At Imbolc: An Experimental Musing between Geneen Marie Haugen & Bill Plotkin
Friday, February 2, 2024
Geneen writes: Bill Plotkin and I have been life partners and creative collaborators for more than 20 years. Naturally we have been in an ongoing conversation with topics ranging from the sublime to the absurd, from visionary grandeur to everyday ordeals. Of course, we don’t always agree with one another, and perhaps those places of discord help widen (or clarify) the lens through which we each engage the world. In addition to our individual work, we have co-created multiple Animas programs that have evolved as our participants and the world have shape-shifted.
Sometimes I wonder if others feel that time has speeded up without anyone really mentioning it. Shape-shifting world events unfold ever faster. We appear to be amidst an extended spell of radical change with uncertain outcomes. In these destabilizing times, Bill and I have been listening and sensing the trembling terrain, as well as our own life stage and ever-shorter futures. My questions turn madly in directions like this: Where is the ground (the psychospiritual ground, the psychophysical ground), the anchor point, that is most nourished now by our particular ways of tending? How do we live most coherently with the unfolding cosmos? How do our grand philosophies and spiritual practices best take root in our everyday lives?
I ask these questions of myself, and right now I ask my Billoved, too. As usual, I suppose he will take these questions in a direction of his own.
Bill writes: Thank you, dahhhhling. Thank you for initiating this conversation, another jewel in the long string of initiations you have gifted our relationship, our unfolding conversation over the years. And thank you for sharing some of the questions currently working you — or playing with you. I have questions of these sorts, too, questions I’d love to share with you in this format.
But, first, I want to celebrate your questions: how they are so very grand in scope and depth (for example, living coherently with the unfolding cosmos, no less!) and how they are also, at the same time, so immediate, personal, and intimate (grand philosophies, yes, but specifically how they take root in our everyday lives). Over the last few years, my questions, too, have combined these two dimensions — basically, eternity and the immediate now — in ways that are often dizzying, consciousness shifting, upturning my previous sense of what this world is. For example, every day now I am living this question: How can I most effectively dedicate the rest of my life, through what I do every day, in support of (possible) future humans many generations hence while I am also apprenticed to our ancestors of long, long ago? That question guides what I do in my “work” now: for example, the design of training programs for future soul-initiation guides. But it also guides current conversations with friends and colleagues, program participants and trainees. And this tension between eternity and the present also shapes the questions with which the two of us are currently dancing: questions about community and where to land ourselves for our final years — years that might coincide with the demise of the military-industrial, consumer-conformist, dominator society we have lived in for so many generations now. What might we leave to future generations that has the chance to be of real support in the coming decades and centuries of “reinventing a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources,” as Thomas Berry urged us.
Geneen writes: One of the many thoughts I cherish from Thomas Berry is his encouragement for enacting cosmological rituals, encouragement to celebrate and acknowledge moments in the unfolding of the universe, and Earthly life, without which we humans would not be here. My imagination blazes when I wonder what the world could become if all human communities celebrated the original “flaring forth” of the universe — or the emergence of photosynthesis! — as fully as people celebrate a bar mitzvah, or a gender reveal. Or even Earth’s annual circumambulation of the Sun, which gives us the cycle of seasons.
Speaking of cosmological rituals, right now, in early February, we are at the mid-point between December Solstice and March Equinox — a time the Celts call “Imbolc.” Others may name this “cross-quarter” moment Brigit’s Day, or Candlemas, or Groundhog Day. (Cross-quarter days are the midpoints between Equinoxes and Solstices.) In the simplest sense, in the Northern hemisphere, Imbolc is the time when Earth invites us to tend the life-energy gathering below ground — physical ground, or maybe even psychospiritual ground, or in the depths of our collective psyche. What human possibilities are hinting at emergence now, perhaps in symbolic resonance with, for example, bear cubs being born underground?
A question for Billoved: Any thoughts how we might mark this particular Imbolc, while bombs are falling in Gaza and Ukraine and Yemen? While late January daytime temperatures at 7300 ft in the Rockies are in the 50s F? While mayhem overtakes our political systems?
Bill writes: Well, there it is again: the now, on one hand, and deep time, on the other — but you’ve also invoked the underground, on one hand, and the underworld/ unconscious, on the other: We can tend the life energy gathering right now and right here below ground, and we can also tend the life energy that has been gathering for perhaps millennia in the depths of our collective human psyche. Can we celebrate and support the hidden start of yet another new spring (celebrating the eternal round) while at the same time co-conjuring and supporting the renaissance of a mode of human consciousness humbly rooted in our interdependence with all life? Perhaps not just a renaissance but a never-before-seen evolutionary unfolding. Can we celebrate both forms of emergence while we are also grieving the suffering and losses we humans are inflicting on each other and on all other species? Can we do all we can to save as much life as possible? Can we overhear the Imbolc conversation currently taking place underground between two realms of emergence: the seeds in the soil starting to awaken and the seeds of the future human stirring?
Geneen writes: I’d like to invite you and me into a simple hands-in-the-dirt ceremony to help the grand philosophies take root in our everyday lives this season. Where you and I currently live, it’s way too early to plant garden seeds, but perhaps not too early to plant juniper berries, or other wild seeds we can still find on serviceberry or chokecherry. Or perhaps, before the next snowfall, we’ll find hints of emergent green to tend. Astronomical Imbolc falls on February 4 this year; we can honor the astonishing journey of Earth around the Sun at the same time we tend new possibilities that stir in the darkness — including emergent human possibilities that are, even now, gestating in the potent dark womb of our time.
(Geneen and Bill may continue an experiment in conversation in future Musings.)
