These times feel like a familiar beautiful tune struggling to play – but with missing pieces, interruptions.
Turns out that’s what ‘syncopated’ means: all chopped up, leaving gaps (syn – together, plus kop – cut). This sense of something missing came to mean fainting, a loss of consciousness (syncope). The word drifted into language too, meaning contractions with the middle letters missing, and music, where notes seem to be missing. A syncopated string of notes can feel unreliable, unrestful.
We’ve known the music of Spring, sustained when life was more in tune with Nature’s familiar rhythms, as when and where and what to sow and reap (metaphorically and sometimes agriculturally). And now the soundtrack of our embodiment is changing: cultures hundreds or thousands of years old deconstruct in the information age, new generations grow up online, knowing their local world is not the only one, and all generations are left without access to consistent trustworthy wisdom. Thus, the old mythologies no longer hold, the old certainties of Nature no longer reassure. The known Earth itself is deconstructing, with melting ice and rising warming oceans, raging storms and swallowing floods, and catastrophic gargantuan fires. Worldwide economic, health, and societal crises blunt the seasonal sense of newness I’d come to know in the North – and for millions, have cut life off altogether.
And yet there are buds and bright-green new leaves on the plants and trees that remain, baby animals in the fields and forests. Interventions in the health and economic spheres are pulsing new hope into our shared activities. Cultures are showing signs of regenerating along more fruitful lines, individually and collectively.
Back and forth, up and down, daily headlines play a syncopated song full of gaps, notes in a melody of rebirth followed by a void, where all has been unmade.
This seems a little like the stages of certain meditation practices, the early exaltations of realizing the timeless light and beauty of the higher realms, alternating with the mandatory realization of finite mortal life, the temporariness of senses and sensations. These two – the purely joyful and the partly wistful – soon merge in awareness as two aspects of a single reality.
Living happily in the true universal chaos of the present moment, recognizing the infinite potential in the formless gap, can take a lot of practice. When the losses feel like nothingness rather than openings to reconceive, it’s especially worthwhile to include compassion in that practice – compassion for oneself and others who aren’t able to hear the subtler melody all the time. Compassion can fill the whole soul and bring it to self-awakening peace, can open the heart so that any action that emerges into the physical world is conceived with the most helpful energies.
Some softer thoughts about the transience of us all, the transience of the variegated parts of us, are in All Seasons, All the Time. Strategies for centering inside the mundane chaos are in Inner Q&A for Chaotic Times. A favorite all-purpose technique for allowing even the most challenging experiences to be transmuted into enhanced living is in Generating Quality Time.
May the subtle continuous song of the heart play within you and be heard in the world.
Photo Credit: Pixabay