emergency: A serious, unexpected, and often dangerous situation requiring immediate action; urgent, crisis, extraordinary, impromptu.*
Change one letter and it becomes
emergence: The process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed; becoming known, coming to light, exposure, unfolding. The process of coming into being, or of becoming important or prominent.*
These words share in common the Latin, emergere: bring to light; arise. Emergency holds within it and is seemingly nonexistent without emergence. It might seem that each gives birth to or holds or envelops the other. And emergence, as unveiling — whether swift or labored, forced from without or within, private or public, consciously coaxed and graceful or unconsciously wrought – is no stranger to the unexpected and dangerous.
In the messes and unexpected graces of my own and my clients’ lives, I’ve come to believe that we arrive in this world with
- the longing to know ourselves wholly
- the very wholeness for which we long
- the map for becoming
- the imbedded celestial and earth-seeded impulse to migrate toward and into the bones and beauty of who and what we have been all along.
The great mystics tell us that in order for the heart to open, for the brilliance of the heart to emanate, it must be shattered.
It is said that the heart opens in one of two ways: either through great pain or immense joy. Both catapult the experiencer beyond the consciousness of the ordinary moment, even beyond linear time. In an instant, pain and joy will make precious the just-taken, unnoticed breath that rhythmed us into their now full-on, front and center juncture that defies any attempt to escape.
Nearly twenty-five years ago, a cicada that landed on the fence in my backyard astonished me as a living metaphor of the rawness, destruction, mystery and poetics of emergence in the midst of my own emergency. I was in my twenties and in my third year of graduate studies at seminary. (I had decided to attend seminary within months of getting married and leaving an early career in television advertising sales.) By my third year of studies I had become so depressed and pixelated by anxiety that I wanted (though surprisingly never attempted) to kill myself. My will to live, to be alive, had ghosted out of me. Weekly and twice-weekly therapy sessions, then a psychiatric hospitalization afforded me only brief respites (though I’m sure that without them, I would have been an even lesser shell of a human.) I tried at least six psychotropic medications, all leaving me with intolerable side effects. I was bereft, not knowing any longer who I was. And I was terrified that my choices were to either live like this, which was no way to live or to die, because at least my physical death would be an end to what felt like a relentless slouching into quicksand.
One summer morning, looking into the backyard through my kitchen window, I saw what at first appeared to be an unremarkable lifeless remnant of an insect still stuck to the fence. I soon realized that inside of this shell was a very-much alive cicada, slowly cracking through its exoskeleton. For what was likely the span of a couple of hours, I watched as the cicada fractured and slowly exploded out of itself, out of its own body — this body that was simultaneously sustaining the birth process and becoming an artifact with each passing minute.
I witnessed the fragile, iridescent creature made of things breaking and being born both pull itself and be forced out of its sheltering skin. The whole process was one of motion and stillness, movement and rest. Once completely out, the cicada stayed attached to its emptied frame. I could see new wings unfolding — wet, glistening, dazzlingly delicate. In slow deliberate time, the wings filled out, incrementally bursting into iridescence and eventually drying. Throughout this revelation, the air was filled with the piercing harmonic wave-songs of cicadas. I was captive to the artistry and precision and perfection of the miracle unveiling itself before me. Then, during one deafening crescendo, welcomed and sung into its new life and body, the cicada suddenly flew away, up into the trees.
I’ve read that Life has no opposite. It is the Whole and the All. Within Life, there is the ongoing cycle of death and birth. I knew that morning that I would be okay. I could see my own coming into being, my own death and birth within the orbit of Life. In the decades since, there have been other exposures and arisings and experiences that have thrown me to the ground and lifted me to the stars. I continue to be shown how that which must and will be brought forth is ultimately the Light that refuses to stop, refuses to waiver, demolishes our hideouts, eclipses our cherished theories and stories and psychologies. And it doesn’t care about our social status or vacation plans or Ph.Ds. or reputations. It is the perfectly soul-timed arriving of all that we are.
When the Light, which is the mystery of Divine Love, gets too big for the husk, that very Love holds tightly the husk that must surrender. And with fierce yearning, draws back to itself the beam and body of our longing, and in the uprising of octaves, returns to us the determined eloquence of wings.
*dictionary.com
