Just Below the Surface

We live in a physical world. Whatever our personal beliefs, perspectives, or conscious awareness of why natural disasters happen, they are a reminder that the environment we live in is not always calm and stable. The fiery, windborne conflagrations that demolished neighborhoods, homes, and lives in Altadena and the Palisades this past month showed us that the beautiful forestlands we live near have their own cycles of death and rebirth, shifting from creative to nurturing to destructive, archetypal processes personified by the Hindu Gods of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

As residents of this planet, we are enmeshed in the natural world. It nourishes and sustains us. But its power to transform from safe to dangerous lurks just out of sight, just below the surface, just out of reach of our everyday consciousness. We may sense and feel and believe that everything is okay, but then it’s not, and our communities, our homes, and our lives are upended.

So why do disasters sometimes take us by surprise? One idea is that over time our experiences and cultural conditioning push us to think we are immune from harm. Called optimistic bias in psychology, or positive thinking in New Thought philosophies, these belief systems help us overcome fears and doubts about our lives, about our world. They allow us to take risks, to move forward, to live large, believing and knowing the universe supports us. Guided by the light within, it’s our own personal survival skill, thriving from within.

But sometimes those very biases and beliefs can block out the possibility of existential threats lurking below the surface, right near the wildland’s edge, right under the waves that break so evenly along the shore, right in the skies where we navigate our advanced aircraft to their landing sites. And then the unthinkable happens. A flood, a fire, a tsunami, a plane crash. The world turns upside down. Our very existence is threatened. All we have worked and believed in is gone, the illusion of safety and security shattered.

Disasters not only change lives and landscapes, they can change us. They bring us back to our roots, to our underlying motivations and hard-won capacity to flourish in this world. To our underlying will to survive. To strengths and capabilities we don’t always acknowledge. And facing threats, something remarkable happens. We go deep. Our autonomic nervous system kicks in with the parasympathetic flight or fight response. Our very own emergency response system. Adrenaline pushes us to action to save ourselves and to reach out to those around us. The stress response. Our inner hero or heroine is reborn, conditioned over the millennia we humans have roamed the earth to manage threats, to overcome adversity.

All the while larger efforts around us are initiated. We have our collective stress response. Our emergency first responders who appear and help us get to safety. Just out of sight, just below the surface of our everyday life. They spring to action. Ordnum ab chao. Order out of chaos. Evacuating people , fighting flames, clearing debris, creating a path for the recovery work.

And then our autonomic nervous system does us another favor. It slows us down. We shift to the sympathetic nervous system that balances out our recent emergency mindset and activity. Our involuntary psyche, sometimes called instinct but I’d rather call it deep intuition, tells us to come down from our heightened awareness of danger, to relax, be quiet, crash out, go dark, be still. Out of harm’s way we can now grieve for that which has happened. We question where to go next, how to move forward, what are the implications for our lives both individual and collective. Time to reset. Time to recover. Time to breathe.

And what we see all around us now is an outpouring of love, goodwill, and resources for recovery. Our
collective resilience affords us the strength to continue. We are grateful to be alive. We are transformed through the challenges we have confronted, rebirthed, and more aware perhaps of who we are and what our purpose is in this lifetime.

Like the archetypes embodied in our lived experiences, we have changed and grown. Knowing that the Universe and the Spirit of God within us is one. Leading us to dwell consciously in the promise of Resurrection, for both ourselves and our impacted communities. We survived, we will thrive. We are digging deeper to understand events and conditions and states of being that are right below the surface pushing up from darkness to light, lifting us up, renewing our connection with our people, our city, our world as we imagine what it can become.