By Anna Hummel-Gumaeli
My strongest emotion during the first week of this pandemic was my lack of skills to survive. Not getting by-- but the real core “surviving if getting lost in the woods” type of survival skills. I have no capabilities to hunt or kill animals, and growing vegetables and using the soil takes time, patience and know-how. Although it never got as far as having to learn these skills, my association was to the deeper sense of being non-resilient in this situation.
During the second week came new emotions. A wave of calm came over me. I realised that we, as humanity, know what to do. We have survived pandemics before, but what we have forgotten is how to tap into our unconscious knowledge and wisdom, to ask our ancestors for help, in times unprecedented to us but not to them.
Out of this instinct came my desire to collect dream material from Grey Swan Guild members as a means to tap into this vast source of collective knowledge. I wanted to know what we knew. And here is the answer:
We forgot to listen to nature, to animals, to mother Earth. She is now showing up as an irresponsible mother that no longer wants to keep us safe but to subject us to danger and harm, whilst our father continues to keep the same structures as before, although they are not working.
Something is eating us. We fear that the other will take our livelihood, our bread. In the corner of our eye we see the Hydra, appearing with all her heads, the ones that grow back out if they are chopped off. Is this building the resilience that we lack?
We find ourselves like the Roman god Janus looking in all directions, looking to both the past and the future to understand what path to take into this passage of transition. Then she arises - The Phoenix - Burning the present to make way for the future, but only showing herself partly. We must take a leap of faith, there is no way to distinguish what the future holds. Part of her vision feels safe, part of it feels like a threat.
We need to grow our courage as tribes have always had to and make sure to stick to what will keep us alive – creativity, trust, loyalty, communication and slowing down to look at the small signs when the path is not clear.
We need new air. We want to breathe a different type of air. We do not want to be as separated from one another as we have been. We want to be part of something that more strongly holds us together and that we are not fearful of sharing. We want rest. We want other options than complacent or abusive societies.
There is an option showing itself to us-- but right now we are on the outside and are not let in. We are now responsible to acquire the skills needed to make this option visible to us. We must understand the non-ordinary. We must stick our necks out.