It was late Thursday afternoon of a two-day event at Sunrise Ranch, Gathering the Tribe. We were up at the Rimrock Firepit area and Karen Pritchard was guiding the group in a collective mural painting. She had put on a channel of Enya instrumental music—so lovely. There we were, with people going out from the event tent to do their part of the mural. I did mine and came back, waiting for others to finish. As I looked out, I saw a silvery thread drifting on the southerly breeze through the valley. It looked like a spider thread, and at first I thought Oh, of course, there is a spider thread going by, but then realized, There are no trees out there except at the floor of the valley. Usually where there are spider threads, there is a tree and a spider hanging off the tree and coming down to earth. There were no trees nearly high enough for these spider threads. And it is not just staying in one place—it is drifting through the valley.
The sun was beginning to set over Green Ridge, and so the rays of the sun were illuminating the thread. And then I saw another one, and another one. Some of them seemed to be twenty-five feet, thirty, and then forty feet long, drifting through the valley, illuminated by the sun and dancing to Enya’s instrumental music.
Sometime after, someone reminded me of what I used to know but had somehow forgotten. As portrayed in E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, baby spiders wait for a windy day to spin out a kind of thread that they spin out once in their life. They catch the breeze and literally cast their fate to the wind. And so at the end of each of these illuminated threads was a baby spider, which we could not see—we just saw the thread.
The spider is symbolic of us, in a certain way. Its web is symbolic of the web of life and the web between us as Beings. That is how human life is held together. Our life is held together among us on the threads of relationship. And so all that we create as human beings is created on the foundations of Being formed by relationship, known in our own experience and then shared among us.
The foundations of a new world are established in Being. We might say they are established in God, but what is God? God is a word that we use to name the Beingness of the world, and the Beingness of the universe. It is a way of naming that the universe and the world are not just created out of energy and matter; they are created out of Being. The universe is created as an expression of eternal selfhood and the constellation of all Being.
The Lord our God is one God, one reality of Being throughout the cosmos, and yet it is a constellation. The angels of heaven are the composition of the Being of God. And relative to each one of us, there is that God reality within us, seemingly so elusive in people’s experience, something seemingly so separate, and yet more and more we are having an experience of that reality living through us, as us. It might seem like a terrifying thing: where do we go in that picture if God is taking over? Are we having a visitation—a walk-in? And what happens to us in that whole process?
I will tell you what happens to us. We find that the most real thing about us is the God dimension of our Being. And that reality is living through us, as us, and we find that that is who we are. If someone is visiting or walking in, it is the reality of us. Beyond personality, beyond need, beyond want, beyond preference, there is a reality that comes through us and is embodied by us in our living. That reality can seem to be, all at the same time, something foreign and yet familiar.
The experience of Being carries with it the feeling of ineffable home, an ineffable home that can be made real in our relationships with one another. It can be made real in our houses; it can be made real in the way we embrace one another. It is the ineffable heaven of our Being that is the home of who we are, the home for the God-self. And when the God-self is in expression, there is home. We bring our home with us. And there is the fabric of Being, the web of Being, known between us.
Having that experience, we can well say to one another, I called you to me, and you came. I called you into my life, and you came. And I hear you calling me, and I am here. We show up, awake to our true nature and our truest reality. We show up that way with one another, calling forth the reality of Being in one another and calling forth the threads of connection that are natural to us as Beings but which somehow have to be spun on earth. That happens easily when we are present in the highest reality of ourselves, expressing that reality in thought and word and deed, and in the very energy that we are emitting and embodying in our life and sending out to one another.
Creation happens that way. Any creation happens that way for us as human beings. It could be the performance of a piece of music; it could be an event like Gathering the Tribe. It could be the manifestation of a community on a piece of property, like Sunrise Ranch. It all happens in the same way. I called to you and you came; I heard you calling to me and I am here. The threads between us carry the vibration of Creation and create coherence in our field.
Within the act of Creation, there is the natural urge to come together. Some of us felt that around Gathering the Tribe. Here was this coming event, and there was a coming together, knowing that Creation happens when we come together, when we stay connected and allow coherence to be known.
There is already coherence at some level of our Being. I’m pretty sure God is coherent. Us? Not so much all the time, because there are human things that get in the way of our coherence. There is work to do for us as human beings to keep the web of connection clear, so that it can vibrate and bring us together. Then the vibration of Creation can move through the web that we are sharing, and we find ourselves in an energy field in which Creation happens.
Music is so beautifully an embodiment of that: people coming together and strengthening, magnifying an energy field. Music celebrates the unfoldment of Creation in time through the beat, the rhythm, the tempo, and the unfoldment of vibration through time. Some music does get incoherent. If the musicians have not come together, they are not in right relationship with one another, or they are not in sync, it gets incoherent. But music at its best celebrates us coming together as human beings and allowing the unfoldment of Creation over time.
Music is clearly something of itself—a glorious thing in which we participate. But it is also an entrainment with what the rest of our lives is meant to be about, where we all are musicians of Creation, hearing the vibration of Creation that wants to sing through us. And knowing that we have to come together and be coherent, we let the power of love move through the web that we share.
That is what happens when we create. For Gathering the Tribe, there was all the planning that was done—and thank you to everyone who played a part in that. There were all the little things that made it work, that depend on our coherence and our ability to stay connected. There were moments for me when I was on a panel. Rachel Morrison was hosting, and there were moments I looked around and couldn’t find her. Yikes! It was important to me to catch her eye and stay in tune. It turned out she was around the corner on her iPhone, organizing the next session. My point is that just as a guitar player and vocalist stay in touch and in tune, our creation together in any field depends on our connectedness and coherence. We are telling each other, We are in this together. Let us allow our coherence to hold Creation over time. And when things become dissonant or incoherent, let us do the work of keeping it clear. And let us follow the impulse that calls us together. We call to one another, and together we hear the call of Creation within us.
Where there is a coherent, conscious field held between people, there is the work of Creation and all the practical ways that we create together. Just as for musicians performing, there are all the practical things about staying in time and staying together and staying in tune. But if that was all that music was about, it would not be very exciting. It would be mechanical. The point of all that is that the power of love can move through that coherent field created by the musicians. It is always different—all the essences of love in their unfoldment come through the music, and even the same piece of music is different on a different day. How symbolic of our function as human beings. Our coherence allows the power of love to move Creation.
The patterns of Creation for us as human beings are actually so essentially simple. We show up as ourselves, we stay coherent inside and with each other, and spin the web of connection between us because we are showing up with each other, hearing the call together. And then, over that web, there is the power of love that begins to move and create. It creates in our immediate field and it resonates out into a larger field, beautifully and wonderfully.
We have to gain coherence, you and me, if we are to have any hope of resonating out into that larger field and creating coherence in that larger field. If we are to bring the call of love into that larger field, the immediate field of you and me has to get clear and coherent. Allowing the higher dimensions of our Being to be here and express, and to take us over, we become coherent, one to another. We participate together in the intimacy of Being and the intimacy of Creation. And then, because we have done that in the immediate, with the people right next to us, we have the chance to reverberate with the call of love and the call to coherence in the larger world.
There is a tremendous requirement for coherence, for you and me to create, and bring the power of what we have to bring in the world in the only way that it truly can be brought. And then, if you have the other end of the spider thread, we can hold that together and allow the power of Creation to move between us.
There is a kind of death in all of this. It is not a bad death, though. It is the death of the little-me reality—not such a bad thing, actually. It is the death of all the things that go with the little-me reality: all the worry about how I am going to end up in all this, what is going to happen to me, all the preferences and all the likes and dislikes. It is just the little-me reality. If we were to simplify this, it all gets replaced by the big-me reality. It all gets replaced with the highest parts of my Being showing up and expressing. Not so bad.
When that happens for a person, it looks like they are living the life that everybody else is living. They are doing all the same things that everybody else does: eating and working and recreating and having fun and going through all the human things that we all go through. And yet, when that higher reality of the God-self is present, expressing and creating, everything has changed. I celebrate the fact that we are people who are awakening to that experience. We are awakening to it and then finding that the experience is being activated through us, and finding that in our surrender to it and our answering to the call that we have heard, we are expressing something that is at the same time unfamiliar and new, yet familiar, and we are knowing home.