Quotes about Rhythms

Humans, like other animals, are shaped by the places they inhabit, both individually and collectively. Our bodily rhythms, our moods, cycles of creativity and stillness, even our thoughts are readily engaged and influenced by seasonal patterns in the land. Yet our organic attunement to the local earth is thwarted by our ever-increasing intercourse with our own signs. Transfixed by our technologies, we short-circuit the sensorial reciprocity between our breathing bodies and the bodily terrain. Human awareness folds in upon itself, and the senses – once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth – become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind bent on overcoming an organic reality that now seems disturbingly aloof and arbitrary.

 . . . The mind seeks knowledge as a handle on the cosmos from which it gains leverage for greater control and self-satisfaction, but synchronicity will not allow itself to be used so roughly. Like the flea (on the ‘iron bull’), we must eventually give up our effort to penetrate the impenetrable and surrender to a reality which we cannot master but to which we must submit. In the end, to be honest to our exploration or synchronicity we must ourselves surrender to it. This means to relax and allow the sometimes fickle tide of fate to take its natural course, to let it wash over and benignly carry us. We must sacrifice the urgent, petty agendas of the ego to a larger field or participation. We must learn humility and own humor, finding guidance in intuition and making logic a servant rather than master. Control is a personal experience, surrender is a transpersonal one. Through surrender we learn to move with the rhythms that flow through our existence and in so doing open ourselves to the wellsprings of life that are the gift of the divine Trickster.