Flow of Life

There is a flow of Life that we can all access and align with. It cannot be understood intellectually; it is an experiential thing. Being in conversation with this flow is unlike any other experience; there is a power and potency, a beauty, a deep knowing, that lodges itself within us as we open to it again and again.

But until the door opens to it, through some combination of inheritance, work, grace, and other means, stories that justify one's experience of alienation, lack and discontentment more readily flourish. These stories have one thing in common: they are based on the assumption that we are separate, self-absorbed beings inhabiting an otherwise unintelligent world in an indifferent universe, here by chance. Kinship with the world is absent, and trust in others precarious.

These stories that can so contain our lives are recent inventions, and based in cultural trauma and forgetting. Their seeds are perhaps 200 generations old, and the beginnings of their more recent flourishing only a dozen or two generations past. They are the product of the gap between ourselves and Life that we inherited and maintain as normalcy. We end up dissociated from our bodies and their vital energy, and without space to be in conversation with the thousand elements and beings of the world that would engage us.

To re-align with the flow of Life that constantly beckons us, it is first helpful to find space within ourselves and our relationships. This often begins with honesty, a discerning transparency, with ourselves and those closest to us, with that scary opening into the unknown - risking loss, upheaval, and the pain these can entail, to meet ourselves and others again fully. Once we can exhale more freely, the energy bound up in controlling life begins to relax, and we are more able to notice and respond.

Then, the conversation begins in earnest.

Original Artwork created specially for this piece, by my friend Amy Gibos.