Facing the Flatlands and The Journey Towards Re-Enchantment

The Fool from Tarot for the Holy Spectrum by Chase Voorhees www.tarotoftheholyspectrum.com

There is a fire burning… What sense making and wisdom can we make out of the world in which we inhabit at these times? Ken Wilber describes the distorted sense of reality that emerged out of a reductionist framework and reached into the realms of endless expansion as the Flatlands.  From an Integral perspective, this emphasized horizontal expansion of perpetual forward movement at the expense of the depth and height of vertical expansion that has resulted in the pillaging of natural resources, a stripping away of meaning and mythic identity, the distracted and disconnected self to the world soul…

Mythologist Sharon Blackie describes the Wasteland in a similar notion that she translates through her stages of the Eco-Heroine’s journey.  This first stage in the journey invites one to lift the veil that prevents one from seeing the world as it is: to clearly see issues such as climate change, and political, economic, and social injustices that include the othering of groups that do not fit the archetypal preferences within the dominant narrative.   

When one sees the Flatlands and the Wasteland for what they are… what is there to do?

Complex and nuanced conversations can unfold in multiple directions…

From a somatic psychology perspective, stability proceeds movement; meaning that the exhale, the deep pause, the moment to yield before any movements are initiated is a biologically aligned state of our human movement developmental sequence.  There is a fundamental and necessary stage of vertical alignment before one moves into the horizontal plane of expansion.  It is an invitation to be in conscious engagement on this level more than ever not only for our personal bodies and lives, but for the collective well-being for generations in the future to come.   

In the The Fool tarot card, the image depicts a person stepping off the edge of a cliff.  This is in essence a drop, a deep trust down into the abyss below. A vertical engagement into trusting that the higher alignment above will support the descent, a card and metaphor that represents an initiation into the next cycle of being of evolutionary growth.  This is an infinite trust within that becomes vertically aligned before birthed into the horizontal plane of movement forward.  

 This mythical archetype translates into the great Calling, the path that takes fierce courage to walk upon, stripping away false illusions of security and control to walk in alignment with the soul’s true path of meaning and re-enchantment.  

“When the great blazing bonfire of a culture goes out, what remains are a few individual flames. When those individual flames come together, we can kindle a new fire. That fire’s name is enchantment” –Sharon Blackie from The Enchanted Life: Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday