We know we are at a critical point. Many of us are awake and aware; many more are awakening every day. If you are reading this, you are probably one of those who recognizes that part of this awakening entails having to learn to do new things. If I have a favorite passage from written scripture, it is probably this one:
"Do not recall what happened of old, or ponder what happened of yore! I am about to do something new! Even now it shall come to pass, suddenly you shall perceive it: I will make a road through the wilderness and rivers in the desert." Isaiah 43: 18-19
So simple, so direct, yet filled with so much hope and promise. Still, I remember the first time I read this. I thought, yes, but do we really want God to do a new thing? It's much less anxiety provoking if God keeps doing the same old things, even if it does mean we don't have a road or rivers. Because if God does a new thing, then we will have to do new things, too. For example, not ignore what is happening. Follow the road. Be nourished by the living waters of the rivers.
Realignment means to get into correct, adjusted position. It involves adopting a new attitude, literally a new posture. It means moving from fear, to faith, to fecundity...right now. Suddenly you shall perceive it! From scarcity to abundance. From anger to sorrow, and joy. From chronos time, to kairos time. And above all, it means letting go of all that happened of yore.
Here is a passage from David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous, which for me goes directly to the heart of this idea:
"Yet the practice of realignment with reality can hardly afford to be utopian. It cannot base itself upon a vision hatched in our heads and then projected into the future. Any approach to current problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future implicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time. It holds us, that is, within the same illusory dimension that enabled us to neglect and finally to forget the land around us. By projecting the solution somewhere outside of the perceiveable present, it invites our attention away from the sensuous surroundings, induces us to dull our senses yet again, on behalf of a mental idea. A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future, but strives to enter, ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment. For the other animals and the gathering clouds do not exist in linear time. We meet them only when the thrust of historical time begins to open itself outward, when we walk out of our heads in the cycling life of the land around us."