What does it mean to be available to life? What is required of us to meet and be met by new opportunities, arising insights, and impending evolutions?
I’ve been reflecting on courage in its most natural expression. Having just passed the vernal equinox, nature is reflecting the audacity of new life to emerge, which appears to require only the availability for it, or the conditions that are conducive to life. The conditions, unsurprisingly, are a balancing act; a moving breathing response to the moving breathing world.
If you just read those words and started worrying that this response-ability is something that your mind is going to have to tackle, you can breathe easy. I assure you this is a problem of physicality, not of mental abstractions. Courage, after all, is anything but abstract.
You can begin to address your own availability by noting where are you out of balance in your unique relationship with your immediate spatial and temporal surroundings. Immediate as in right now! If you can feel what I mean, don’t even read the rest of this newsletter. Lift your bright eyes away from this screen and go out and live. Breathe the wild air. Burst through the top soil and sprout never-before-seen leaves. Let yourself be wounded by this life for gods’ sake.
podcast recommendation:
In this episode of the “On Being” podcast, Janine Benyus, a pioneer in the field of biomimicry, invites us to be in direct mentor/mentee relationship with nature. Instead of asking what something is or how it can be measured, we can ask directly: “How do you live here?” - now, and especially through change.
Benyus’s work is grounded in a slight oversight in the interpretation of the original version of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species” which doesn’t actually say - as we’ve fashioned an entire worldview around - “survival of the fittest.”
What Darwin wrote was “survival of the fit,” as in fit within the environment. Organisms survive when they co-create a place and the place co-creates them; when there is a mutually beneficial interdependence between organism and environment.
Survival of the fit suggests that when conditions change, as they do, we evolve in response, becoming more and more at home here.
featured animal of the lunar cycle:
quote of the lunar cycle:
As often as I return to the wisdom of nature - inner and outer - I am still prone to falling into the trap of believing my own opinions. Whenever I start to get too many ideas about how this all works, I return to the wisdom of astrophysicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, who dedicated his life to expanding the known limits of our universe. Here, he provides a simple and sincere explanation of how the universe works:
“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
mutual indebtedness
What is this evolutionary force that springs up from the earth, shoots plants out of seeds, and propels life onward? How do we live here - now, and especially through change?
Martin Prechtel, indigenous author and storyteller, gifts us with the Tzutujil Mayan word "kaslimaal," which means mutual indebtedness or mutual insparkedness. There is no such thing as a self-made person and no such thing as a person in general outside of their respective relationships. We couldn’t get out of debt if we tried. That would be annihilation.
Prechtel, speaking from within the framework of the Tzutujil Mayans, says, "We always want to be indebted to each other because that is how we know we belong to each other." Rather than trying to get out of debt, the Mayan way is to be in debt beautifully and full of reverence for the other.
Beyond the goal of independence is a more courageous one, waiting only to be acknowledged. This is not co-dependence or assimilation, rather it is the goal of the evolutionary force itself: to differentiate. We become ourselves through our relationships, from the prominent to rudimentary: relationships with people, with the more-than-human world, with time, with our bodies, with our hearts, with the dirt and the sky, with the spec of air right in front of your face.
We are in mutual indebtedness with this sparkling world. We are ourselves because of it. We are here for a very specific and highly unique living purpose. Courage is calling.
💚
Coach Laura
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