Vote Embalm or Decay - what about the Life force? Holding the polarities…

One of the skills we really need to develop at the moment, is the ability to hold polarities

One of the skills we really need to develop at the moment, individually and collectively, is the ability to hold polarities without collapsing into them. To hold the polarities fully, without rushing to fixed positions and opinions, and to pay attention to what is being shown, what wants to arise.

I really feel for Americans right now. From a distance, the choice they are being presented with, is between embalming or decay. The Democrats are so strongly held by the stagnation of the current system, they can’t bring change. Whereas Trump is the full on bringer of decay… change will definitely come but it will be very difficult and degrading because the forces of decomposition and degradation are not discerning, they also degrade a lot of what would otherwise be healthy or curable. Trump himself seems to have a very strong shadow, that strongly brings out the shadow in those around him as well. People and institutions close to him seem to degenerate, which is never a good sign. (I remember being amazed by the rapid deterioration of Giuliani, from someone who was the scourge of the Mafia, into something unrecognisable as that under Trump. And then there is the entire Republican Party…)

So what does this have to do with polarity? Well, embalming and decay are not actually a polarity, they are both on the death side (which also contains other options, but that’s something to explore another time). Life force is the other side of the polarity. If the mainstream choice is between embalming and decay, we need to recognise that the polarity is not being held widely enough, and there is no outlet for the life force at all… which cannot last. We do need to create channels for it to move, or there will be a burst at some point. 

Flows are healthy and generative, but explosive bursts and floods ‘spend’ the energy and recede, as we have seen many times before, perhaps most recently the Arab Spring. Bursts and floods create a space, but don’t bring the structure to use it well… and other more organised forces move in if it’s too clear. Going further into the water metaphor, we need lots of irrigation channels and reservoirs for the flows and floods.. Almost creating a wetland for that life force stuck out at the margins to flow back in. And this is about more than politics, it's about pretty much all our human-created systems in the Western world. They are all stuck, decaying, presenting us with the limited choice of Embalm or Decay. As change-makers, we need to widen that polarity, internally and externally, to allow the regenerative forces back in. 

So how do we do that? Actually most of us have been trying to create these flows for some time, but we’ve doing it using heavy machinery. Like trying to dig a wetland with a JCB. I mean you can dig some holes and channels, but it's very laborious and expensive, and the results are usually disappointing. If you really want to recreate wetlands, you do what nature does - release the beavers to do it for you! There is an analogy to our change work.. We need to ally better with the insight and intuition that is available to us and bring it into our work. We need to learn how to bring in the beavers!

If this resonates, I invite you to join me on a course I’m running in December, which is about learning to hold polarities, developing systemic intuition, and other neglected systemic skills which are very needed by change-makers right now, internally and externally. Hopefully see you there.