initiation without the return

This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore a little bit of everything that’s on my mind as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. You can listen to me read you the newsletter by hitting play above - or you can click the little link above and to the right to play in your favorite podcast player. If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it!

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I’ve been listening to podcasts from the first few weeks of the pandemic - conversations that were recorded back in April 2020. A recurring theme of those conversations is this: the pandemic is an opportunity for a global initiation. But every teacher that I’ve been listening to spoke of the danger - back in the early days of the pandemic before the politicization of masks and vaccines - of not using the opportunity for initiation, of us missing the invitation.

It is generally accepted across many different cultures that initiations have three parts:

1. The separation

2. The ordeal/threshold

3. The return

Covid obviously forced us out of our “normal” lives - the separation that is step one of an initiation. Then, depending on where you lived and/or how seriously you took the threat, there was (maybe still is) this liminal period of so much uncertainty - the threshold space that is the middle part of any initiation. You can see how some of us rushed to define and control the thing when really, the liminal space calls for a sitting-withness instead of a grasping ever more tightly. It calls for a sense of curiosity instead of any self-righteousness. This middle period calls for us to embrace possibility and imagination.

Most of the teachers in these podcasts that I’ve been listening to say that the hardest part for us 21st century Westerners is the return part of the initiation. We don’t lack for separation and ordeals, but we rarely make the return. We stay in this pattern of repeating steps one and two over and over again.

Martin Shaw uses an analogy of three soldiers returning from war:

Three guys go off to war. Everybody, I think by and large, would say that war, in the way that most people understand it, is an initiation. The three men come back. One of them commits suicide. One of them becomes an alcoholic. And one of them decides to do some work with their soul. But they all had the initiation.

War is always an initiatory opportunity, but not all soldiers finish the cycle of initiation. A pandemic is an initiatory opportunity, but many will not take the opportunity offered. Not everyone will stay in the threshold place to honestly confront themselves, and even fewer of us will integrate what we learned from the separation and liminal spaces to be able to properly return to share our hard-fought wisdom with the community.

Our pastor preached at another church last week, so she asked me to preach in her absence. I was excited until I saw the text for the week: Mark 13. It’s all fire and brimstone stuff. I was not thrilled about figuring out how to talk about those passages that have been misused so egregiously over the years to stoke people’s fears and goad them into submission. But then I started delving into the etymology of apocalypse, whose original meaning is “collapse, unveiling, renewal.” I pulled on that string, trying to connect this idea of apocalypse with the times we find ourselves in (you can listen to it here).

Covid has certainly been an unveiling, revealing the underbelly of so many of our systems and ways of living. Like an initiation, an apocalypse is an ending and a beginning. The death of something, so that something new can be birthed. These apocalyptic times are an invitation to, as I said at church on Sunday, “feel all of it, to ask what it has to teach us, to  be present and awake, and, then, to imagine what could be - what could be birthed - for ourselves, our communities, and our world as we move forward into it.”

Part of my grief (and rage) over these months has been that it feels like we’re missing the invitation altogether. We are stuck in that first phase of separation. You see this if you just read the news or look at most of our elected leaders. Most CEOs are talking about “getting back to normal” instead of grasping this opportunity to completely reimagine how we do things.

But one thing I’ve been learning from this threshold space is that the top-down way of growth and change doesn’t seem to be working. We’ve tried it for at least a few centuries at this point. The new way forward, I think, will have to be from the ground up instead.

This is the best invitation of all: that my own individual return from this initiation and the reimagining work that little old Sara is doing is part of a larger quilt that, while many are probably missing the opportunity, there are many of us who are waking up to the invitation, crafting our squares in a beautiful tapestry, among our particular people and in our particular places.

Rants and raves

👍 Thanksgiving is coming! Here are some past round-ups. I’m not cooking much this year, but I will definitely still lose myself to looking at my favorite food blogger’s menus.

👍 The kids and I finished Emily of New Moon on audiobook last week, and I loved it reading it with them so much. It led to so many great conversations together. A related rave: the library’s free Hoopla app, which is where we listen to all of our audiobooks.

👍 Speaking of initiation and Martin Shaw, I wish I could buy every one of you subscribers a copy of this for Christmas.

👎 This:

Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle

66% of big companies are making higher profits now than before the pandemic. Make no mistake: Companies aren't raising prices because of inflation or supply-chain issues. They're using that as an excuse to raise profits and hope you'll fall for it

businessinsider.comCorporations are using inflation as an excuse to raise prices and make fatter profits — and it’s making the problem worse“Inflation isn’t driving most of these price increases,” says former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Corporate power is driving them.”

Stuff worth sharing this week

• I don’t really have any way of properly summing this up other than to say it brought together so many different strands of things I’ve been wrestling with lately, and I’m envious of how well Antonia does that (and grateful).

• Saving Courtney Martin’s Notes on Rejection to send to friends when they need it. You should too.

• “…to be a woman in America involves paying a steep fine for simply trying to live.” Read the whole thing to see how it’s the water we’re swimming in.

Tis the season for

working by the Jøtul and the Christmas tree

Cheers to wondering where you are in this initiation in the weeks ahead!

Sara