Essay and Photos By Freya Secrest
I spent a day in the northern section of Yellowstone National Park this past summer. It was a brief visit, but nonetheless powerful in connecting me with the formative forces building our world. There were geysers spewing out hot bubbling minerals not safe to be touched by human hands, powerful rivers cutting channels in the landscape and various microbial life-forms wearing down rock. My day’s experience was an amazing window into the forces that tirelessly move, meet and mold a world.
Going into the Park I recalled several National Geographic documentaries of Yellowstone which shared the beauty and the rawness of life in its mountains and valleys. But as we traveled by the mineral geysers, the Yellowstone River canyon, and a wide valley with a vista that dwarfed its resident buffalo, I was aware of the vast energies that sculpt and give shape to our planet. Those documentaries had not given me the felt sense of the power in wind and sky and molten chemicals that underlie its unique landscape of bubbling springs and delicate wild flowers. Images could point me to a tree growing close to sulphurous upwellings or a wild creature who made that world their home, but they didn’t fully capture the spirit of determination and joy evident when standing in their presence.
On the way home to Michigan, I found myself considering my own relationship to formative forces, not looking to those powers of nature outside myself but to those powers available within my human stream of action. Standing, Partnering, and Generativity – these are not geologic forces but human-centered formative forces that I can direct— each elemental and powerful in their way. They work with elements of creation different from the geologic forces, but they are no less potent to the life of Gaia.
Back now to my daily life, I wonder how to better focus my formative actions. I do not always see the impact of my life in the world, do not always recognize myself as a formative force. But the choices I make, the relationships I foster and the way I invite possibilities to emerge in my life help shape the wider world. My awareness of the possible impact of my actions leaves me feeling daunted. How do I know my individual actions contribute to the dance of life in a way that leads to a more whole and coherent world?
The answer that comes to me in this moment is that we don’t always get to know our impact. We cannot control the end result of our contributions in life except through Love. The understanding we bring to our actions and the choices we make from Love create a field where connection, possibility and respect enhance mutual unfoldment, where results foster wholeness and a vitality of life. As a formative force, it is my responsibility, my opportunity to step into Love as the controlling factor.
I have to admit that love has been a bit of a mystery for me, not so much in the specificity of personal love or the spaciousness of love for the Sacred in life, but in the mystery of how to bring them together. How does personal love expand to touch the universal and cosmic love reside in daily connections? How do they come together into a wholeness of love that is a life-enhancing, formative force?
What comes to me as a path into answering this question is to live with the same determination and joy as does the nature I connected with in Yellowstone Park – to stand and celebrate my life as a feast , to partner deeply, joyfully, lovingly with myself and the people and life around me, to be generative as a spring is, bubbling out the fullness of myself from wellsprings of love, a resource freely available for co-creative interaction with my world.
After millions of years of interaction and relationship, many large and small acts of beingess, Yellowstone is a landscape manifesting a presence that touches its visitors with integrity, beauty and coherence. It is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. No one element could alone imagine its current shape and vitality, but each element is a formative force in creating it. The same is true of each in our own lives; we are a formative force in connection with other forces and together we shape a more whole and beautiful world.
Views from the Lorian Community publishes essays from a team of volunteer writers expressing individual experiences of a long term, committed practice of Incarnational Spirituality (and the general principles shaping such a practice.) Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you would like to subscribe, please visit our website and click on Follow Our Blog Via Email. Or email the editor:drenag@lorian.org.