Spirituality is Political

It is a common thing, in “spiritual” spaces, to hear that someone doesn’t “do” politics. But I would argue that political activism and spirituality are not separate.

My loves, if the results of an election bring you hopeful hearts and clear eyes, may you feel the wind of spirit beneath the wings of action for justice and liberation. It is clear that turning away from the pain of the world and a mentality of “good vibes only” will not dissolve the sharp edge of fascism. We need connection to the spirit realms AND groundedness in our earthly reality to dismantle the forces of oppression and birth a new world.

These are prophetic times. A threshold between two stories. The old story of domination, control, hate, and fear is struggling to stay alive, while a new story is fighting to emerge. This old story has been so total, so ambient, so woven into the grammar of how we see and speak and move through the world, that we have come to experience it as simply the truth of things. That the way things have been is the way they will always be. We have been smelling smoke everywhere and looking for fires, placing blame on the “other,” becoming afraid and ashamed of our own wild, instinctual nature.

We have been experiencing a critical loss of soul.

The symptoms of this malevolence are always the same:

• Insatiable hunger.
• Inability to feel the suffering of others.
• Compulsive accumulation.
• The need to extract from everything.
• A hollowness that no amount of consumption can fill.

It is contagious. Once it enters a culture, it spreads through the stories, the laws, the markets, the schools, the churches. It disguises itself as success, progress, ambition, freedom.

This is the mask of Empire.
Its true face is in the war budgets. The pesticide fields. The data centers eating rivers. The endless growth demanded of a finite world.

The cost of this soul loss is carried in the body, in the psyche, in the slow erosion of a life lived outside the living web, severed from something we cannot live without: the felt sense of belonging to something larger, older, and wiser than the private self.

We find ourselves in a particular moment within the universal pattern of life–death–life, found in ecosystems, in mythic and archetypal storylines, in human maturity, and enshrined in ancient traditions. In a culture obsessed with perpetual growth and individual wealth, we are called to return to the truth that all life rises and falls. We are all intertwined in this cyclical journey of rebirth.

The mythic imagination has made medicine from this wound across the world and through time. The great stories carried in the hearts of people everywhere tell of descent and return. They teach us that severance, separation, and descent are necessary precursors to emergence; that sacrifices must be made; that dissolution is not the end; and that the thread of belonging runs even through the darkest passages of human experience. The pattern spirals. And each turn of the spiral carries us closer to the center of what we are.

The spiritual path asks us to face the consequences of this perpetual wounding. It calls us to nurture a love that enters the wounds of the world with renewed courage, a steadier heart, and a freedom that has passed through the fire. Spirituality that fosters individual peak experience and neglects collective connection is incomplete. We must cast a net of belonging wide enough to include everyone, with a vision capacious enough to hold both the grief of what has been broken and the hope of what is trying to be born.

Re-membering

The word member comes from the Latin membrum: a limb, a part of a body. To be a member is to belong to something larger than yourself, the way a hand belongs to an arm, the way an arm belongs to a body, the way a body belongs to the earth. To be dismembered is to be torn from the body we belong to.

To remember is to call something back. To re-member is to call ourselves back into the body of the world. Bone by bone. To reclaim our agency as a part of a greater whole. Re-membering is more than casting our minds and spirits back to what we used to know, or what we used to do. It is the slow, sacred work of becoming a member again. Of remembering how to belong to this beautiful world, so worthy of our holy participation.

Belonging is a skill. A capacity honed through return, attention, and the willingness to be affected; through extending dignity to all beings. The torn fabric of creation is mended through apprenticeship to the wound of disconnection. Here we are free to relinquish the race to arrive, for a tender devotion to being present with what is. Here we reclaim our agency by listening to, and entering into dialogue with, the diversity of voices in the living world, and we begin to reweave our belonging.

We are standing in this place between worlds, where one way of being is dying and the next is waiting to be ushered in. The space between is an actual location. It is precisely this in-between space that is the most generative, the most sacred. It brings us to the very edge of our imagination of what is possible.

A communal fire has sparked among us. Its warmth is the shared care that emerges from devotion to the truth of interbeing. The spirit that moves through root and river, connecting all things, moves through us. It is beneath our feet and all around us. It is inside of us, asking for us to REmember our true nature.