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wanted: the miraculous

lately i have been feeling like I owe the world, and myself, some explanation. my attention and passion is leaping all over the place. i keep wanting to wander in spite of all the to-dos i have which want to pin me to one place…

i end up in places like this:

those who know me well know that I am extremely easily bored with ‘the mundane’ and that most things default into mundacity unless I can see that they are miraculous. then I am totally into them, present with it, til the next miraculous thing comes along.

at any given moment the world is utterly mundane, or utterly miraculous. since I have previously understood that perspective plays a major role in this, I have been known to blast some miraculous dust over a mundane moment, put on the other glasses through which i see the magic in the minuscule and daily.

I experience actual trepidation about the mundane

(mun·dane/?m?n?d?n/Adjective
1. Lacking interest or excitement; dull.
2. Of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one.)

don’t you?

i feel it like it is the nothingness spoken of in ‘never-ending story’, a world-ending darkness, a sameness that can swallow up life. I see potential mundane energy in all sorts of activities, including radical political work, cooking, science fiction, family time – things I love. there is an energy to it that makes me feel restless and weary in a massive cosmic way…

‘is this really worth the miraculous breath of my life?’

the trepidation and restlessness combine to make me rude when I ought to be kind, and unfocused when i have discreet tasks to accomplish.

but! the thinking I have been doing lately has been liberating me from that trepidation, leading me to take on work and projects and conversations and relationships I never would have considered, in ways I wouldn’t have been open to.

it’s deeper than I have experienced perspective shift to be…there is a sarcastic voice in my head which chimes in when I try to perspective shift…’no love, that’s a piece of shit and you’ll smell it when you step in it, even if you get it to look like a rose.’ (for a couple of years the voice has sounded like a raunchy Brit from one of china mieville’s books.)

this new thing feels more like a fundamental belief system, and it’s disrupting my work and relationships in a way that excites me. I am starting to believe in wholeness, not as a future concept, but a present one. I am starting to believe, after years of angst and anger and suffering that was both empathetic and experiential, that there is nothing wrong with the world. that in fact the world is miraculous:

mi·rac·u·lous/m??raky?l?s/Adjective
1. Occurring through divine or supernatural intervention.
2. Highly improbable and extraordinary and bringing very welcome consequences: “our miraculous escape”.

there are lots of things that are horrific, there are stories to carry, there are things that are unfair, violent, disgusting, unjustifiable. there is all of that, some of it close to my heart and some of it far.

but every single place I see suffering see days, I see better people, survivors, brilliant communities. i see and hear the rush as people tell the story of their suffering, once they learn to tell it. I see resilience within all of this suffering and oppression and experienced scarcity, transforming people from addictive individuality to sustainable communalism.

AMP, being a network for the miraculous, has a principle about this truth which i think i am just getting to fully grasp in a living way:

The most effective strategies for us are the ones that work in situations of scarce resources and intersecting systems of oppression because those solutions tend to be the most holistic and sustainable.

in that, I see miracles, lives worth living because there is righteous work to be done and resilience to be learned. the only spaces that still seem unwhole to me is places where people are ‘sleepwalking through their lives’ as someone told me my friend Tom Goldtooth said recently. that – being asleep in waking life – is a personal tragedy, perhaps a survival mechanism, and requires systemic work, work that awakens, restores curiosity and life force without forcing a direction for people.

where ‘power to the people’ has been the connecting thread of my work for a long time, it is shifting now to this waking up, ‘waking up the sleeping people’. the world is whole, wake and be in it.

wake up to the natural world which is constantly communicating,
wake up to those who love you, and see how love waits to transform you,
let the pain of the labor instruct the process, let your baby enter the world undrugged if it’s possible,
eat food from the earth and feed it to your families,
trust the earth to heal from humans, while becoming the kind of human that deserves such a magnificent home,
trust our spirits to liberate everything we create…child, machine, self-myth…

my life is feeling simpler in a way that is not mundane…I am saying yes to things, admitting what I don’t know in order to create space for learning, being less accountable in the ways i have been (around time and tasks) but more present in the ways i have longed for and been longed for.

also, I am a miracle maker these days, because that is all I want to see and it’s everywhere, and there are other miracle makers too, everywhere. i have stopped orchestrating everything (or attempting to and feeling foiled by the way everything/it seems to go everything/it’s own way) and stepped into the larger space of emergent co-creation of each moment. only in each moment can i see the next miraculous step.

the mundane (or more accurately, mine, because my mundane is my own) is now at the edges of my life, guiding me by repelling me in ways i can hear loud and clear. daily, I am less concerned with minutiae and rules and expectations, and more present to what is calling itself into the world, to add itself to the wholeness, or perhaps shift it’s position in the wholeness.

I’m just beginning to articulate all of this, pardon any clumsiness.

I know that when I meet someone new these days, I want to listen to what they are most interested in and/or proud of, or maybe just look at them, reading the messages in how they present themselves to the world. if I share, it’s either about amazing miraculous stuff people I know are doing, or something brilliant I am learning about, or connecting through a story of the fires of my life. I can’t remember mundane parts of my life, perhaps I am letting them go. I don’t have mundane visions of the future…I want to just keep transforming and learning and seeing the world with curiosity and laughter and resilience every day – even (especially) the hardest days.

as I learn to say all this in more polished ways perhaps I will sway more people to see and create miraculous living. but then again, it seems like the sort of thing to come to through your own experiences, because it isn’t a temporary shift of seeing things. as I keep saying lately, it’s tectonic, it’s from within a cocoon, it’s opening up my heart like an energetic philosophical experiential cervix and pushing out this massive new foundation from which to see the world.

more than anything it intrigues me, pulling me from this moment to the next, notebook in hand.