A metaphoric tale came to me this morning about the ancient and powerful craft of weaving and its counterparts.
I’m imagining a family of weavers at work in their farm cottage. They’re laboring through the many exacting steps of creating the fabrics that clothe their own and other families. They feel pride in their craft and lovingly teach their children how to do it with them. In my mind’s eye I can see agile fingers gathering threads in precise ways that result in colorful patterns and interesting designs that humans always devise when they create. When something happens that puts the pattern off they stop their looms and study carefully what happened to go wrong. There’s always a way to mend what’s broken or twisted into something whole and beautiful again.
The weavers are one metaphoric view of life. There was a time when this was the way the world operated, and without a lot of thought on the part of humans, it flowed on in balance for everything and everybody.
Another view is the view of the Choppers. The choppers feel an intense need to chop the world up into chunks small enough that they can own some of it. They love to know that even if this is a little chunk, this chunk is theirs. And they can get more chunks if they can manage it. It’s what gives them joy, purpose and pride in their accomplishments and shows their worth in the world.
For a long while now the Choppers have been in control on our planet. Once they started chopping things up it only made sense to organize the chopping for efficiency. Otherwise things got kind of contentious. They wanted to be fair about things, so they created very ingenious and complex rules for chunk ownership and management.
From the point of view of the Weavers there were problems with that. The chopping was somewhat random, not really based on principles of wholeness. The random chopping broke up the delicate warp and weft of creation and did a lot of damage that seemed unnecessary. Wise weavers predicted that it would make a mess of things unless there was a plan guided by wholeness. At times Choppers agreed and made rules to fix things, but it was often hard to make the rules for chunks accommodate wholeness like that.
After a few thousand years of chopping the damage had become so severe that it threatened life itself. It was indeed a mess. Even the Choppers had to admit it. So the Weavers decided to take back control of the loom and repair the torn fabric of life to beauty and wholeness once again.
This shocked and disturbed the Choppers as soon as they realized that the weavers were drawing threads from their chunks to reweave wholeness. They responded by suing the Weavers to weave wholeness without bothering their chunks.
The Weavers exclaimed that wholeness can’t leave out big chunks like that. “Once it’s rewoven it’ll be a lovely thing for everyone,” they said. But the Choppers were furious and saw this as theft of their property. That they were, in fact, the ones obeying the rules.
This is our developmental stage right now: wholeness vs possession.
Last I heard, about 800 Choppers owned nearly all the world. A lot of Weavers were working hard to salvage it from damage, but it’s been an uphill battle of the first magnitude. Due to the nature of competition and costs and technology and all, the 800 Choppers were having to work 10 times harder to keep up their chunks and causing even more damage.
There’s a good deal of resentment among Choppers that Weavers don’t appreciate everything that Choppers have done to make the world what it is. They put their hearts and souls into creating a world where chopping can be done precisely, legally, safely and efficiently. And they aren’t exclusive. Anybody who has the balls can chop too. They were very proud of what they’d accomplished up until those Weavers started unraveling things.
For their part, the Weavers express shock and dismay that anyone would consider chunks more valuable than wholeness.
As of this writing, both sides are in their respective corners looking for a deus ex machina to resolve the stand-off by striking the other side with lightening.
There doesn’t seem to be a pretty ending to this conflict. In order for both sides to find resolution some third way needs to emerge that allows for transformative adaptation for the parties.
I don’t really believe weaving wholeness and chopping ownership are mutually exclusive activities. But for anyone who’s paying attention it’s possible to see that a balance has been lost that’s hurting everybody. The polarity we’re trapped in right now doesn’t hide that, except maybe for the 800 Big Choppers who own all the chunks.
There are 7 billion+ people on this planet, many of whom are thinking about this dilemma. I really believe the answers are already floating somewhere among us, and we need to be listening to each other. From all our varied thoughts we must draw out the threads that allow us to weave a new fabric of reality that helps us live in happiness (our internal state) and harmony (our external network in right relation) on a planet that thrives.
If a deus ex machina steps in before hand with a definitive resolution, that’s a different issue that can be taken up by a different writer.
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