You’ve probably heard some version of it before. It crops up like an overnight mushroom, whenever an event like Charlottesville or Brexit or Charlie Hebdo or Syria or Iraq or Rwanda or 9/11 or-or-or shakes us loose from our torpor and shrieks for attention, for a reaction. You can fill in your choice of event, from a whole ungainly series of them over the last year, decade, or lifetime.
We could quite accurately call the reaction the “20-40 rule”, courtesy of one of its literary expressions from some 80 years ago, in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. The two speakers here are Chang, an inhabitant of the famed valley of Shangri-La, and Conway, the main character:
“We keep ourselves fairly up to date, you see”, he [Chang] commented.
“There are people who would hardly agree with you”, said Conway with a smile. “Quite a lot of things have happened in the world since last year, you know”.
“Nothing of importance, my dear sir, that could not have been foreseen in 1920, or that will not be better understood in 1940”.
Now the argument here, a philosophical version of wait-and-see, has its obvious appeal as well as its downsides. In considerably less than a year, the political (or ecological or spiritual) landscape can shift dramatically. Irreversible change may swallow up — or end — lives. Wait for expanded understanding, however rich or apt, and it may simply arrive too late. Look solely at the long game, and I miss the immediate stakes.
But even knowing this, if you’re like many, you may start to experience “apocalypse fatigue”. You have little adrenalin or passion or initiative left in the tank. You’ve felt and you’ve empathized and you’ve resolved, and maybe you’ve also marched or written or witnessed or organized or simplified. Maybe you still do. Or maybe now you keep your head down and try to live your own life as best you can, because that’s all you feel you can do, as the world unquietly keeps crashing and burning. You brush off the ash and pick through the rubble — you stand up and do it again tomorrow. You endure.
For a thoughtful and balanced set of responses to crisis — not just one, and with Charlottesville simply the current face it wears — I suggest you read John Beckett’s 10 August ’17 post here. While we don’t always see things the same way, I value his hard-earned perspectives.
And when he observes, “My political posts weren’t well read, I didn’t particularly enjoy writing them, and every political post I wrote meant there was a religious, spiritual, or magical post that didn’t get written”, my experience echoes his. Long-time readers of this blog don’t come here for politics anyway.
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But here I want to look at an approach that I’ve found addresses the -cosms of the title, the keen needs of the moment as well as the more subtle draw of the long view, an approach that can serve the politically engaged and the quietly witnessing and the spiritually armed and ready, as well as the hermit sage. In a word, stamina. Fortitude, courage — though not quite the same thing. Staying power.
The approach sources, among other wells and fountains, the wisdom of the Galilean Master, who counseled prayer and fasting. And to make it a Druidic triad, we’ll add listening, because listening is another face it wears. Listening, prayer and fasting. LPF.
And that means listening to all of our -cosms, macro- and micro- and meso-, too — all our worlds, and the world “in between”, this middle earth where we spend so many of our daily hours. I’ve found if something’s shaking in one world, the others vibrate with it, too.
I’ll go personal from here forward, because that’s often how I think and talk best. If it’s true for me, it may — or may not — also work for you. But you’ll see it tried out with me first.
If I don’t fast from frequent tugs towards anger or fear, if I don’t re-connect with the innermost truths I know, I can’t pray (or act) effectively. I drag along the trash and flotsam and jetsam from others’ anger and fear. Don’t need ’em. Got enough of my own to let go of. This happened most recently in a job situation I won’t go into, because I’m still praying and fasting about it. Work-in-progress. Material for an upcoming post.
The danger of another’s anger and fear is I may not recognize them until I make them my own. I may confuse them with almost anything but a limitation. Unless I fast from their effects, listen to their seed-causes, and pray, I open the door to them. Now in addition to my own, I’ve invited in another’s fear and anger.
So if I’m not praying, I can’t fast or act with justice to myself or anyone else. And without praying, I can’t listen. Some of my prayer will be silence, a space where counsel from wise guides and teachers and ancestors and spirits has room to reach me.
Without this practice, whether I launch myself into a protest march at the statehouse in Montpelier, Vermont’s capital, or weed my garden and share with my neighbor a bundle of chard or a basket of carrots or — soon — potatoes, I’m missing my best path.
Because whether I link arms with another protester or cross my yard to my neighbor’s and listen to his life over the past few weeks, I’ll miss what I most need, and miss what I most have to give. The opportunity, the exchange, is often a seeming small one. But that’s why I need to listen or I miss it.
This has happened so many times to me, both the listening and also the missing-the-moment, that I’m actually beginning to learn it. (Like I’ve often said here, I can be really thick and slow about these things.)
The test, always, for me, is the quality of the encounter, the sense of rightness. This sense doesn’t exclude physical difficulty. Whether I’m about to go into surgery, or face an angry person waving a sign on the street corner, or talk with a friend, the words, the tone, the energy exchanged between us is my guide. How does it manifest? Can I watch the exchange without deep attachment to its outcome? Can I watch the — for lack of a better word — the ecology of the moment work its own energy?
I’ve acted, prepared, prayed and fasted and listened. Now comes the wonder, when I’ve gotten out of the way of Spirit manifesting in the situation. Or not.
For me, the listening IS the prayer and fasting. The fasting IS the prayer, and the prayer IS the fasting. One of the best Druid triads I know.
Pray and fast, and things go smoother for everyone, not just me, whatever I do. Miss the optimum alignment, and I discover that, too. This is my love laboratory, this world where we all are trying out our truths, where the test, in the end, is this: Does it build? Does it open? Does it give? Does it connect? Have I served?
And what forms of prayer might work? Material for the next post.
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A Druid Way 