This Threshold
We find ourselves on “This Threshold.” The challenge is to cross worthily. Together, with courage and wisdom. We embrace change. Walk through the uncertain and the unknown. Care for one another, and dare to shape the future.
Two quick reminders before we get into it:
1. This really is the last reminder to register for BOOST Your Practice. Deadline is January 2nd. Some of your are already on fire. But if you are feeling a bit bogged down, here is a great piece on how to de-bog yourself. HINT: Starting the year with BOOST is definitely going to help!
2. Tuesday, my beloved, is inviting women to Open the New Year with the Divine Feminine. It is a beautiful, inspired introduction to the best of her work.
As much as we like to plan and project and imagine the future rolling out on planes of predictability and progress, life is marked by thresholds. We are thrust — sometimes by choice, but more often not —from a reality we believed we understood to a new planet we must learn to breathe in and traverse. The point with thresholds, John O’Donohue said, is how we cross them. The challenge — the question to live — is this: How to cross them worthily?
We find ourselves at a Threshold. We are rounding up the first quarter of the millennium. And things are looking kind of messy. Those of us in the United States are ever more aware of an upcoming inauguration that promises a new "order." The climate keeps changing. And the families of Gaza still have no respite from absolute devastation.
There is more. So much of what is hard is still unfolding.
I got the quote above from Krista Tippet. And I hesitate to borrow so much from her as I share this note with you. But the fact is she is saying something that feels perfectly aligned. This is the posture I’ve been trying to take as we turn towards this moment of uncertainty. The posture I’m inviting you into.
She goes on to reflect on the term “worthily.”
The challenge — the question to live — is this: How to cross [these Thresholds] worthily?
Which to me speaks of the path of wisdom that holds true through the millenia. It speaks of an ancestral understanding. The sensing that allows us to know the earth as alive and enchanted. Never free of struggle, death and suffering. Yet always teeming with life, spirit and meaning. This deep time is alive within our bodies, it vibrates within our cells. All it wants is our attention. To learn to sense is to know it.
I find the word "worthily" so rich. It is a calling in and of itself. It invites us to tend to the quality of our presence in these disorienting times. It beckons us to orient to the questions that have been a North Star for humanity all through the ages. The elemental, universal wonderings that our great spiritual traditions arose to address:
What does it mean to be human?
How do we want to live?
And who will we be to each other?
Culture, prayer, song, art, story, ritual, dance, fire, drum beat, drum beat, drum beat. All of it is our effort and our longing to try and answer these questions. And to have our descendants remember what we’ve learned. What is essential and most important, about how to be human, together, upon this Sacred Earth.
Tippet goes on to talk about changes in her programming, and even here we find gems of reorienting wisdom:
With accelerating velocity since the pandemic, the world has changed, and we have changed, and the reality of institutions has changed. What is required is metamorphosis… living more nimbly and responsively into [...] conversation and social healing that is the underlying calling of this work.
This is it. This is how we turn towards the world we are living into. It is how we are called to be in this age defined by VUCA. Volatility. Uncertainty. Complexity. And Ambiguity.
We can live in conflict with what is real. We get to be angry with the terms that have been set. We have the option of being resentful before what is unfolding.
Or we can tend to each other instead.
We can tend to each other’s growth. To each other’s metamorphosis. As we become dignified and capable ancestors in training. As we hone our scent for the narrow path of wisdom. And find the courage to take it.
This is how we find our way through what is already so.
Can we live these questions in our heart? Can we bring them into our communities? Into our intimate conversations? Not always as assertions. But as the humble inquiries of tiny humans who have always sought to find our way by gazing in awe at the stars.
What does it mean to be human?
How do we want to live?
And who will we be to each other?
A year is coming to an end. And a New Year is about to begin. The first quarter of the first century of the millennium. The world is burning. And there is fear. And there is grief. But there is also opening, and possibility, and remembering.
Here I turn to Alexander Beiner again:
For months I’d been wrestling with a feeling that, despite appearances, we are living in a time of renewed hope. [Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope] showed me I was touching on something that others were also noticing, and helped me disentangle my thinking. Specifically, by separating hope from optimism. Han sees optimism (and pessimism) as fixed and stagnant: both contain a rigid idea of the future and are based in a kind of fantasising. But hope is different. It is rooted in reality, and grows out of despair and difficulty. It directs us to a future we can’t yet see, drawing us toward unexplored potential.
Novelty, hope and impact. It struck me that a combination of these forces is essential in helping us traverse the metacrisis and craft beautiful futures. Unifying them can help us find the agency and imagination we need to create a new counter-culture. Not by hiding from reality, but by fearlessly embracing it. They draw us forward, turning our heads to a future we can’t yet touch, but know in our bones is possible.
We are in this initiation together.
Let’s stay together.
Acceptance. Courage and Wisdom.
As life thrusts us through This Threshold.