Resolving Polarity

We live in a world of polarity, duality, extremes. Hot, cold. Left, right. Up, down. Open, closed. Awake, asleep. Everything exists on a relative scale held in place by extreme poles. In our post-modern linear minds, which have been cured of nuance, subtlety and imaginative curiosity and reduced to rigid identities revolving around polarized ideologies, we have lost sight of the circle.

The ouroboros resolves this polarity by bringing the extremes into contact with one another. The taijitu or yin/yang symbol of Taoism depicts the polarities as alive within each other and engaged in an endless whirling dance of longing for resolution. They are held within the symbol of that resolution, the circle.

The wheel of the year is depicted as a circle, with the polarity of the seasons seen as sacred markings of time that repeat over and over again on Earth. The moon phases are a circle where fullness and emptiness/darkness dance into and out of phases over and over again every month. The peak of every inhale empties into the peak of the exhale in a circular flow that marks the movement of life force through our days.

And somehow we are arrogant enough to think that our polarized ideologies do not belong to each other? That we can somehow annihilate our political enemies and reign supreme? That we aren’t One, aren’t the same People expressing our needs and fears in different ways? That illness or poverty or trauma for one of us isn’t imbalance for all of us?

In the United States, our devotion to linear polarity is taking us to the very brink of fracture. As the politcal divisions move further and further apart on the scale of polarity, the parties are also fracturing within themselves. The MAGA Republicans versus the RINOS or Lincoln Project Republicans. The Radical Leftists versus the DNC Democrats. Devoted to our differences. Entrenched. Convinced of our righteousness. Making demands. Posturing. Blaming. Victimizing ourselves, and allowing our thought leaders to tell us who the perpetrators are.

We have forgotten the steps of the dance here. The left foot and the right foot belong to the same body. The left wing and the right wing belong to the same bird. The in breath and the out breath belong to the same lungs. We are a circle of beings, intersecting with many other circles of beings. Our decisions and indecisions impact more than just human life, and our impacts are profound.

While we look scornfully across the divide at the other polarity, and use our great intellects to demonize one another, the heart is quietly breaking. Our hearts break as we watch President Biden struggle against the reality of his mortality. Our hearts break as we watch former President Trump embolden cruelty and succumb to his darkest impulses. Our hearts break for the incredible absence of the butterflies. For the devastation in the wake of tornados and wildfires. For the emptiness and loneliness of our lives. For the children killed in senseless brutality, so far beyond retaliation.

The heart remembers the dance, always. Which is why we struggle to connect to its voice and live in the head instead, where we make the rules. The heart is obedient to the rules of Nature, to the rules of Love and reciprocity and Oneness. Our hearts know how far we have gone down the dark road. Our grief is almost unbearable, and yet….it is in bearing this grief that we begin to remember.

We are all in this together. We are one People. Our hearts entrain with each other in compassion and connection, whether we want them to or not. It is Law. Our heart beats synchronize, the organ of the heart communicates energetically to other hearts without the mind’s consent or understanding. We are wired for empathy, for cooperation, for connection. And we are turning off these messages within us in favor of our entrenched polarity.

When we resolve the polarity, when synthesis is born, a miraculous healing field emerges. Our Oneness is restored. We keep our differences, but reclaim our humanity. We understand each other, even if we don’t agree. Discourse leads to new ideas, novel concepts, a way forward emerges. The sunsual undulating line between the Yin and the Yang. The serpentine, meandering Middle Way finds birth in us and between us. This alchemy is the potent, juicy, fecund, seed bearing fruit that hangs in the aether between us all now, just begging for us to take a bite. We are still in the Garden, we never left….and the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge has come into season. May we begin the harvest.