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This episode begins with the idea that we are living in a dire time in which the nobility of our own souls is at odds with many of the circumstances in which we live. The latest report on the earth’s oceans predicts even more extreme weather events and a rapid rise in sea levels. At the same time psychologists are concerned about a rising tide of grief and loneliness resulting from the tragic loss of life due to the pandemic surges and the scourges of hatred and gun violence.

The notion that going back to familiar forms or normality will solve the crises we face seems a different kind of madness given the desperate collective state we are all in. We are caught in the turning tides, not just of the ocean, but also the tides of time that occasionally turn over as one era ends and the next seeks to begin. In mythological terms, we are in the throes of a great transition in history, which of necessity requires a transformation of humanity as well.

People drown in the storms of change because they cling to abstract notions or conventional beliefs that lack true buoyancy when the time for transformation comes. Sometimes we have to be willing to enter the waters of uncertainty to find the inner dream, the living story that can keep us buoyant in the tides of change.

Part of the challenge and part of the practice involves accepting that we are on the edge between the known and the unknown, the only place that new knowing can come from. Although not found in the headlines or the many reports of growing dangers, the greatest level of loss involves our loss of things that are timeless, of things that touch the eternal, of things that are sacred to the soul.

For only in timeless moments does time itself renew, as life is reborn and the future becomes revealed. Moments of true awakening become “lived time,” time fully lived into, that alone can lead to a life fully lived out. In the storms of life, the awakened soul becomes the source of vision and creative agency that alone can inspire a collective renewal at both the level of survival and the level of transformation.

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