Interlude: On Discernment and Will

I spent an inordinate amount of my childhood playing in creeks.

Water is a discerning element. Rivers do not choose their course. Rain does not choose where to fall. Molecules do not choose when they will evaporate, when they will condense, when they will become ice or spend centuries underground or bubble up in hot springs.

And yet, water is a force of creation. Every inch of Earth’s surface has been sculpted by storm and flow and flood and glacier.

In the hours upon hours I spent sitting in creeks, immersed in experience, I was both witness and will. I was witness to the ways in which storm flows shifted channels, carved them deeper. I was witness to the ways in which tree roots and bedrock created structure, imposing a subtle will upon the water. I added my own will, in the form of shifting rocks, digging channels deeper, building small dams, watching the flows shift and pool in response. And I became aware of choice points, divides where a single branch or a raft of floating moss could lodge and shift the entire flow to a new course, cascading over new waterfalls and nourishing different trees before rejoining the path in the valley below. And somehow, even in my child self, I held these points sacred, felt that subtle forces and magics were at work, felt that it was not my place to impose my will here.

The “elf-divide” above Bluff Creek Falls near my childhood home. The ephemeral creek can either turn left over the roots of the cedar and through the woods, emerging to cascade silently down a sheer granite cliff, or it can turn right toward a tumble of broken boulders, a cacophanous descent spoken in a thousand water voices and echoed through hidden chambers. Or both.

Together, will and discernment weave existence. The will of plate tectonics, volcanoes, weather patterns following solar activity and transpiration and millions of subtle influences. Water always following - evaporating in sunshine, carried by atmospheric rivers, condensing and surrendering to gravity, sensing always the next lowest point, discerning a path and yet, over time, willing rock to yield, to become rounded pebbles, to become sand and clay and soil.

Our modern world has a surplus of undiscerning will, a masculine-dominant imbalance, a clash of rigid structures and ideologies and agendas, a mission of extraction for purpose and profit. A sprawling mass of concrete and steel, dams and skyscrapers, mines and monocultures, commodities and clearcuts. That edifice, borne of an illusion of separation, is beginning to collapse, and - I feel - we are beginning to awaken, to attune, to discern, to listen.

What is without, is also within. We carry this imbalance within ourselves. We are releasing it.

The separate masculine, the will, the mind-identity, fears a loss of control. The lesson, the shift, seems to be: it is OK to surrender, to let go, to trust.

The separate feminine, the follower, the discerner, fears making the wrong choice, a failure of discernment. This has been been the lesson revealing itself to me in this time: there are no wrong choices.

There are no wrong choices.

So much harm has been done by the undiscerning will, and those of us who see that can become paralyzed, afraid to exercise our own will unless we have complete clarity, resonance, alignment within ourselves.

We cannot live by discernment alone. We are creators, participants, agents of change within creation. Sometimes it is clear where the current is flowing, and it is an easy choice, a resonant choice to follow. Sometimes the river splits around an island, and neither side calls out in promise or in warning. Sometimes we have to choose into uncertainty, in spontaneity, neither guided by resonance nor repelled by dissonance but still with confidence, condensing possibility into action, knowing that the universe is not pre-determined, that these choices are the fabric of free will, the fractal branching of experience.

There are no wrong choices, and yet - there is always feedback, awareness. Sometimes we can’t sense the trajectory ahead, because the future has not been written. Sometimes we simply have to choose, allow our will to follow our intuition or inspiration or impulse and then remain open, remain fluid, feeling our way forward and not allowing our past choices to confine us, constrain us, commit us to future choices.

Or - at least - that is how I am feeling today, as I am approaching choice points amidst uncertainty in my own life.