An archetypal poem about the connection between making and creating.
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Being whole is the proposed purpose of a contemplative life. By the time you reach my age of the late fifties, one has been broken-hearted many times. Even the Japanese art of Kintsugi (where broken pottery is put back together with gold lacquer that reveals the breakages) may find it difficult to glue together the multiple broken-heartedness of a mature life.
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This reflection is inspired by a dream I had recently.
In the dream, I witnessed a sudden apocalyptic peeling back of a valley from the surrounding mountains. Everybody, including rescue personnel and community, ran towards the theatre of dystopia. I found myself turning around, against the surge.
Meriam Webester dictionary has pronounced “authentic” as the word of 2023.
Authenticity is a term I have always used to signal the primordial domain in archetypal wisdom. My first group course in 2023 was on the Deity Krishna and about “Authenticity as a sacred expression”. I should has said, Authenticity as THE sacred expression! The word of the year in 2022 was “gaslighting” It is no wonder that in 2023 we yearned for Authenticity amid the delusion of narratives that aim to fix Reality as meanings and ideologies. Usually such efforts lead to deception, and not just by others as we may also deceive ourselves in our anxiety for answers and definitions. We may rush to destinations simply because the unease of a shimmering Reality is unbearable.
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This video has been inspired by something that happened in one of my individual programs. This week, as I was practicing are working with one of the women in the program. She shared with me the teaching that emerged from her practice for the week. And this is what she said, You are the hero of your own life. Your job is not to save the world.
This was a very potent teaching very timely, not just for herself in her life, but also for me in terms of what I was experiencing this past few days and couple of weeks. And that is how it is always in these archetypal invocations that the insights and teachings that emerge are not just relevant to the person, but also to everybody who are in their space and invoking or co-creating that expression along with them.
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Anger is a contentious emotion. In our usual stories about anger, it is almost always a bad thing. It leads to violence and destruction. And a lot of the time we are asked to delete our anger to manage our anger or to overcome it completely. Indeed, we have this belief that without anger, we would all be better, better off. And on one level, that is absolutely true. And this is where I want to clarify, as I sometimes do, that, in these approaches, in these videos, we are not looking at it through a psychological lens. But we are considering it through an archetypal wisdom, which includes imagination, creativity, and the Deity, which is a very different thing to a psychological lens. The psychological lens and approach, of course, is extremely important. And we all go to it whenever we need it. But here, it is a different approach.
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Recently I went on an extraordinarily ordinary pilgrimage—to the sites around Canberra, the place where I live, where there are material connections to the geological “Deep Time” of the Earth.
These are humble places, one hidden under a busy overpass, one outside a government department exploring rocks for mining, and one under a major road. Of course, the land we stand on anywhere on Earth is “Deep Time” matter. These places just brought that fact to our attention.
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