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Adaptability is essential now.
We develop strong identities and set clear boundaries, we choose what we want and imagine our futures. This is healthy. But times like these call for new skills, and they have less to do with Identity than with Adaptability—the ability to respond to change. (Think Dinosaurs).
Handling the unexpected, gleaning wisdom from challenge, going beyond what we thought, we expected or even dreamed-- these capacities are called forth daily as we negotiate our way through times of exponential change and evolution.
We have perceptions and experiences—habits of both body and mind—that tell us we are solid beings. But we are more a moving sea than we are earth; less a thing than an unfolding web of events, a real Happening.
A channeled friend once said, ‘we are best served when we identify with what we don’t know rather than what we know. What we know is merely a footprint from the past, there to inform us, but not to guide us in our evolution”. We are better served to identify with our own edges than our core constructs, with the flow of energy rather than the form we hope it takes. As the circle of the Known enlarges, the circumference of our Unknowing expands, as well.
What lies behind the messenger (person, event or thought) we may dread? On the other side of challenge lies the promise of new possibility. If we identify ourselves more with what we don’t know, if we become interested, surprised, even upset….what can we learn? Then, if we go beyond even what we don’t know, if we seek out the mysterious, the enticing, our deepest delight, what might we become? Evolution is mysterious and we are in fertile territory, a streaming of convergent / divergent potentials.
Ask anyone who does a board sport, be it on concrete, snow or water…. she’ll say, “stay on your front edge, out over the moving terrain, don’t hang back”. These folks get it about staying fluid.
Or, if you prefer, take the Hopi Elders’ letter to heart: “it is time to let go of the banks and be in the river of life, keep your head up and look around for who is there in the water with you.”
So how do we identify more with flow than with form, with change than with stability, with what’s possible than with what’s already true? How do we become adaptable, able to respond to our environment and to support the process of evolution in our bodies, our minds and our hearts?
Take any landscape—in nature or in human nature, your body or the body of the cosmos. They reveal this truth: that the edge is fertile, the boundary leads onward, transition contains creativity. No matter what landscape we enter, we find discontinuity stimulates life.
Ecosystems abound with examples of this truth. Shorelines and mixed zones between field and forest both support more than their share of species and food. The meeting point is fertile in all of nature: the front of two weather systems produces the most activity; the meeting of waters generates endlessly creative spiral formations.
New and full moons, Equinoxes and Solstices: these moments are powerful gateways in our relationship to our twin sky forces—sun and moon—who regulate our chemistry and our watery nature.
Dawn and dusk are fertile times. Spiritual traditions utilize them as portals to other domains in consciousness. Birds and animals do the bulk of their eating and mating in these fringe times.
Sunrise and sunset are breathing times for the Earth, bringing shifts in wind, moisture and temperature.
The transition from waking to sleep and back again provides a bridge for the many aspects of our consciousness to weave together. In spring we delight in the lace of red and green that edges all living things, signs of new life. We tap the maple for sap that flows just under the surface, through the living edge of the tree.
It isn’t called the growing edge for nothing!
The greatest possibility for change in the nervous system lies in the synapse, that space between the fingerlike dendrites of the nerves, a plexus of potential pathways. As certain choices are made repeatedly, we mylenate our nerves, allowing impulses to travel more quickly. Thus we learn—forming both skill and habit. Habit is ingrained, or, as new choices are made, new possibilities arise. Novelty (not overload) increases our nervous system’s activity, we access more capacity—we evolve. Newness is stimulating and generative.
Cells teach the same wisdom. They continually oscillate between a gel like, well-defined state and a state in which cell walls are more permeable or dissolved. In this moment of dissolve, the cell’s boundaries are permeable, even non-existent, as it releases its wastes and takes in new fuel. In this moment, when the cell is permeable to its environment, susceptible to change, it is cleansed and revitalized for its work of generating life.
The Wheel of Life, Indra’s net, Grandmother Spider, Isis, all these faces of the mystery embody the wisdom of the nexus, the fertile intersection of many………. a point of transformation & unlimited potential.
Itzhak Bentov in his 1977 book, Stalking the Wild Pendulum, introduced the cosmic jelly donut, in which the big bang or any white hole is, from another perspective, a black hole or the creation of anti-matter. The same moment is both birth of new life and the end of form. The cosmic jelly donut, in motion, involutes and conversely, pours forth. Birth/Death—same transformation, different perspective—be it molecular, human, or cosmic in proportion.
The Mandelbrot (the image of an equation iterated millions of times and also, interestingly, one of the crop circles) is a picture of evolving chaos and pattern from the world of math. In explaining a Mandelbrot image, a friend said, look at the borders of the pattern; they unfold indefinitely, with more and more complexity. Try to measure the shoreline of a lake. Measure the distance end to end, now measure each bay, now each curve, each stone, each grain, each molecule…The implicit order unfolds infinitely through its edges.
How many ways has it been expressed? We humans want more than anything to be in loving relationship—connection both with our own uniquely expressed, essential life force; and with each other, in relationship. In this meeting place—this dynamic, changing interplay Between—we feel most alive.
There is great fertility at the edge of the evolving unknown.
David Bohm, scientist, wrote a book called On Dialogue. In it he states: “Dialogue comes from the Greek ‘dialogos’. Logos means ‘the word’. And dia means through…. The picture or image that this derivation suggests is of a stream of meaning flowing among and through us and between us. ……It’s something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It’s something creative. And this shared meaning is the glue or cement that holds people and societies together.”
Whether we are moving with change in ourselves, our bodies or our beliefs, whether we are working with people, or things or data; we can tend the unknown, we can honor information from the edges, seek the new and the possible. We can practice welcoming the unexpected…together. Perhaps we can ‘one up’ the Hopi Elders, and not just go with the flow. Perhaps we can Be Flow—ing—ness.
What about those times when it’s too much, the system is on overload? We need nourishment, resource and capacity. More in the next issue on how to tend ourselves, befriend our own edges, welcome the messengers, and surf the unexpected with grace and good humor.
