Whenever they can, my sons nudge my book choices towards science fiction. The first sci-fi book they gave me was Dune. This book hit it out of the park for me. I mean, does anyone not love Dune after the first fifty confusing pages? That was what they both warned me, that the first fifty pages were not that great but to keep going. I am so glad I did.
When the movie came out I became a big fan of Denis Villenueve. To wrestle that complicated plot and world into a coherent movie? It astounded me. I watched the film several times, each time startled by all the details he had slipped in. One moment I appreciated is the scene in the helicopter when Paul has a vision of a teacher from a possible future helping him in that nerve wracking dust storm. The teacher says, “The mystery of life isn’t a problem to be solved but a reality to experience, a process that cannot be understood by stopping it. We must move with the flow of the process. We must join it. We must flow with it.”
In New Hampshire, January is a time of not much apparent flow. The earth is locked in ice, a bitter wind whips down from the arctic and nights are relentlessly chilly. Yesterday on my brisk walk down our hedgerow, it was so cold that Sheba sat up like a rabbit holding out her paws to let me know it was just too cold for her. I couldn’t think when she had bailed on a walk. If anyone uses that word “walk” in conversation, she is at the door ready to go. Not yesterday though. Yesterday things felt locked down even for Sheba.
Yet in the night as I considered this, I thought about all the flow that does happen in January. Seed orders are sent and received. Garden designs get scratched out on paper. Projects for the coming season are tossed about. I hear whispers of new energies coming and the garden mandalas that will contain them. All this reminds me that sometimes flow is a quieter thing, an internal thing.
What have we all learned in the last two years of contraction and diminished surface flow? What will be born from this time? What inner flow will now spring into outward expression?
Have you noticed how many people found new talents and interests during this time? I think we are only just beginning to find out what actually flowed during the last two years of contraction. Why even the winner of the British Bake Off shared that he learned to bake during lockdown.
I’ve hardly seen anyone in what feels like forever, yet I’ve still heard many stories of people finding new ways to express themselves during this time. A friend I was texting with this morning mentioned she was just finishing the edits on a book. Holy cow! I hadn’t realized she was even writing a book let alone just wrapping it up for a publisher! She, like so many, found flow beneath the frozen circumstances. And it wasn’t as if her life was a piece of cake during lockdown. She found flow while her husband was very ill and she was cut off, like the rest of us, from friends and family. For all of us, whatever is born has not been born without pain and suffering. I doubt anyone went through this time without some experiences of loss, grief or isolation.
As we help each other heal the wounds of this time, listening to each other’s stories and sharing from the heart, I feel we will listen with more curiosity and less judgement. Yes, the media makes us believe that judgment is our main activity and repeats that party line as the one and only story. Yet for me, whenever I have been lucky enough to talk to anyone during this time be it a grocery store clerk, a man delivering a load of firewood, the GHF staff goddesses or the librarians holding the fort at our town library, I have found open hearted sharing. I don’t really care so much about dividing us all into categories after all this and I certainly don’t experience others as caring either. It’s like we know in the actual moment of connection that any kind of sharing is what we need to heal. My belief is that even as we were slowed down or even stopped in external action during this time, the inner flow of love and creativity has risen in counterbalance.
I look forward to all that will come to light now. I look forward to reconnecting and discovering what unique creations were born within each of us. I look forward to see all the love alive and well and ready to blossom in each heart.
Yes, January can seem like a promise of eternal lockdown for all of us. But seeds promise a different story of new beginnings, new life, spring. And the seeds of love in our hearts have already begun to geminate.