A Practice of Being in Service to Life
An account of living, learning and coming to terms with climate breakdown.
What happens when we feel at the edge? When the world seems to be spiralling into chaos? I feel like living in these times is a reckoning with everything we have suppressed individually and collectively. It is a reckoning where there isn’t the luxury or privilege to look away anymore. Instead we are learning to sit in the dancing flames of the fire with each other as the world morphs and transforms around us.
This has been the undercurrent of the journey I have found myself on since March 2019, a deeply spiritual process that has asked: What is like to lean in to both the pain and the beauty simultaneously? To hold the complexity, nuance and multitudes of this time. (I feel like that might be a whole other blog in itself!) Since this journey began I have fallen through many layers of grief around climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse. What that means, the many many many lives, both human and other-than-human, that are falling through the cracks as our world heats and we can barely draw ourselves away from a screen.
And then the new layers that arise through seeing half the world literally on fire, corrupt and inept governments, a pandemic, the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and everything that must be acknowledged regarding the harm and violence of white supremacy and colonialism. It feels that part of living in this moment is falling through the layers but having the courage to not be swallowed completely by despair. It is to be cracked open through grief and love in order to be more connected to life and in service to transformation.
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In September 2019 I started hosting a six month learning marathon with Enrol Yourself, where I also participated in the journey and experience. The learning marathon is disguised as a learning accelerator but the reality is this was a personal and deeply transformative process that has given me precious experiences and friendships that have changed me and influenced the pathway towards learning to adapt and build resilience in the face of so many uncertainties.
I started the journey with a question:
How can I weave together the different threads of my life into a practice of being that is in service to life?
I look back on the beginning of that process and am fascinated by my choice of question, my desire to weave everything in my life into something complete or ‘whole’, the obsessive desire for control in the face of emergence and complexity. The deeper that question went the more threads I found, the more possibilities, the more chaotic (and fertile) the garden of my question became. I found the teaching of adrienne maree brown and Emergent Strategy to help deepen my ability to hold complexity and this emergent process.
I soon learned, through the many mirrors of my peer learning group, that the root of the question was not about gathering and weaving threads into something coherent, but actually about how to practice being in service to life, the life I am living, the lives of those around me and the life of all animate beings on this planet: the trees, plants, insects, birds, mammals, fish, the rivers, forests, mycelium, mountains, clouds.
Something clicked in one of our sessions where I understood that part of my process of ‘creating a practice of being’ was discovering how my capacity for learning is part of ‘being in service to life’ and using that capacity for learning to fulfil my potential.
I don’t mean potential in terms of how successful I could become or how much money I could make, this is part of capitalism and the perpetual growth that we have to surrender. It’s more about getting to the root of the matter and listening to what it is that is unique to me and my experience of being alive that can contribute to the world and the changes that are here and coming.
This is a time for each of us to listen attentively to understand and feel what those gifts might be. It might be as simple as acknowledging our capacity for deep listening and empathy and how we help others feel heard, it might be that we model new forms of leadership wherever and however we work, but that this leadership affects and changes those around us, when we bring forth these gifts they ripple out around us.
These gifts are unique to each of us, like our soul purpose, and through bringing those gifts forth to our village, community and relationships, even the places we work in, we can find pathways of purpose that feed and nourish us individually and collectively, and also might be part of our survival in the process. I don’t believe this is an easy or simple path, but an imperative pilgrimage we all must undertake.
It’s like we’ve got to imagine that each of us has something precious, beyond the value of money that wants to emerge. I think about the village at the end of the world, what that village might look like and what it would need. It would need people who can make and build shelter and homes, those who can bring people together in ritual for healing, celebration and loss, those who create art and beauty, those who have the skills to make or fix things the community needs. Those who understand the world through the lens of science and those who understand the world through the felt and lived experience. Those who have found ways to organise through observing nature, those who know the land and how to grow food. People who know medicine in all it’s forms, those that model sacred leadership, those that support the youth and mentoring a new generation. Within this village everyone has a gift to bring forth that contributes to the wholeness and wellbeing of the community.
So I guess this is where my question has brought me, to wonder on how to create the world of my longing where our gifts are called upon in service to everything we love. Learning how to be with this curiosity by creating the world of my longing, through living it now.
What has emerged is a fascination and focus on cyclical wisdom, fractals and nature patterning as part of this longing, with an emphasis on slowing down in the face of our high speed, high intensity, fast paced, automated culture. This urgency is a symptom of white supremacy, of colonialism, of capitalism and this slowing down and listening is resistance against everything that destroys the natural world, everything that brings us further and further away from intimate connection with the living world. In that slowing down we might witness and appreciate what is around us before it disappears.
My longing is to slow us down enough so we can feel how the earth shifts, moves and dances with us, to see that the personal is political in how we dismantle the systems of oppression that are killing us and this earth.
This slowing down to touch the experience of deep time, geological time, the ancient and volatile cycles of our planet that created what we see today. So that we can embody the seasons we witness in nature, and learn how they exist within us through our moods, feelings or needs. That it’s not a coincidence that in the northern hemisphere during winter we might want to hibernate and in summer we are looking for an adventure. We are informed by millions of years of evolution in relationship to these huge cycles.
So this is the basis of Regenerating Rhythms the fertile soil of living the world of my longing, an emergent methodology that has been influenced by a mycelium of practices and experiences. A prayer that is me learning to bring my gifts forth in service of everything I love, a prayer of learning how sacred leadership looks and feels through the incredible people I have in my life. It is a lifelong learning towards how we might create resilience and deep adaptation in the face of the huge challenges that humanity will face in the years to come, how we access our gifts, creativity, even our joy and pleasure as part of bending with the winds and tides of our world.
Alana is an artist, facilitator, performer, ritualist and activist committed to expressing life to its fullest capacity through creativity and facilitation, exploring the intersections of learning, community, creativity, environmentalism and social change.
