Tethering to a Higher Wisdom
As the summer wanes — hot and besieged with heavy news — and I begin planning my fall events (including a first-ever practitioner cohort), I’ve been pondering the question: How does a person stay awake and steady as the world reels with crises of all kinds?
A helpful Hassidic story came to mind.
It was the end of a long winter, the ground both muddy and slick with ice. Robust and sure footed, nevertheless, Rabbi Meir of Premishlan, (1783–1850) trekked down a treacherous slope to the spot in the river where he and his Hasidim would do their sacred immersion (mikveh). Slipping and falling themselves, the students were amazed that their teacher did not falter.
“Rebbe! How do you keep from slipping?” they asked.
As Reb Meir helped them up, he said, “Before you start out, you must tether yourself. When one is connected up above, one does not fall down below.”
May I say that my devotion to Mother Earth is axiomatic. She is for me a sacred webwork of mind-blowing intricacy, pulsing with life, from mycelium to the interlacing root systems of entire forests.
But lately, lifting my gaze to the vast intelligence of the cosmos beyond Earth has given me another kind of tether. The astonishing photos broadcast from NASA this month were a reminder of the limitless wonder above and beyond us—a Divine Intelligence that plays in intergalactic fields, generating billions of stars in a timeless ocean, cooking up life and more life.
Consider the fact that this Divine Trickster hung our earthly planet precisely 93 million miles from the sun, just the right distance to set life in motion, for us and millions of species. (At 94 million miles away, we would freeze; at 92 million miles, we would burn up.)
That thought tethers me. It connects me to a gigantic Creative Power who winks and says: Get it? I want you here!
Sadly, we are flubbing our end of the equation, in ever tragic ways.The brilliant cosmic experiment of life on Planet Earth has turned muddy.
It helps to tether ourselves to the Vast Intel who insists on our waking up. It helps to look up, lift up, connect up to the wild mystery out there and in here—to expand, pray, ask, cry, and even fake some divine intelligence, to act like a Creator and declare: Let there be light!
Each of us has the challenge of living into this season of extreme slides, by tethering ourselves to a higher star and offering our own unique brilliance to this benighted world.