Dear friends ~ “This isn't the world I want to live in." The thought echoes in my mind as I close the news app, the messaging app, the email app. My lungs wrestle down a gasp of humid Appalachia air in response to the endless feed of Apocalypse I just conjured with thumb swipes across a screen.
No, not Apocalypse. They are, in fact, creation stories. What else to call it when a group of people assesses the world and says, “We want it to look different than this," and then imagines a new paradigm into existence? From idea...to fruition. Creation.
I'm reminded of a scene in the musical Hadestown. A crowd of revelers, relieved that Persephone has emerged from the underground after a far-too long winter, begs a modernized version of Orpheus for a toast. He is a poet, after all — his very words potent enough to change the hearts of humans and gods. Everything goes silent. Then shy Orpheus gazes into the audience, inviting the entire theater into his benediction: “To the world we dream about... and the one we live in now."
The world we live in now crumbles and rebuilds endlessly. Each new day is a question: What kind of world do we want? And each motion, conversation, or choice we make answers that question tactilely. If the human imagination invented scarcity, extraction, and the silencing of voices, what's to stop us from imagining a paradigm where none of those things have sway?
Last summer, during July's heatwave and drought, a voice began to tell me a story about how God dreamed rest, companionship, and nature's balance into being. That creation story came to me as a gift (one I'm sharing with you here) with an empowering message: it could be different than this. May we all have the courage to imagine new possibilities. ~ Joy
Rain ... for the eighth straight day ... rain. She was beginning to find the enforced confinement more bitter than sweet. Freedom of movement was as dear to her as freedom of thought, even though both were often misunderstood by others. The rain limited her general habit of walking daily -- hikes that cleared her mind to receive guidance and centered her for authentic living. Rain ... it also cleansed memories and scars of past mistakes.
He came home to a testy woman -- wife in his perception, companion in her dreams. His had been a lean day of purpose, distractions met with sighs of unacknowledged anger. They met at the door with a perfunctory kiss and he began to grumble recitals of a misspent day. She felt constrained and controlled by an unspoken inner fear of screaming ... STOP! Let's not talk, but simply listen to the rain.
And he, being sensitive to her psyche, felt the contained rejection and talked -- frenetically spewing words toward an unreceptive ear. She heard him not; she had tuned into a void to avoid an unrelated sharing.
Out of the rain came rumblings of thunder. The storm approached rapidly and with uncontrolled savagery. The light dimmed ... then went out as the next crash followed the flash of lightning too close to ignore. He took her hand and led her to the sofa, as much for his comfort as hers. They sat without speaking and listened to the storm raging outwardly, that storm which each had felt within. As the storm abated -- seeming to have spent itself in calamitous outburst -- the subdued pair continued in a silence that radiated an envelope of peace. They were still sitting when the light came back on.
She was the first to speak. From that deep place touched in the Silence, she said simply and quietly, "Yes ... shall we take a walk before we eat?"
He assented with a kiss and a smile which conveyed more than a plethora of words.