Hi Friend,

Recently - when was it? time, which I always find mysterious, seems sloppier than usual at the moment, with days sliding into weeks so fast I can't keep track and then moments that blaze with brightness, lasting for quite some time… a friend texted me about the horror of the US/Israeli strikes on Iran.  This, he said, has set peace back by decades.

I blinked. At that moment, I had not seen the news about the latest war. 

 I had been more focused on the impact of the US Administration's gutting of the Clean Water Act by getting rid of local communities and states' rights to veto major projects. One result is that big companies are resubmitting projects previously vetoed, including the re-submission of plans to build a 30 inch fracked gas "Constitution Pipeline" (where do they come up with these names???) that would run from Pennsylvania through New York, destroying over 700,000 trees, 95 acres of wetlands and disturbing 289 bodies of water (including many protected cold water trout streams)... to feed energy-and-water-hungry data centers. New York State vetoed this proposal in 2016. But now that veto - that voice - holds significantly less sway. And so the big companies are trying again. I'm sure someone's in line to make a huge "profit" - but it will be at the cost of the fish, soil, water, or everyday people who live here. (If you want to get involved, our friends at the Waterfall Unity Alliance are amongst many groups resisting this.)

My friend and I both know that both things - the pipeline and the war - are super connected. And in that moment …. in that moment, I had a hard time connecting to the outbreak of war on the other side of the world. I felt it later. In the moment, I mostly felt the overwhelm; I felt numb. 

Yeah. It's a lot.

Sometimes, staying focused on the everyday forms of connection like running a small business where kindness and innovation flow through it, collaborating on super cool initiatives, stubbornly continuing to be creative and generative, feels like its own kind of resistance. 

There are many ways to lean into interconnection.

Amongst other equinox activities, I co-hosted a fire circle for the new moon/spring equinox this week, and I asked folks what they associate with Equinox.

Responses varied from noting this is maple-tapping season and watching the birds (and humans) get excited about the sap flowing in the trees to thinking about balance (always a classic equinox theme, for obvious reasons), was that while we often think of spring equinox as full of soft pastels, spring itself is actually a time of huge movement. One friend shared how the thick ice on one of our local lakes has been breaking, and as it does so, it makes great big cracking noises. There's the rush of muddy water in our great big River That Runs Both Ways (the Hudson River). The water is fast and cold and full of power. It is as if the elements themselves are conversing loudly with one another, long before the pretty flowers fully bloom (at least here in the Hudson Valley).

Life is insistent: it will continue.

I need those reminders. Always. And especially in times of overwhelm. I need to re-ground myself in the cycles of the seasons, even as they are (also) wacky with climate change. I need fires and stories and songs and simple, face-to-face connection. It helps me rebalance. To orient myself. Right: there’s something ancient and true that I’m connected to, not because of my actions or my thoughts, but because that connection is just the nature of our existence.  

I’ve always experienced that connection, and I have a lifetime of stories and experiences and generations of myths to support it and that keep reminding me that I’m not alone; that I both can call forth the circle (around a fire, on a zoom call, whilst sitting amongst the trees and strawberry plants in my backyard) and also lean into the circle. 

I could frame this as, I keep cultivating a story of connection- for myself and for others. That’s true…. But there are some stories, some art, that’s not just a verbal/written  narrative.  It’s about how we live our lives. The embodied mytho-dynamics of moving with the muddy magic and the magic of mud.

We could call these stories of connection that help us re-center amidst overwhelm ‘tools’, tho some part of me is hesitant to put them into such a utilitarian category, as if their usefulness is their only purpose. We dance to dance; we sing to the sunrise and share stories for the thing itself. And it feels good, too. 

Within these wider stories of living and being dwell 

Origin stories.  They are part of how we humans orient ourselves. And reorient. 

What do you come back to to orient yourself? How people answer that question determines how they respond to dis-orientation.

There’s a lot of disorientation right now.

People/leaders renarrate histories, including origin stories, in times of great change because origin stories tell people who they are and whom they can become.

When faced with overwhelm, people often go into some kind of freeze/numbing or flight (which can look like overwork, fyi). They want/need simple narratives to break through the sense of overcrowdedness.

There are some helpful complexity science understandings of this: when faced with too much chaos (where people struggle a great deal), people can swing into simplicity, even though the ideal space is complexity: some order but also a lot of room for nuance and emergence.

There are many forms of simple stories, and a lot of them have an overly simplified cause-and-solution combined with a string of "us vs them’. Such as: the problems ‘we’ are facing are from immigrants, and if we just get rid of ‘them’ then we are going to be ok. 

I like talking about these things? because I like looking for the deep logic, the logos*, underneath things. I like finding patterns. Hence, one of our taglines: connecting the disconnected. 

But the best way for me to teach it is through doing it with you. Having you work on some kind of origin story that matters to you.

Hence the course: origin stories for inter-being. Which includes actively engaging with ancestors.

Which is starting in a few weeks. Thursday nights. Registration is open.

May you find balance, reconnection, and beauty.

- Sara Jolena

PS - *Last Sunday I gave a sermon on the Way of Living Water (working with the gospel of John and notions of logos).  People really liked it. If you are interested, you can hear the recording here. The recording is of the whole service- my part is about 30 mins long, starting at 15 mins in.