(audio file below)
The world is very dark where I live this time of year.
By 4:30, it’s nighttime. The sun doesn’t begin yawning its way up until close to 8:30 the next morning.
It’s disconcerting to live this way all winter — It’s a sudden blanket thrown on the day (and don’t get me started about the 16 hours of sun in July). My plants sit in 10 hours of artificial light and turn pale and limp. I water them, prop them up, and whisper, we’re all doing our best.
I turn to you and say the same thing: We’re all doing our best.
Sacred Confusion
Our best is all we can do when things are as dark and confusing as they are right now. Blinded and lost, we are feeling our way around but keep awkwardly bumping into one another.
We all thought we were out of this maze in summer 2020. The sun called us outdoors and at first we thought it was a victory march. But what happened when we found each other after months in our cocoons? All the conflict we had momentarily looked away from exploded.
Black and white.
She and him and them.
Government and the people.
Everything is still upside down. What was once right is now wrong and the righteous are on a crusade. No one knows who to trust anymore; even our faith in ourselves has been shaken.
But before you go darting about like a squirrel trying to cross the road in traffic, consider this: What if this confusion has a sacred purpose?
Nature Speaks
No one wants to be confused. We value what’s known, what’s provable. We value the clear, linear progress of our history, like the one outlined on a timeline in our school textbooks. But in order to make it so orderly, they left out a lot of dots.
If you look at nature (and we are nature) you’ll see that everything is actually cyclical. Not linear, not predictable. Things open and close. Things are born and die without warning. And none of this happens in coherent, marked changes, but rather in the soft way a sunset arrives. The shift is gradual, moving from blue sky to soft orange clouds that grow purple until they are finally obscured by the night. You would miss it if you weren’t paying attention.
As the sun knows, we all must spend time underground. We must allow ourselves to be confused. But in order to do that well, we must give ourselves permission to get messy.
Messy Magic
Messiness is the energy of a compost pile. It is the wisdom of a child at play. What comes from both compost and children is the kind of fertile magic that we all need.
Messy is also the way of the divine feminine. It is the chaos and undulating emotion in the waves that rise and disappear into the sea. It is impossible to predict what She will do next, which is surely why we have spread the mistruth that we can control Her. But life always has a way of making sure we remember who is really in charge.
What to Do
When confusion strikes, we are tempted to shake our fists at the sky. We demand tribunals and panels of experts. We want to know why.
But this is not the time for why. Not when we are in a blinding windstorm. Or buried in the dirt. Or walking through a fire of transformation. There is no why here. Not yet.
Why is kryptonite to the confused person; even Superman won’t come near it. Our hero looks more like The Hanged Man in a witch’s tarot deck.
When this card appears it tells us that we are bound and restricted. The only right action is inaction. This is a time to pause, listen, and wait for guidance.
This is how confusion serves a greater purpose — it allows us time to form the right questions, which is 90% of what we need. Soon we will be able to seek answers, but not until we have learned to bite our anxious tongues.
Certainty is Risky
So long as you’re bound up and hanging around for a while, come warm yourself by this fire and hear what I’ve learned.
The dark tunnel is not the enemy. If there is such a thing at all it is not confusion, but certainty.
Certainty is a fixed point. It is an inflexible state of mind. In other words, it is rigid, and rigid structures in nature are destined to collapse.
Even science knows this. Yes, that holy grail we’ve been clinging to in these pandemic years wants to be proven wrong (it’s the media that sells us the myth of absolutes).
Scientific Spirituality
The scientific method and spiritual quests share a lot — both begin with a question and lack a clear end. Yet we can’t lurk forever in the compost pile. So how can we know when we’ve made a breakthrough? We look for clarity.
Clarity is the aha that comes when we suddenly notice the sun has risen. It is the lightning flash of seeing the next stone in our path. It is the joy of realizing that the load on our backs is not ours, so we shake it off dancing. We gather as much clarity as we can, knowing that we can never see the whole picture.
But one last thing — it is foolish to stalk clarity or try to cage it up. Follow it instead, looking for its sharp glints amongst the path that is covered in bramble. Yes we may stumble in our search. Surely we will wish for the confusion to clear. And it will, as long as we can pause, listen, and wait for its guidance.
