The Center Cannot Hold

“Turning and turning, in the widening gyre/the falcon cannot hear the falconer/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere/the ceremony of innocence is drowned/The best lack all conviction/while the worst/are full of passionate intensity. (W.B. Yeats “The Second Coming”, 1919)

Published in 1920, this poem describes the world of my grandparents.

In the aftermath of WWI, during the Irish War for Independence, Irish poet Yeats describes a world collapsing into chaos, anarchy, moral decay—-a sense that the 19th century western civilization was falling apart.

Here we are again.

The center cannot hold.

Seers, visionaries, prophets and consciousness gurus know that we are facing a complete reordering of the world as we know it.

I wonder how my grandparents survived not just one World War and The Great Depression, but a second World War, following in quick succession. How did they bear up emotionally and spiritually in these terror filled times?

In terms of sheer physical survival, they were hard working, resilient and creative.

Both sides of my family were people of the land—-ranchers and farmers.

They kept their hands in the soil, attuned to the living relationship of animals, fences, barns, gardens, canning, preparing and storing food, the rhythms of seasons, cycles of rain, sun and crops. They also had to interface with the world of economies and markets and speculation. But it was The Real of planet earth’s resources that literally kept them grounded.

Spiritually speaking, they were also relentlessly local and engaged in their communities and churches as social hubs. They had private practices.

I remember visiting my octogenarian maternal grandparents in the 1970’s, after they retired to a small rural town in Iowa. They had moved from South Texas where they pioneered a ranching life and raised their family for half a century. Now they lived in a small, simple, square white stucco home. My grandmother was an avid gardener and cook. She still used the old timey, hand crank wringer washer, stringing her clothes to dry on the line in the backyard or in the basement on a winter day.

In the mornings, I would come up to the kitchen for breakfast, wiping sleep from my bleary 12 year old eyes, and find grandpa and grandma reading a devotional together out loud. When they finished, grandpa would switch on the tiny rectangular plastic radio on the kitchen table and the National News would burst forth in this place that had just been a prayer filled room. Grandma would bustle about, making a hearty breakfast for all of us.

I wonder how you who are sensitive to the zeitgeist of the times are digesting and living through the horror of this hour in the Human Story? How are you, as a loving, caring and yes, empathic mortal finding the courage to carry on each day when the center cannot hold.

We’ve been here before.

Each of us are a living fire of our ancestor’s courage, tenacity, wisdom, love and resilience.

They are alive in our words, our breathe and our bones.

I read this living legacy in amazing daily meditations and reflections that range from the substack posts of Cameron Trimble, Connie Anderson, Jennifer Weaver, Cynthia Winton Henry, To The Center for Action and Contemplation, Findhorn Foundation and a myriad other voices and organizations that are from the decentralized human community all around me.

When it seems the center cannot hold, it is not the politically biased mainstream media that gives me insight or buoys me up…I ignore these talking heads.

It is these voices in the wilderness from my fellow human beings— as they connect the dots of our existence with our ancestors, our earth and human companions on the journey.

This is the new world coming, the seeds of imagination for a sustainable, loving, conscious future, even as the center of the old order no longer holds.

And so, I sit here in my little tiny corner of the world, as the star smeared, black velvet canvas of the night sky gives way to the iris-colored early dawn. I write. Because it is a practice that keeps me centered and grounded. Stringing words together becomes a lifeline in the struggle to become more love conscious, more self aware, to make meaning in these times.

I’ll end with Wendell Berry’s “Mad Farmer Manifesto”(Country of Marriage, 1973)

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.

Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.

Take all that you have and be poor.

Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands….

Invest in the millenium.

Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit.

Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.

Listen to carrion – put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.

Expect the end of the world.

Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable.

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Friends, I am publishing on Substack now. If you’d like to catch some of my posts there, please check me out and subscribe there!

https://anitaamstutz.substack.com/publish/post/184974627?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

Thank you for your faithful readership!