There were only two check stands open, and lines of customers snaked down the aisles. I remarked, “They need to open another one.” The man in line behind me replied, “We can’t open it until it’s paid for.” I was perplexed: pay for a check stand?
A man across from me caught my confusion and said with a grin, “Amazing timing!” He explained that the first man wasn’t responding to me, but to his young son, who yearned to open a box of cookies. Minus this frame of reference, his words made no sense to me — yet their synchronous timing illustrates the crucial nature of context.
Caroline Casey introduces each broadcast of her weekly radio show with, “Welcome, allies, to the Visionary Activist Show, and I’m your weaver of context, Caroline Casey.”
What It Looks Like Is Not Necessarily What It Is
We’re all weavers, whether or not we’ve ever touched a loom. And context, from a metaphysical perspective, can look very different from what we perceive in 3D.
For example: I spent the first year of my 3-year “dark night of the soul” initiation in rural New York state, the latter two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For me, these locales were less residences than healing sanctuaries for my rebirth. When I was complete with each phase of my gestation, as though a bell had rung, I knew it was time to move on. Others simply dwell in New York or New Mexico as home; for me, they were crucibles.
When I lived in southern California, I knew a man who briefly owned a restaurant. He’d originally been a silent business partner of the fellow whose dream it was to open his own restaurant; when that venture dissolved, he placed his own name above the door, and customers continued to visit the establishment with no discernable difference. Except the eatery was mainly a storefront for Steve (name changed), a vehicle for his journey. It “looked like” a restaurant, but the place’s principal function was not to serve food.
Similarly: a woman harbored an intense desire to write a book about immature bosses. While her book and resulting online presence have no doubt helped many people, her quest to convey this material to the world sprang primarily from a need to heal her relationships with past superiors.
In each case, location, restaurant, and book created the context for valuable personal development, beyond the obvious outward purpose they served.
Information Alters Experience
We can gain new clarity or a profound ah-ha! from revisiting a catalyzing event, once we gain context that was initially absent. In 1993, I watched the film Resurrection, starring Ellen Burstyn and Sam Shepard. I’ve written before about what a visceral experience this was for me. When I discovered the movie uploaded to YouTube in 2010, I decided to watch it again.
What astonished me, from the vantage point of seventeen additional years and awakened perspective, was a reference to “the moon under her feet” (which comes, amusingly, from the Book of Revelations.) In 2003 I read The Moon Under Her Feet by Clysta Kinstler, a Mari Magdalene story that takes place 2,000 years ago. The book also affected me profoundly. When I watched the film in 1993, those words passed right by. In 2010, they pierced my soul. Context.
In these extraordinary times, the context of the known cannot provide the container for where we’re going. The new context arises from the liminal, luminous places we touch with our hearts, and can be both as ephemeral and as everlasting as breath. Each of us is the warp and the weft; we inter-are, as Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist and author Thich Nhat Hanh says. What looms large is our future.
About the Author:
Amara Rose, Managing Editor of Ascension Lifestyle, is widely published in health, business, lifestyle, and new thought magazines, both digital and print. Visit LiveYourLight.com, where you can also subscribe to her monthly e-newsletter, What Shines.
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