A weekly dose of dauntlessly dealt reality from the What It Is Wednesday Blog Carnival…
The other day, I journeyed with Freya to learn how to better ground in the day-to-day. I’ve had a lot of personal upheaval over the last year, and felt the collective discombobulation. “Path, or pass” is working very well for me, yet I still want some underlying, overarching sense of peace to carry with me and I’m just not finding it.
As I stepped into a frozen creek bed framed between icy peaks, Jötun (giant) Ymir stomped there, yawping and growling. For those not familiar with Old Norse cosmology, Ymir is the masculine aspect of the divine, created by the feminine aspect, Audhumla (I have a different theory on this; ask me). When the Aesir fell into conflict with the Jötnar, Odin and his brothers disembodied Ymir and from his scattered body parts created Earth, it’s atmosphere, and attributes.
Ymir’s name is translated as meaning ‘big sound’–(big bang) go figure. This symbolism not lost on me, I stood quietly for a few minutes, watching the bellowing Jötun stare at me. Then I yawped, too, and through its vibration into the frozen world around me realized the peace in seconds, milliseconds.
We will not always have the luxury of sustaining, readily felt peace. This doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to feel in the fine details, in short bursts, which on occasion we may need to create, ourselves. Once we know that, it’s our job to remember to make our own peace, as needed. We can’t sit back and wait for it to arrive, externally. Self-created peace won’t always be neat, tidy, and secure as what we recall from the past. In fact, creating personal peace looks a lot like a giant in the wild yelling his brains out.
We call that process faith, and it’s hard to sustain for a reason.
From Ymir came also the message that sacrifice has its place in creating peace. We don’t have to go sacrifice ourselves to make a new planet (or are we doing that, already?), though we do have to be willing to tear down what isn’t working to make way for what comes next. We may not even get the luxury of knowing what comes next, yet we must clear the way. It’s our job.
Before we can do that, though, we have to get past the idea of trying to fix what isn’t working. We fool ourselves into thinking that the thing not working is what’s creating the conflict. If we could just fix that thing, there’d be no need for sacrifice, we’d find peace, what comes next could roll up.
Whatever isn’t working, realize it’s time to work as intended in this world is over. It’s brokenness isn’t the conflict. Trying to force it to keep working is. Trying to jump start it repeatedly is wasted effort.
We’re groomed from day one to stick with everything until the wheels come off, and when they do, fix them. That credo is the problem. It’s what’s interfering with peace. Our best intentions create conflict. Our ability to let them go gives us peace.
How do you create peace in your life? How do you step out of conflict?
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Would love to hear more about, “Path, or pass.”
Hi Martha! I’ve never thought that we can be “off our path.” I hear people say things like, “I need to find my path, again,” and I think the perspective that suggests mistakes and accidents aren’t part of path dismisses what we can learn from such experiences. I think they are path. However, we can stall on our path. We can get distracted by the shiny.
Last month (I talked about this in a #whatitiswednesday post, though I don’t recall which) that my focus right now is minimizing distraction. I’m passionate about a lot of things, as in passion ADD. But because I’m passionate about them doesn’t mean they are what I need to be doing to do my work here, to be sane and healthy. My friend, Lorna, says it can be summed as, “If it ain’t hell yes, it’s hell no.” Though I found that while a lot of my passions are hell yes, when it comes to the focus that I need to be healthy and growing, they are hell no. That realization brought a lot of grief, though I knew it was right.
For me the resonant wording is if it’s not path, I have to pass on it. My energy is too scarce to spend it on distraction, pleasant thought they may be.
So glad to see you, Martha!