I've written about "going with the flow" before. We all talk about it a lot. Everyone talks about it. There is even a Zen Tarot card of "Going with the Flow". It's the Ace of Cups in traditional Tarot. Obviously "going with the flow" has a lot of many and difficult applications! Let's think about that for a moment!
We saw Gasland 2 last week, Josh Fox's second movie about the horrors of fracking. While "visions of sugar plums" may "dance in your heads" around Christmas time, "visions of hell" and "frack pit, frack pit, full of frack shit" were swimming around in my head last week, after seeing that movie.
At which point, one needs to take a look at a whole series of early
A Course in Miracles lessons:
Lesson 12, "I am upset because I see a meaningless world";
Lesson 14, "God did not create a meaningless world";
Lesson 16, "I have no neutral thoughts";
Lesson 19, "I am not alone in experiencing the effects of my thoughts". In a nutshell, you have to work on your thoughts and perception, practice living in the moment with whatever is in front of you at the time, and learn from that experience, whatever it is showing you or teaching you. That is "going with the flow".
Our flow took us out of Gasland and immediately into family. Charque's sister and her 14-year-old granddaughter have been staying with us this past week. We have had a very good week. But I am now practising trying to look at life through the eyes of a 14-year-old whose mother has had stage four inflammatory cancer for nine of those fourteen years. Move over fracking. Let's look at cancer now. It's quite amazing that our niece is still alive. But nobody dies by chance or but by their own consent at some deep level. By the same token, nobody gets fracked if they haven't at some (again, deep,) level chosen the experience to live and learn from. It's all part of "going with the flow". Sometimes the flow flows over cataracts and chasms; sometimes it chugs along through meadows and woods.
In case you haven't noticed the irony of "going with the flow" when talking about fracking which both seriously messes with the water table as well as taking a monstrous amount of water to operate with...... well, it's interesting to note that water is so basic to life and so compelling a metaphor for spirit. The need is to go to the deeper waters of spirit which takes you away from the ups and downs of life (or "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"), down to the levels of vision, guidance, understanding, so that when you surface onto the earth again, be it fracking, or cancer, or loss of voting rights, you can still bob along, not taking the earth too, too seriously, or metaphorically trying to put all of your eggs in the physical basket. Perception is a choice. To quote ACIM again: you don't need to change the world; you need to change your mind about the world.
