Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible? Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly there’s nothing left outside us to see?  What, if not transformation, is your deepest purpose?

–Rainer Maria Rilke
From the Ninth Duino Elegy

(The following is written from the perspective of someone born at the beginning of the post war baby boom. I was born on the East Coast at a time when the urban/suburban middle class was burgeoning in the US, and I was in graduate school as the seventies began.)

When I was in my twenties, back in the seventies, the Human Potential Movement was foremost in my mind. The basic premise was that each person has a lot more potential of soul, talent, and achievement than heretofore realized. It was an invigorating time, as people my age opened themselves to new ways of being that helped us “break out of the box” of who we thought we were.

Humanistic psychology took us out of the “Freudian box.” We went to “encounter groups” where there was (generally speaking) a safe place to explore our deeper identities and repressed emotions. We spoke out against the (Viet Nam) war. We spoke up about civil rights. We worked on causes like voter registration in the South. We joined the Peace Corps and learned about other cultures that were often very different from the ones in which we had been raised. We lived in “communes.”  We returned from a war that left many of us in a state of shock, disillusionment and openness to change. We went to schools of “awakening,” where we learned about the “inner work” that loosens up our identification with the personal ego.

After that, roughly in the eighties, there was a period of being “hit by reality.” In the final scene of the Dustin Hoffman movie “The Graduate” (1967), where the two “escapees” sat in the back of the bus– one in a wedding gown– was an act of genius. It conveyed in a nutshell what happens after the sense of euphoria/freedom from the “box”  dissipates and “reality” sets in: what next?

Did we just revert to the confines the past?

It may have looked like we “copped out,” as we toned down in our thirties. But something was gestating– something that had matured underground. Something that is again rising to the surface.

Many people, of all ages, in all walks of life, and all over the world, are now realizing that it is true that human potential is indeed vast. Human potential is very individual while at the same time bringing us into a global community.  Science is aiding and abetting this, as more studies are performed upon the human DNA. Spirituality is  peaking again, with renewed opportunities to “wake up” and enter the Witness state– the state wherein we stand outside of our “small selves”  and see things from a much broader perspective.

The worst tribulations of humanity and all life on the surface of our Mother Earth are coming to our collective attention. At the same time, more and more people are experiencing that, indeed, we can be much, much more. They are experiencing the reality of the great teachings of all traditions in their own lives: that we are One and that we are capable of living in a state of expanded awareness, of presence, and, of love. That state includes and transcends all moments, including the weird, wild, wrenching, and wonderful moments of the seventies.

This morning I watched the chickadees flying from tree to tree cheerfully. I let that energy of cheerfulness soak into me.  Today as I pause to return to mindfulness, I intend to remember that chickadee cheerfulness and breathe it in to my entire body and being.

Pausing can be the baseline for mindfulness. Pause and watch the breath for three times when I remember. This is my task for today, as I work on strengthening my power to pause.

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It is easy to stay present as the observer of your mind when you are deeply rooted within your body. No matter what happens on the outside, nothing can shake you anymore.

Unless you stay present– and inhabiting your body is always an essential aspect of it– you will continue to be run by your mind. The script in your head that you learned a long time ago, the conditioning of your mind, will dictate your thinking and your behavior. You may be free of it for brief intervals, but rarely for long. This is especially true when something “goes wrong” or there is some loss or upset. Your conditioned reaction will then be involuntary, automatic, and predictable, fueled by one basic emotion that underlies the mind identified state of consciousness: fear.

— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

This book is about restoring the soul of the world. Bringing soul back to the world means perceiving the world through a deepened imagination, one that is capable of experiencing our intimacy with the surrounding world of finches and dragonflies, creeks and woodlands, neighborhoods and friends. Everything possesses soul. It is our myopia, our one-dimensional attention to only what is human, that leads us to see the world as object, something to be managed and controlled, manipulated and consumed. The earth is a revelation, offering itself to us daily, in an astonishing array of beauty and suffering. What is required of us is living with a level of openness and vulnerability to the joys and sorrows of the world. Taking in the beauty of the land as well as the great rips and tears in her skin requires a psyche attuned to the living world and one engaged in the ongoing conversation with all things. Soul returns to the world when we attend to the movements and rhythms of nature, when we nourish our friendships with time and attention and in our daily participation with repairing the world. How well we do that will determine the fate of our communities and planet.

— Terry Tempest Williams, Introduction to Entering the Healing Ground by Francis Weller

Grief is subversive, undermining the quiet agreement to behave and be in control of our emotions. It is an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and small. There is something feral about grief, something essentially outside the ordained and sanctioned behaviors of our culture. Because of that, grief is necessary to the vitality of the soul. Contrary to our fears, grief is suffused with life-force. It is riddled with energy, an acknowledgment of the erotic coupling with another soul, whether human, animal, plant or ecosystem. It is not a state of deadness or emotional flatness. Grief is alive, wild, untamed and cannot be domesticated. It resists the demands to remain passive and still. We move in jangled, unsettled and riotous ways when grief takes hold of us. It is truly an emotion that rises from soul.

– by Francis Weller,  Entering the Healing Ground

Traveling with Eusabio was like traveling with the landscape made human. He accepted chance and weather as the country did, with a sort of grave enjoyment. He talked little, ate little, slept anywhere, preserved a countenance open and warm, and like Jacinto he had unfailing good manners.

– Willa Cather, Death Comes to the Archbishop, 18

We may have forsaken the simple feminine wisdom of listening, and in this information age awash with so many words it is easy to undervalue an instinctual knowledge that comes from within. But the sacred principles of life have never been written down: they belong to the heartbeat, to the rhythm of the breath and the flow of blood. They are alive like the rain and the rivers, the waxing and the waning of the moon. If we learn to listen we will discover that life, the Great Mother, is speaking to us, telling us what we need to know. We are present at a time when the world is dying and waiting to be born, and all the words in our libraries and on the internet will not tell us what to do. But the sacred feminine can share with us her secrets, tell us how to be, how to midwife her rebirth. And because we are her children she can speak to each of us, if we have the humility to listen.

-Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
From The Return of the Feminine and the World Soul