The News
I can hardly bear to read the news or watch the videos of current events. And I can hardly bear not to. This present time holds so many levels of consciousness. We are living in a time of much outer chaos and seeming disintegration of our accustomed culture. Some people want to return to a Wild West mentality – every person for themselves or their tribe, shoot first, think later. Run the people who don’t look like us off to someplace else. Reminds me of the childhood game King of the Mountain, where the object was to hold the position of power by tumbling everyone else off the mountain.
I could write about how shortsighted and adolescent many of these approaches are, but I’d rather write about the possibility that turning up the heat when everyone can see what is happening might actually lead to the emergence of more evolved viewpoints. Maybe we actually don’t fully comprehend all the variables in the situation. It is possible that we could be surprised by hopeful developments and wise voices that offer ways forward that will carry us into a better future, a world where we can acknowledge the beauty in all our diversity.
They say that when a caterpillar goes within its spun cocoon, its lone chamber of metamorphosis, that it must first completely liquefy, dissolve its caterpillar self into an amorphous “ooze” before the component parts begin to reassemble. So, let’s say if a person were to cut open the chrysalis before the process was complete, observing the protoplasmic material might lend itself to a conclusion of utter dissolution of a perfectly functional caterpillar. Of course even most nursery school children know that after a patiently long wait, one day there will emerge the magical winged butterfly. The operant term here is –“a patiently long wait”. How long is that? The answer is, as long as it takes.