EQUILIBRIUM

I had a visit last night from my godfather, my uncle Johnny. He lived a good long life, leaving us just last year and it’s the first time that he’s come in my dreams. It felt so real, this version of him at middle age, and he held something behind his back as he often would when I was little, asking me to guess what it was. He said it was one of my favourite things. We both laughed, I made a few guesses. And then he brought it out in front of him, a long well-worn brown rectangle held vertically. His level. A piece of my childhood. He showed me how to use it as if I were a child, reminding me that this is how you find level, how you find equilibrium. This is how you make sure things are built in a way that will make them strong and true.

Equilibrium. It’s one of my favourite words in the English language and perhaps what we all need right now. Our world is askew, to say the very least. 

When I was a little girl, my father and uncle spent a great deal of time building things, fixing things, a process which fascinated me. I loved to play with the tools in their toolboxes, the ones I was allowed to play with, that is. While I spent a great deal of time hammering straight nails into random pieces of left over lumber (not very successfully) my favourite tool to play with was this level. Uncle Johnny had an old-fashioned one made of heavy polished wood with metal fittings and a glass lens in the middle. The lens contained some sort of liquid, I still don’t know what it was, and there was a bubble. The point of the game – and it was a game to me – was to get the bubble into the middle of the lens both vertically and horizontally. Maybe you remember this tool, maybe you even played with one too. The current level that I use, the one on my phone, isn’t nearly as fun. This was really tricky and took patience. I would take scraps of wood and play, putting them in the sand and stacking them, aiming to get them level. The point of the game being to build as tall a tower as I could.

In our current times, life can feel like a game too. One with far more serious consequences than my pieces of wood in the sand. As a devoted meditator, sometimes I feel the need to meditate multiple times a day. To be honest, most days now that’s the case. My brain, like most people’s, isn’t able to comprehend the speed with which our world is changing, the lack of concern for basic humanity and decency, and the cruelty in evidence across the planet. And so, coming back to center has become a full-time job.

So has pivoting. The rules which I learned as a girl no longer apply. Perhaps they never really did but at least the facade allowed us to believe so. In order to deal with all of the uncertainties of today, I find myself constantly repositioning. Just as I did many years ago with that wooden level, I find I need to reposition the components of life over and over. The plans we all made are now looking very tenuous at best and so we take the pieces of our lives, hold them up to the sky and look for ways to adapt to the changing world around us. Life has become a series of plot twists, hasn’t it? 

I don’t think we’ll be able to put down our levels anytime soon. Perhaps this is life now, questioning everything that we ever knew, every law we ever followed, every story we ever learned. And I don’t know if that’s a bad thing necessarily, do you? 

Maybe we are building something new and this, as surreal as it seems, is how we find equilibrium. Maybe it’s how we create a new world. Maybe this is how we make things strong and true. 

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Beginning the 12th of April, I’ll be hosting an open circle called The Solace of Sovereignty twice a month. I hope you’ll join us as I channel about what’s to come, how we can remember our own sovereignty, creating hope for us all. You can learn more here.

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