CYCLONE DREAMING 4 – Vulnerability as Blessing Part I

Vulnerability as Blessing Part I
Cyclones play an important part in our lives. Apart from the prosperity they bring through the rain that greens the landscape, they drive certain aspects of our technological and social development. When they blow away our homes we find ways to make them more durable. We track cyclones with satellites and radar. And we devise community strategies for coping when they come. The media keeps us informed and in a very important sense draws us together: when we hear the pulsing warning signal on our radios we know that we are all focused at that moment on the awesome uncertainty of the approaching event.

Such moments are opportunities for the Poet in each of us to reach beyond the event at hand. This we do in any case through the shared hope of being spared ‑ of being the same after the event as before it. But the Poet knows that everything changes even when it appears to stay the same, and in such critical moments reaches for the benefit that change can bring to our lives and actively embraces it. In so doing s/he celebrates our vulnerability.

Celebrating our vulnerability may seem like a strange suggestion to make, but only if we ignore what is really quite normal activity. In Australia, for example, the one day of the year that can be described as a truly national holiday celebrates an experience of devastating vulnerability. On ANZAC day we continue to discover more about ourselves through our annual remembrance of the events at Gallipoli. The Poet is drawn by such events into the single continuous field of meaning in which words and the things they signify exist, not as hard edged and immutable forms, but as resonances of the mind, neither separate nor permanent, but merging and emerging as new forms, shaping and being reshaped by the minds they flow through. The Poet merges with the event and emerges with a sign that effects what it signifies: a constellation of words that evoke the experience, not of the event but of the field of meaning ‑ the Universe ‑ as It unfolds in that event. Such activity has roots reaching back as far into human history as it is possible to imagine.

AS well as ANZAC day, for example, the two focal points of our year ‑ public holidays when the nation stops work for more than just a day and turns its efforts to making merry ‑ have their roots in celebrations that arise out of a sense of vulnerability. Easter has its origins in festivals of the Vernal Equinox celebrating the death and rebirth of the annual cycle of seasonal life. Christmas coincides with a much older festival dating back to Palaeolithic times, celebrating the passing of the Northern Winter Solstice – after which the days begin to lengthen and, in ages past, the chance of surviving for another season also increased.

Hoping to be spared the worst that the chaos of winter – or a cyclone hovering off shore – might inflict is a natural response to vulnerability. It reflects our instinct for self-preservation. But it is a passive and ultimately futile disposition, for we have learned from our experience of the landscapes in which we have taken root, that the continuity of life is maintained by the destruction of all living things. Aroused by the same instinct, the Poet in each of us takes the initiative and discovers a "space" in our lives which can be touched by no thing: in which we know our intrinsic worth and our ultimate invulnerability to all things.