But we live in a culture that loves reaching the summit without the climb, pushing tedious chores to the sidelines – as if life could be glorious peak experiences all the time and by some magic formula we could all become rich and thin and accomplished without any work at all. But I would argue that it is exactly the daily endeavors that give life meaning, perhaps not immediately, but ultimately. Reaching the pinnacle of the mountain by long, arduous ascent on foot holds a far different satisfaction than arriving by ski lift. We have become accustomed to all sorts of modern conveniences that short cut our tasks but that also divorce us from a certain kind of real experience.

One hundred years ago our relationship with daily life was much different. The getting of food, water and medicine – the tending of birth, death and illness were issues much more central to day to day living. Now we hire people to attend our births, cart our garbage, supply our food and water, and take care of our health. But by our ignorance and non-attention to these matters as individuals, a whole toxic system has been set in place to handle it all for us. And it doesn’t handle it – not really. For instance, we can buy fresh water in a bottle at a store and at the same time be unaware that over a million empty plastic bottles are thrown into the garbage every hour and that they make their way to the sea – so that now there are whole islands made up of plastic garbage of every kind floating on the surface of the water, interfering with life below. The buying of water goes on because our daily habits are entrenched. If we are thirsty, it is too much to have to think about the ocean so far away, and the garbage which we cannot believe could be that bad or we would hear more about it.

We know that addictions and redundant bad habits are insidious, working at a slow and incremental pace to color the tone of our day to day reality. But the same is true of positive habits – things that we do regularly, again and again, daily, hourly – the things that are unglamorous or repetitious (doing the dishes, folding the laundry, shopping for groceries). They add bit by bit to the flavor of living – the sweetness or lack of sweetness that we experience. How we feed ourselves, how we get from place to place, how we relate to the place that we live – not only affect us personally but also contribute to the state of our world. Our separate individual daily decisions and concerns do matter. It matters whether or not we compost and recycle our garbage, whether or not we eat organic foods, whether we use or avoid toxic chemicals in our home and workplace, what we spend our money on and how we care for our bodies. It matters how much toxicity we leave in our wake. How much poison is justified if it means leaving pollution for generations to come?

Much of what most of us are busy doing every day has little to do with the natural world at all anymore. People ‘connect’ by sitting in separate locations staring into a computer screen. No one knows where the water from the faucet originates. Instead of looking at the sky we turn on the television to find out about the weather. Modern conveniences have arguably left us much less self-sufficient than ever before in the history of humanity.

Setting up new rhythms and patterns in our habits can add steadiness in an otherwise chaotic time. We will not change the condition of our world through global planning only, but also through our daily individual choices, those things we turn to morning, noon and night. Individual choices to trust nature, to trust ourselves, to say yes to life, living as if our choices to live peacefully actually do help to maintain some peace in the world. It is the small changes, the basic, simple things that bring us incrementally forward on our path towards wholeness.

As dark descends on New Jersey,  dawn is breaking on the other side of the world.   These moments of sunrise and sunset are always happening.  Our earth moves through space, perpetually spinning its orbit, turning on its axis, while light and dark rise and fall, following one another, alternating day and night throughout the world, all the time.  Life activity accelerates and declines by this alternation.    And we, in turn, are governed by these rhythms.

Our relationship with the light and the dark has changed dramatically since the advent of electric lighting.  Now we get to decide whether to be in the dark – or not.  Darkness can be abruptly dispelled by the flick of a switch.  We need never be bothered with wondering what is lurking beyond our little fire – we can light the whole world now.  Since the Enlightenment, there has been a continual drive towards overcoming nature, developing the capabilities that would allow us to live outside of natural law.   People have always feared the dark and have been constrained by the limitations of night.  But now, freed from those limitations we are like adolescents, drunk on our power, wanting to have complete freedom all the time – with no capacity for temperance or reverence. Why bother with darkness when we can have light?  Why stop our activity when we can keep things going 24/7?   I am thinking of Times Square or Las Vegas – no chance of quiet dark or the beauty of the night sky in those places.

Surely, the desire for light is natural; but to what degree do we continue the relentless and blinding lighting of our world without considering the value of the other end of the spectrum?

Darkness holds healing for us too and is necessary for our well-being.   The night is a time for rest, stillness, and an inward focus.  During the day we share a collective reality, but at night the senses are quieted, distractions fall away and we each enter into a very private experience through sleep and dreams.  Physically,  the pineal gland is governed by the rhythm of light and dark. It secretes melatonin in response to darkness.  Melatonin is what allows us to enter into restful sleep.  Taking supplemental melatonin does nothing to rectify our disconnection with natural rhythms and, arguably, can make us weaker in the long run.  We sleep better if we are acclimated to a schedule that corresponds to light and dark.   And spiritually,  darkness symbolizes  the unknown, the uncertain, the perilous.  It is in grappling with the darkness, the doubt, fear and grief of human experience that we grow and develop.

Our circadian rhythms are as much governed by our internal order as by our relationship with our environment. If we can align ourselves with the rhythms of day and night and develop sleep/wake cycles that correspond… allowing both the generating power of the light and restorative capacity of the dark to influence us – physically and spiritually – then maybe we can begin to accept the natural laws that would dictate that we slow down, become more quiet, rest and be more contemplative.  This in turn might allow us to better tolerate the particularly private, challenging, and regenerative experience of darkness.

I love to watch the flocking birds.  Like herds of animals, shoals of fish, swarms of insects, they move with a collective intelligence, a cohesion, an alignment with each other.  In flight they undulate and fold into each other – great sheets of birds moving on the wind.  They fly as one being, hundreds, thousands together.  Landing en masse in trees or fields, they blacken the surface of things.  These are the commonest birds: red-winged blackbirds, grackles, starlings.  In winter they forage in fields and pastures, sweeping down and eating whatever they can find.  They are resourceful and hardy and prolific.

When I heard on the news that birds were falling from the sky by the hundreds in early January, I couldn’t help but make the connection between this event and the ferocious tornadoes that had ripped through that same region only days before.  The news reports only stated that these were random events, mysterious, with no known cause.  They sent dead birds off to the laboratory to see what was going on inside their bodies, ripping them apart to find the culprit.  It must be in the bird.  Research will be done to determine whether there is a parasite, virus or bacterium responsible for the deaths of all of these birds.  If they find it, they will name it, blame it, and then think of ways of eradicating it.

On New Year’s Eve there were 17 tornadoes in that same area.  People, houses, and vehicles were lifted up and hurled great distances.  People died.  Property was destroyed.  Why is it so hard to imagine that these birds who spend so much of their life aloft might have been caught up in the violence of the atmosphere?

This seems such a perfect example of how myopic our science has become.  In our pursuit of eliminating disease, we have lost sight of the bigger picture and much of our common sense.  Instead of looking within ourselves and becoming attuned to nature, we look instead inside of dead birds, searching to understand something.  Perhaps the birds fell from the sky as the result of something much larger and more global than a parasite.  Perhaps it is time to stop focusing on smaller and smaller components and begin to look at the majesty of our world with a wider gaze.

Purification is a word that has a lot of morality associated with it. To be impure, polluted or unclean connotes a kind of soul sickness as well as physical sickness. But purification primarily means to restore to a place of purity, a state of soundness, wholeness, innate essence. Isn’t that what we really want after all, a sense of being fully ourselves?

This time of year, just after the holidays, it is popular to make resolutions for cleansing, rejuvenating, losing weight, giving up bad habits etc. There is plenty of advice in the media about being proactive about it: “Burn 300 Calories in 15 Minutes! Detoxify Overnight! 20 Fat-Burning Superfoods! 10 Steps to a New You!” It is all so positive and encouraging – but relatively few people actually follow any of this good advice.

The problem is that the fast pace is not the pace that heals. We must operate quickly in crisis situations but not for longterm healing. In order to make room for the self-organizing principle of nature to reveal itself, we must become slower, more quiet and still – embracing the feminine yin qualities of being receptive and waiting.

The pace of the seasons cannot be changed. The growing of plants, the flow of water, the movement of the planets have been running at the same pace for millions of years.  We have speeded up and are very much out of synch with the natural world. We measure our time not by cycles of the sun or the moon but by our job or school schedules, TV shows, appointments, and daily routines that have nothing to do with the earth at all. The pace of everything is faster, more complex. There is a sense of urgency about everything – the state of the world, financial situations, the environment, health issues. All of these are real and affect people profoundly, but by perpetuating the rapid pace of things we are ultimately contributing to the situation we are trying to change.

Like that rivulet of dirty water, we need to surrender into the rhythms of the natural world, the cycle of day and night, the turn of the seasons, the eternal things.  Nature makes transmutation possible. It is redemptive, restorative. Water will find its way home and the earth will purify it once more. There is an intelligence that does not need our guidance, but rather our respect. We need to learn how to step away and allow the organizing capacity in nature and in our own bodies to find its way to wholeness. This is the process of purification.