0

Practices For A Darkening Time: Some noble saints meet in a coLAB…

It’s darkening times for many of us, what with news of wars and images of trauma from Gaza/Lebanon, Ukraine and Sudan alongside word of a multilateral flailing at COP climate negotiations, Azerbaijan, an authoritarian petrostate.  All this intersects with too little connection to local community alongside personal anxiety that makes us feel vulberable. The darkening, therefore, feels both literal and figural. Such was the case in our October developmental friends check in a space in which a dozen or so meet monthly to reweave inquiry and action.

October may be a particularly good time to notice how the human capacity for extractive, predatory behavior has flourished for over 500 years. It was in October 1492 that Columbus first interacted with Native Americans. Columbus Day had long been a national celebration of discovery in the USA. Some have renamed it ‘Invasion Day’ to remember also the Indigenous peoples suppressed/killed. October, a time of harvest, is increasingly a reckoning with the disappearance of ecological ways of living all over the globe. How many more harvests can we extract from our depleted topsoil? And we may notice that what has been suppressed is now back with a vengeance. It is an obvious fact that we are part of nature and not in charge of it. 

It was my turn to guide the November session.

November starts just over the threshold of Halloween which bridges to All Saints Day (Day of the Dead). Guiding any session is an invitation to locate personal courage – one’s developmental edge – within the shared ‘brave protainer.’ I therefore invited us to explore our practice of being noble saints.  The term Noble Saints naturally provokes a raised eyebrow and a little laughter. We are all used to the idea of nobility as an unearned generational entitlement. But in its more democratic form nobility invites the evolutionary spirit of goodness that is living (and also dying) within and around us. With a term like sainthood I knew my edge would have something to do with including explicitly spiritual practices, reimagined as inclusive-democratic and ecologically attuned forms that might open up new pathways to skillful action.

Despite (or perhaps because of) years of formal philosophy and theology training I am uneasy with a purely intellectual definition of spirituality. Certainly, at its heart, spirituality has to do with acknowledging a sense of connectedness to something bigger than ourselves. However the term points, I’d say more importantly in all traditions, to an embodied and collective interdependence. Spiritual practice helps you feel and then know that you belong. Hence regularity of practice helps us find – or more often re-find – a felt faith in the basic goodness of life. Classic practices are prayer, meditation, reading (lectio divinia) and altar making are common the world over. How then to find a secular thread? What practices help us feel belonging to the world without overriding the simultaneous truth that life is hard and that political and ecological vectors feel to be moving in the wrong direction.

The coLAB structure encourages intersessions which are essentially a time to have zoom coffee with a fellow participant.  I got to meet with Kristen Goessling (Kristen’s recent paper about her work with youth activists was recently published at ARJ) who helped me clarify the bridge between spiritual practices and eco-spiritual anxiety.

Taking up the baton.

My interest in spiritual practices is to find embodied bridges that might deepen the connection between what feels personal and is also systemic.  The ongoing inquiry of the coLAB concerns how to be the transformation we need for the world. Generally, we’re asking: how are we to move from the extractive ways of living with one another and with nature? If we have inherited these extractive practices over millennia, how might we learn and practice relating in ways that promote partnering and co-creativity? As well-meaning as we may each be personally, we are also part of a social escalation of extractive dynamics worldwide that has many ugly manifestations, e.g., ecocidal tendency, religious and ethnic persecution, anti-refugee dynamics, racism, misogyny, anti Gay+ … the list goes on. Amidst these troubling events, how do we each ground ourselves and move toward transformation – personal, relational, ecological – anyway? 

Sharing spiritual practices.

To help participants play along with the invitation to noble sainthood, I made an audio-track to share as a pre-session practice. I recorded it to coincide with the full moon, known as the Beaver moon. What a role model. Beaver is nature’s great engineer who builds lodges above the water line.  In reading a bit about lodges I was intrigued to learn that Beaver dives through the water to ascend into the lodge. Symbolically this felt like moving though the floods of personal and impersonal chaos to establish inner resilience that can be shared. Interesting Beaver doesn’t just make a lodge and be done with it, the work is never ending.

Audio pre-recording.

I sent the full-moon recording – a 15 mins Meditation/prayer and altar building practice – in advance both as an optional taster and a potential inspiration bits of which might be included in a fuller practice. Most minutes were a meditation that I find useful for finding center. (I’m happy to share it, background sounds and all). The invitation is to take time to digest our lives and move toward being present both to ourselves and our larger lives around us. And because we work with others it’s good to keep our wits about us by noticing what hooks and contracts our attention. The meditation, therefore, involves digesting whatever challenges pull at our sleeve on any particular day. I find it effective to take quiet time and sit in a posture both relaxed and alert. Then floating attention freely I see whatever recent (sometimes recurrent) challenge demands attention. My own recent examples include… the partner who upset me, the person I hurt, the neighbor who scared me witless when they almost fell off the roof…!  In this “floating” attention each hook comes to be slowly dissolved. Big challenges, of course, take a long time to absorb. Overall, and slowly, we’re making space within our own protainer. This space-making is preventative and best to practice when life is not too difficult, when we are privileged enough to create some space in our day.

I ended with a prayer dedicated to Noble Saints in general. Given the relative taboo over sharing sacred language in modernist society,  I encourage replacement words that may feel more suitable.  Aided perhaps by lighting a candle on an altar and saying:

Great Sacred Mystery

Great Sacred Mystery, help me recognize and realize the beauty within and around

Shine your light also on my unfolding as your do on the trees, the rabbits, the grass, the waves, the clouds.

Heal the disabling wounds those anxieties that block a peaceful heart

Restore me to trusting more fully the basic goodness of life

Let me know again my full belonging in this trustworthy world,

For all this I offer my thanks.

 

Practices mentioned by participants:

In session we started with settling into a shared protainer – so each may step to their own edge.  The check in question was simple: How is living in this darkening time for you? What is dying? What wants to live? Freek Sanders, a coLAB participant and AR+ poet laureate captured the check in:

 

A need for light

“We are beings.

Being nature, being our microbiome, being in this world.

We ask ourselves

What is dying? What wants to live?

What wants to move

out of the darkness into the light?

What portal do you need to go through to come out on the other side?

 

A beaver floats and swims,

Out of water, mud, trees he constructs

his house

his submerged dome

his castle, his place to hide.

 

And with the waves of water, the seasons

ebb and flow.

Energy spirals,

and when asked

How is living in this darkening time for you?

a silence unfolds.

We listen to our inner murmurations,

Feeling awakening and expansive.

A darkness that enables

to feel what lurks below the surface.

Time horizons shorten.

And nothing, nothing can be taken for granted.

Retreating to safety.

Feelings of numbness convert into a sense of hopelessness,

When someone propagated, We are in collapse!

 

So, we wonder.

How to navigate our inner storms,

being in uncharted territory,

feeling tired of the past times,

when a puzzled look from a self-portrait

stares and inquires:

What is my role in this loss?

What does loss mean?

A mixedupness stirs its head,

Echidna, Centaur, Avatea, Glaistig

or even Ammit.

Houses smashed by mud,

crushing into a wooz

 

And when essential hormones are

no longer attainable

– upsetting internal balance-

a sheep skin keeps me warm.

 

Naivety seems to be dying, new life emerges,

unsure but certain.

Looking into the past to help find strength

to navigate the future;

I lay down

and breath

consciousness flows

back and forth

from ribs to the front of the pelvis.

 

And as we look into the deep waters of mystic rivers,

we hear the mountains whisper

that good times might be coming.

An epoch of 500 years comes to an end.

Opening new doors

new ways of being.

We can ask for help.

And by practicing togetherness

we nurture life.”

 

Sharing a variety of inspiring spiritual practices.

Our time together completed with each of us sharing a few details of practices we’re inspired by…

1. Meditation and Prayer
2. Self-Portraiture – one’s own vision of self
3. Releasing the linear narrative of progress AKA shedding ego
4. Deepening gratitude practice
5. 5-minute journalling/revisiting earlier journals
6. Developmental yoga movement
7. Running
8. Walking with courage e.g., on the exposed parts of the pier
9. Tarot cards
10. Alchemical Christmas shopping; less is more.
11. Going to places I have not gone
12. Altar creation

Practice is important.

Practices help us establish steps through which (new) insight may transform into creative action.  Practices, therefore, allow us to take first steps which – because we are embodied and not just brains on sticks – further help us move to Skillful Action.  It is best to feel supported by one another in developmental friendship.  My own hope  – and invitation – is that our participant group may develop these issues further in writing together. In that way we can strengthen the linkages among the various sessions, recalling that this coLAB iteration started back in April with Alex who wrote on Being as Nature: Being as developmental friends.

• Hilary Bradbury, curator AR+ Foundation.

 

.