Hurry Up, Its Go Time
“Don’t let your fear decide
That’s how you break inside”
A while ago I learned to stop judging, and start noticing. Its amazing what you can learn when you start noticing. These days I am noticing within me a deep sense of urgency.
I wonder if you feel it too?
This urgency is not the kind of stress panic that goes with a deadline, or an overdue presentation, or a looming assignment.
Its deeper than that. Its bone-deep for me; is hallmark signature is a kind of restlessness of spirit which has something to do with the collective experiences we are having as a planet these days, and something to do with the acceleration of a timeline I can sense.
It might be because my soul-sister is doing her PhD in Hebrew Bible with a focus on ecological crisis, and that the existential angst I feel after reading the things she sends me makes me feel hollow with grief and rage…
It might be because I can see how hard my kids’ teachers are working to make learning meaningful and rich for their students, and yet there is still something missing. Something to do with purpose, vision, and scaffolding the ontological shifts this next generation are making at lightening speed.
It might be because everywhere I go, people confess things to me. This has always been the case, but lately I’m noticing themes emerge. They confess that they are miserable, fed up, tired, lonely, overworked, undervalued, checked out of their key relationships, yearning for something deeper, something better. But they don’t know what it is, how to name it, or where to hunt for it.
This urgency that I’m noticing in myself, and in others, has some interesting side effects. I’m noticing that my tolerance for hoop jumping, line-toeing and making polite conversation is at an all-time low. I never had much patience for that kind of thing, but now its completely disappeared. The only topics of conversation which can hold my attention for longer than about three minutes are sex, power, spirituality, healing, ripping apart the school system, building new communities or listening to real stuff that is happening for people. The brilliant thing is, because of the work I do, I get to swim in these waters all day long. I feel like I’m drinking from a fire hydrant at all times. Like, nothing is ever boring or pointless or a waste of time these days.
“Every second counts. Every conversation feels like it was orchestrated by Divine. Every encounter feels pregnant with possibility.”
I have a theory about why this is.
Its because we are out of time. Not in a Doomsday kind of way, but in the way where we all know the old world order is collapsing, and there’s no more time to waste in getting to building a new one.
Over and over again I hear Mary Oliver’s prophetic question resonating in my mind,
“what are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”
I know the answer to that question now, and I am single-mindedly crafting it each and every day.
What about you? What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?
Wake up. We have no more time for dilly dallying. The world needs you to show up, break the mould you were poured into by virtue of your family of origin, your religious conditioning or your gender role. It needs you to wake up and sing your song, write your book, tell your story, make your art, plant your garden.
This past month, I had the perfect joy of sitting in the back of my truck, which I parked up facing the ocean and decked out with lanterns, blankets, pillows, wine and cheese with a dear friend. As she was arriving and settling in, I was overcome with the urgent need to tell her that her art is prophetic. That it contains healing power and speaks to people in a language they are hungry to learn, but which they barely understand. That her art is actually truth-telling and co-creating real beauty in the world and that she must never ever stop. The timing of this was particularly hilarious because just that previous week she had just become low-key famous for painting our Premier with Vegemite. We laughed ourselves silly and drank and ate and cried and wondered aloud together. And it was perfect. You see, her art has cracked me open. And when I am in her presence, in the presence of truth-telling, I must also say true things. And when we say true things to each other, we shift reality. We align to a vision of the future which is truthful and whole and beautiful and full of wonder. When I got home from being with her, I just sat in the driveway staring at the stars for a full twenty minutes before I could break the magic that hung over my truck like silk, and tear myself away to bed.
Our artists and prophets are often one and the same, I’m noticing that too.
The Empire of Organised Religion and their affiliates are cascading in on themselves like a house of cards built on illusion, ego, fear-mongering and the almighty dollar. I came out of the Empire of Organised Religion. I came out of it the same way Jonah came out of the whale; vomited unceremoniously onto a beach I never wanted to visit. Against my will. Despite all my trying. (But also, I brought it on myself a little bit. Both are true. Ancient Hebrew literature is fascinatingly complex.) I loved the corner of the Empire I had lived inside of, and I wanted to serve it until I died. I used to be Somebody in that Empire. I had business cards and everything. It was really, really good for my ego. I enjoyed it, to a point, but I never really fit in. I was a very hard worker, and a bit talented at some things, and clever, and so I blended in for a little while. But I wasn’t a Very Good Baptist, as it turns out. Some people will tell you I wasn’t even a Very Good Christian. I sincerely wanted to be not just a Very Good Christian, but the most Dedicated of Christians. At one point I was even going to try and do a PhD to cement my place in that world. So, for a little while, being rejected by the Empire I had loved and served for so long stung.
Every major life event acts as a catalyst for our own becoming. For me, leaving the Empire behind was my cue to start freeing myself from the prison of other peoples’ opinions. Doing that difficult work has been one of the greatest feats of my life, and I’m still reveling in it, if I’m honest. Once I got free from that, I started to get free from a whole lot of other things.
And, well, here we are. In the glorious land where I can’t get fired for things I say on the internet anymore.
I’m now in possession of the kind of freedom I, tragically, had no idea was even possible. Belonging, at last, to myself – in full charge of my own agency, decisions and will. Moving forward with a single-minded vision of what I know I’ve been called to do and the certainty that I have what it takes inside of me to get it done. And what’s more, that its going to be FUN.
Before you get free, before you let go of the ego-attachments that keep you tethered to the life you thought you were supposed to lead, you will have some secret things that you will find hard to tell people. The reason I know this, is because I had some secret things I found it hard to tell people.
“And the more I screwed up my courage to be brave and real, the more I found people along the way who were also being brave and real, and lo and behold, we gave each other courage to go on being brave and real and say the un-sayable things and that’s how you walk into freedom.”
Before you step into it, in that moment when you think you don’t have what it takes, you might think any or all of the following thoughts:
“I don’t fit in.”
“The old answers I had don’t help me make sense of this life I’m now living”
“I’m filled with rage / sadness and I don’t know why”
“My failures haunt me, I don’t know how to make things right.”
“I’ve never experienced anything supernatural or Divine and it’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“I’m scared of who I will be if I leave this community / family / relationship / job”
“I don’t know how to make friends.”
“I’m exhausted from pretending.”
“I feel like a fraud.”
Almost without exception, the people who seek me out for these kinds of conversations are saying some or all of these things. Often they are also leaders or “Somebodies” in organised religious systems and their offshoots, or they are people who have felt rejected, wounded or let down by the leaders or “Somebodies” in their worlds. Its about a 50/50 mix. Sometimes these brave and wonderful souls are people who are both in charge of their own Empires, and still being hurt by others who are in-charge of slightly larger Empires. Do you realize what this means? EVERYONE IS FEELING THE SAME.
Here is something else I’m noticing. Right now, in front of our very eyes, ancient knowledge and wisdom from every tradition under the sun is being brought forward in new ways and played with and applied differently to birth a whole new cosmology to serve a whole new generation.
And before you go clutching your pearls and whispering “oh my god, she’s a universalist now!”, let me assure you of something.
I left universalism behind hundreds of miles ago.
I am way out in no-mans land now, where only the fools, dreamers, prophets, artists and the relentlessly curious ever venture. And let me assure you, I am not alone.
I am surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, and the witness they bear strengthens me and gives me hope and life and grounds me in a reality which is more beautiful than I ever dared imagine.
You can only ever get here, according to the incarnated Universal Christ who -for me - is the road-map, the journey and the destination, by selling everything you own, giving up and walking away from every tether that ever held you to the life you carefully crafted for yourself, and buying the land where you found buried treasure.
The treasure is slightly different for all of us. It has a heft and a weight and a value that is beyond anything you have ever encountered before. I promise you, when you find it, you will know. I’m writing about that more, but not here. In due course, I will have something else to offer on this; for now, it is still gestating.
You don’t need permission to walk into the field and start hunting for this treasure. You don’t even need an invitation. This moment that we are sharing right now, this is your cosmic invitation.
Our planet is groaning under the weight of climate change, our most vulnerable people are being raped, sold and murdered. Our beloved masculine-folk are being crushed by the weight of toxic masculinity, succumbing to being manipulated and hated and are mired in their own self-loathing which goes so deep that they cannot even begin to get their heads around their own complicit behaviours which keep the patriarchy alive and kicking. Our beloved feminine-folk are so busy literally trying to survive in this toxic system, that we cannot spare any compassion for our masculine counterparts who are breaking under the weight of it as much as we are. Don’t even get me started on our LGBQTIA+ beloved folks. I cannot begin to sketch their heartbreak. I wouldn’t dare. We are now confronting white supremacy and systemic racism with fresh vision from our BIPOC leaders who are leading the BLM charge with mastery, courage and conviction to bring an end to this evil once and for all. We are drugging our brightest and most sensitive children so they can conform to an education system which is slowly stealing their souls, robbing them blind of their creativity, their own cosmic wisdom and attempting to inculcate them into the matrix of study / work / produce / earn / die.
We all know, deep down, what the thing is we need to do – and who it is we need to do it with- to play our part in healing these wounds humanity is carrying. Its time to hit go. There is no more time to waste. There is no reset button on this planet we call home. We cannot afford to walk around one more single day like zombies doing what we’ve been conditioned to do anymore.
I know its scary, and hard, and lonely. I know. I know. I feel that too. That’s why I’m writing to you. Because we need each other to be brave and we need to do it together. My closest friends are the bravest people I know and they are all busy cracking open their own spheres, letting light in where they stand. And they are all paying steep prices for that. It is felt in the most intimate and intolerable places. In our children’s lives and routines, in our families, in our sex lives, our physical and mental health, our bank balances and in our spiritual identities. Those are the frontiers of this kind of change at a private level. Make no mistake. This work is hard and costly and frightening. It might cost you your financial security, at least some of your key relationships, a large part of your sense of being tethered to secure structures (which are all coming down around your ears anyway), and more. It will most certainly cost you your entitlement to cling to victim-hood, or self-righteousness. It will require nothing less than a total death of ego, which is what Jesus was talking about when he called us to ‘die to ourselves’. When the ego dies, it is truly excruciating. But we cannot walk into freedom until we sit our ego down at the table and look it in the eye, and thank it for keeping us safe and alive and comfortable. And tell it that it is welcome to stay at the table, but that its voice no longer gets to call the shots, make the decisions, steer the ship. We hand that authority over to our deepest wisdom. Our god-self voice, our intuition. Some teachers call this our ‘higher self’, some call it our ‘gut’. It doesn’t matter what you call it. It just matters that you stop fighting it.
If we can face these private battles, do this difficult work, we start to turn the tide on things like international food security, climate change, economic systems which enslave the most vulnerable, the sickening partnership of politics and church, the choke-hold that the patriarchy has on the safety of women and children. Addiction. Racism. Spiritual abuse. Big stuff. What we decide privately, plays out on the public stage; whether we realize it or not. This is what it means to wake up and recognize that we are, quite literally, co-creators of reality.
It means if we continue to co-create realities in which we ourselves are gagged, numbed, bound and powerless, we will continue to manifest paradigms in which others will remain gagged, numbed, bound and powerless.
Including our children.
I’m not going to stand by and watch that happen.