The Valkyries Vigil, by Edward Robert Hughes (Image courtesy WikiCommons)
The Valkyries Vigil, by Edward Robert Hughes (Image courtesy WikiCommons)

“Along with the Great Turning, the Great Unraveling is happening too, and there is no way to tell how the larger story will end.

So we learn again that hardest and most rewarding of lessons: how to make friends with uncertainty; how to pour your whole passion into a project when you can’t be sure it’s going to work.

Instead of any blueprint of the future, we have this moment. In lieu of a sure-fire strategy to pull off the Great Turning, we can only fashion guidelines to help us keep going as best we can, and to stay on track with a simple faith in the goodness of life.”

So writes Joanna Macy in “Five Ways of Being That Can Change the World,” sharing the insight that many of us who have the vocation to be facets in the Great Turning. Macy continues, emphasizing the importance of daring vision:

“We will never bring forth what we haven’t dared to dream or learned to imagine. For those of us dwelling in a high-tech consumer society, replete with ever-proliferating electronic distractions, the imagination is the most underdeveloped, even atrophied, of our mental capacities. Yet never has its juicy, enlivening power been more desperately needed than now.”

The Lady of Shalott (1886-1905) by William Holman Hunt (Image courtesy of WikiCommons)
The Lady of Shalott (1886-1905) by William Holman Hunt (Image courtesy of WikiCommons)

Part of the reclamation or re-emergence of the Feminine and its kindred ways and capacities is the reclamation of imagination and attention, among our most powerful Sophia Gifts that have been co-opted and appropriated.

This is why some are called to this path of true transformation, of recollection of lived wisdom, of reclamation of their medial Feminine gifts and deep-ancestral wisdom legacies.

And so a key facet of this Great Work is becoming aware that that’s happened, and how, so we can navigate the passage of great unraveling and (or in order to!) reclaim the gifts so essential for daring vision and the reweaving, and weaving anew, towards the Great Turning.

Big Love,

Jamie

* Joanna Macy’s article appeared in the Spring/Summer 2014 edition of The Rowe Center Post, and also appeared in the March/April 2013 issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.