Trauma Therapist Frances Weller on the Relationship Between Uncertainty and Renewal – The Marginalian

There are times in life when a certain continent is half underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness over us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make a new one. “It might seem that there is no point in such confusion,” wrote Virginia Woolf of such times, “those questions about what, why, and wherefore.” Unlike his religious contemporaries, who trembled when they spoke of the soul for fear of being considered anti-intellectual, Woolf devoted his life to speaking with “all these stray parts that make up the human soul,” which he knew lived on a deeper level than the personal to make us who we are. It is what is left of us and ours in those volcanic times of darkness and uncertainty. It is what rebuilds the world, inside and out, and it is what always is. It is something the world. We still use Kepler's laws of planetary motion to land rover on Mars, but we still have to reach his model of the earth as a unified body – an idea from Plato, whose political laws we still use and his logic anima mundior “the soul of the world,” we will still have to listen.

In the wake of Plato and Kepler and Woolf, trauma therapist Francis Weller offers a field guide to soul strengthening in his collection of essays. In the Absence of Normality: Soul Works for Uncertain Times (public library). Two centuries after Alexander von Humboldt founded modern nature with his observation that “in this great series of causes and effects, no single fact can be considered in isolation,” Weller insists that an accurate view of human nature must be based on the recognition of “our continuous relationship with the governing and spiritual organization.” anima mundi,” of how “our lives are fully entwined with each other, with oak sticks, night owls, outcasts, and broken hearts.”

Realizing that “the soul wanders on a winding path between sovereignty and intimacy,” he writes:

We have clearly entered the Long Darkness… It is the place of the soul – of whispers and dreams, mystery and thoughts, death and ancestors. It is a vital, inevitable and necessary place, providing a kind of soul pregnancy that can gradually give shape to our deepest lives, both personal and social. Certain things can only happen in this field of darkness. Think of the wild network of roots and bacteria, mycelia, and minerals, which make possible everything we see in the everyday world, or the vast networks in our bodies, which bring blood, nutrients, oxygen, and thoughts to our physical life. Everything happened in the dark. We must speak fluently in the habits and ways of the soul.

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We get off to a bad start. Major changes are taking place in our inner and outer environment. At the same time it is personal and strangely collective, binding us to each other.

A century after Bertrand Russell called for “great reflection” on his idealistic balance amid the darkness of the first world war, Weller writes:

It's time to be great.

To be great is to remember how embedded we are in the living world – a world that dreams and stings, a world that delights our imaginations and unites our love with its wondrous beauty. Everything we need is here. We need only remember the wide embrace of our dwellings in the woods and groves, in the marshes, and in the neighborhood, in the stories of old and the acts of love of a friend. Being great involves the powerful act of accepting all that we are in the story. Nothing has been released. We become great by accepting all aspects of our being – weakness and need, loneliness and sadness, shame and fear – all of which are seen as essential to our wholeness, our greatness.

This dimension, Weller insists, is called exclusively by those times of darkness and uncertainty that we feel too small to understand, to fight, to break through – times when the order of the world as we know it turns into chaos, where a new world cannot be born. You write:

When normality fades, when the rhythms and familiar patterns of shared living are eroded, something is activated within the soul. Hidden invitations and initiations appear in times of uncertainty. The soul sees the signs of decline – darkness, sorrow, anxiety – as requiring a radical change. Situations of trouble and uncertainty activate a certain deep movement towards the transformation of the psychological environment. These are the exact times when shifts are possible in the collective sector.

A couple In the Absence of the Ordinaryin the remaining part Weller goes on to offer “methods to improve intimacy with the world of the soul and the soul of the world.” with this lighthouse in the dark times, then revisit the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation in difficult times and the view of the Swiss poet, philosopher, and linguist Jean Gebser on the evolution of our consciousness of civilization.