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
True spirituality is about self-surrender, about bringing our wills into alignment with the will of God. Not about the cessation of pain. Throughout history there have been many cases of people finding God while under lock and key. My own experience in jail confirms for me that something does happen when our souls hit rock bottom, when we are trapped in prisons that are sometimes of our own making and not always constructed of iron and steel. Life can sometimes feel like a cage from which there is no escape...Yet, beyond the crucible of spiritual darkness is the light of inner redemption. If we believe that a descent into the abyss can ultimately make us stronger, we will outlive the nightmare. The challenge is to brave our dark nights and wait for the dawn.