What I want to know is why the election is so close? Why is the country divided exactly in half? Why is Congress so evenly divided, half democrat, half republican, like mirror images of each other. Let's just look at one example of how the archetype of halving works.
In the first half of the first half of life (which is really a quarter of life), we come to fork after fork on life's path and we imagine that we have to choose right or left. It is only an illusion, just like right or wrong, up or down, night or day, cold or hot, young or old, clothed or naked are examples of forked-road choices. All illusion.
Real life consists of infinite choices, but that is too much for most of us, so we simplify, we dumb-down.
I used to teach my students to push past the two-choice forked road (Wizard of Oz) map of life and explore how navigating life works much better if we see it as a map of nano-choices. (Nano = a unit-prefix meaning one billionth.)
Watch a butterfly. It is almost impossible to keep your eye on it if you are within 20 feet of its flight over a field. That is how it survives. If you plotted a butterfly's flight pattern you would wind up with a line of a billion shifts of direction.
Or watch an ant traveling through the grass. Same thing. The ant traverses the chaos of a forest of grass by adapting to its environment like an intelligent drop of water following the path of least resistance, but its path is not downhill. The ant is not ruled by gravity.
We are heavy, slow dinosaurs compared to the ant and the butterfly. We are completely under the thumb of gravity. For the most part, when our heads are above our feet we are awake. When our heads are level with our feet we are asleep. There is another forked choice: we are either awake or asleep.
The reality is much more nuanced. Some people are relatively much more awake or less awake than others, and how "asleep" we are depends on our brainwaves.
I might choose to stop writing right now, but I won't do that because I kind of know where I want to go with this piece. I want to make at least one good point. I think that our country is at a stage in its evolution when it fancies itself young and heroic, like Odysseus in his prime, in the first half of his life. (Sorry for drawing on the archetype of the male hero but bear with me.) The fact that everything is still black and white, right or wrong, evil or good, simple or complex, war or peace, [good god (Athene) / bad god (Poseidon), good witch / bad witch, good country (US) / bad country (Russia)] reveals that we are in the first half of the life of our country. We are still on the yellow brook road, but it is the red, white and blue road.
As we proceed down this red, white and blue road we come to forks, and we think we have to go right or left. But that is just an illusion.
The problem of being stuck in the first half of life, for a person or a people or a nation is that some part of certain individuals needs to evolve, or some people in the nation need to evolve because the forked road of the questing heroic mentality suddenly doesn't seem to be leading anywhere. It's just a fairy tale, an adult fairy tale that doesn't end well. The part of the country that isn't growing up entertains itself by watching football, while the country that is evolving starts noticing the flight of the butterfly.
I was talking to an artist friend recently who showed me her drawings. We were at a pub and she was drawing the musicians at an open mike. Her lines were like the flight of a butterfly. Some depicted her response to the music, some depicted a fleeting expression and some where tracking the curvaceous shape of a guitar moving in time. As we talked she kept drawing and I became aware of how we were occupying a continuous moment and also how we ourselves were not static in any way, shape or form and neither was anyone, even the guy seated alone at the bar.
As we approach the election, I invite us to ask ourselves, which candidate is most qualified to help the country evolve away from black or white, right or wrong, left or right, war or peace.
You know what peace is? It's not everyone agreeing on everything and smiling and blessing each other. It is people making nano choices that lead to complex solutions to complex problems and engaging in energetic debate.
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