility is the opposite—danger, insecurity, discomfort, instability and loss of control. Aren’t we in this space anyway despite centuries of trying to control reality?

So where to find “solutions” now? In the very same philosophies and systems that have set up these dualities? In the same divine traditions that have given women and the feminine a secondary place in their hierarchies? In the spiritual materialism that has appropriated and monetized ancient traditions? In the histories that have patronised ancient wisdom into linear narratives of primitivism?

Or is it that the paradigm of “solution” is flawed and was never something that could anchor the complexity and fluidity of reality?

The invocation to Durga in the ancient Rig Veda seeks Her company not in calming the ocean, but in steering the boat across the swells. And to do that means learning to sway in the boat with Her.

Ancient Goddess dance is a dance of co-creating with the momentum of weight across the earth. It is not mastering stability, but in fact it is the practice of dancing instability. In this dance is the essence of Goddess invitation—to collaborate with Her and to match Her. This is no “enlightenment” solution, but it is an expansive movement that aligns us with the abundance of Nature, rather than the self-interested narrowness of our idea of Nature being in service to our comfort.

We are patronizing about ancient cultures that perceived the Divine in thunderstorms, the forest fire and in wilderness. We have reductionist labels for them like animism. We think that an anthropomorphic divinity is a sign of the progressive sophistication of the human mind. And the ultimate sophistication is to abstract the divine out of existence!

The interconnectedness with Nature that many ancient traditions proposed is vital for us to connect with reality in a material and expansive way. And this in turn is vital to stop our disconnected narratives about our dominion over Nature/Reality. Because the disconnection is not just about climate change on a macrocosm level, it is about everything that makes us human—the truth of our belonging, the truth that the feminine is the source and the truth that what is eternal is material—and this is eternity of the earth and the earth in our bodies.

The “solutions” of centuries have brought us to where we are today. My invitation is to drop into the body, liberate yourself from the constraints of “solutions” and taste the infinite possibilities of dancing with the swells of Reality!