Order
and Chaos
“One
must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a
dancing star.”
Friedrich
Nietzsche
It
occurred to me just the other day, that the reason Harry and I make a
good Spirituality Group team is because he brings order, and I bring
chaos, and both are necessary. Chaos is the creative source. Gothic
novelist, Mary Shelley, wrote, “Invention, it must be humbly
admitted, does not consist of creating out of void, but out of
chaos.” Artist, Paul Chezanne, put it this way: “We live in a
rainbow of chaos.” Harnessing the chaos inside oneself so that it's
orderly enough to be understood by others is how art brings focus.
I
stand by the Native American belief, “As within, so without; as
above, so below.” We, in other words, are a microcosm of the
macrocosm. Space itself has certain natural laws that bind it into
order. Likewise, we have certain physiological functions that take
chaos and give it manageable structure. Both are necessary—out of
chaos comes order. As Carl Jung said, “In all chaos is cosmos, in
all disorder a secret order.”
When
we look around us and see only chaos, we are terrified that order may
never come. When our thoughts are swirling to the point of craziness,
we fear it will never stop. When that is happening, one way of
gaining some degree of control, is to look to the small things. Put
order where you can. It may sound silly, but doing the laundry,
folding the sheets, ironing the pillowcases, helps calm the storm.
One of my favorite ways to bring order to my own interior chaos, is
to go into my basement and work—clean up, straighten shelves, bag
the trash, and box up the give-aways. Cleaning out a closet, or
mopping a floor seem like menial tasks, but they help to bring order
to disorder both physically and mentally.
I
have a neighbor who mows her grass even in winter. Once or twice a
week, she is out there with her lawn mower. She puts out fresh pine
straw, rakes and bags sticks and leaves. I have a feeling that is the
way she brings order to her own chaos. Being close to the earth,
getting our hands dirty, grounds us, and grounding is needed when
chaos is flying around inside our heads.
We
will never have order as a constant state simply because there are
too many variables to control. Also, because chaos is the creative
source out of which the rich tapestry of life is woven. Many colors,
many threads, bound together into lovely patterns of light and dark,
all necessary to the whole.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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