tethering to the deep

You cannot fear destruction and love creation. They are two sides of the same coin.

This is what I think happened to a certain generation of New Age teachers; the ones who built real things through manifestation culture and then, when they began to see its shadow, didn't integrate it. They fled it. Some swung hard into patriarchal Christianity, which confused me for a while until I understood the logic: if an ineffable God is the supreme creator, then you're not responsible for the destruction that always follows in the wake of creation.

The weight of responsibility lifts.

But the weight was never the problem. The problem was the fear of destruction.

The new age teachings say you are the creator of your reality. In some ways, true. In other ways, it's dangerously incomplete because creation and destruction are forever entwined. They are the full cycle. And if you can only hold one half, you will eventually collapse under the pressure of the other arriving uninvited.

Beliefs and identities are tools. They are meant to be picked up, used consciously toward your aims, and put back down the moment they've served their purpose. Not enshrined and defended, or lived in permanently as though they are the truth rather than a truth, useful for a season.

This requires two things that most spiritual development doesn't build: core stability and psychic flexibility. The willingness to move in and out of crystallized states at will. To dance with life and death, creation and destruction, rather than pledge allegiance to one and run from the other.

Have you looked at nature lately? She is miraculous and awe-inducing, and she will wipe you out without a second thought. None of us is getting out of here alive. This is not a dark thought; it's the only honest one. The only certainty.

The alternative to making peace with the certainty and necessity of death and destruction is to manufacture illusions of certainty, such as dogma, unmovable ideals, and rigid identities, and then cling to them like life rafts on the surface of a churning ocean. Which works, until it doesn't. Until the wave comes that your raft can't survive.

Or you can anchor in the deep. The dark, still, unknowable depths where nothing is hospitable, and nothing is certain, but everything is stable. You tether yourself there, and then you can move freely on the surface, responsive, fluid, unafraid because your security isn't located in any of the forms that change.

That's the work of living a truly creative and powerful life. Not finding the right belief system to live inside forever, but mastering the art of using them at will, and being owned by none of them.