It is difficult to feel for the bottom of the river. The surface of the water is cold, and my chest tightens with the shock of it. It wraps around my ribcage like an iron brace around a tub. My immediate reaction is to leap free of the bracing water to the safety of the bank, but it is too late for that.

I am already adrift - we all are, with this sudden unmooring of the world's boat.

The breath of the world doesn't stop for a moment, and then it does, as we wait for what comes next. As we settle in the cold water, the breath is sharp, fast and shallow. It is hard to control it. As the body resists, the water threatens to drag it under, until it realises that to steady itself, a few long, slow breathes are needed, right there on the thin surface, where one world ends and the other begins. Blue skies above, dark waters below. It eddies and swirls and tugs at our feet. We hold my breath and feel for the bottom, down there in the mud and murk that threatens to pull us under.

But it doesn't. Not quite, though we feel we may well be drowning.

^Source

We find ourselves adrift, pulled down a stream we didn't know existed, or perhaps had not wanted to believe was a possibility. The riverbanks look familiar, but changed, as if some water faerie had reshaped the mud in the night, and planted some unfamiliar plants amongst the yellow irises, hogweed and reeds. Look - there is a burning boathouse, it's old timbers creaking as the fire tears it limb from limb. And look, there is a anthill, crumbling in the sunshine. And as these worlds burn and crumble, the birds are buliding new nests. Swans look at us with black eyes and guard cygnets, fresh born. We're wary of them, and them of us. But it's not just the swans, and the more familiar things that have transformed as we were drifting.

It is all the monsters on this new shore, that have eaten the world we thought we loved.

But with time, we realise we must swim toward this bank, or drown. Enter the new normal of the rest of our human lives.

Yet this new 'normal' is not normal at all - it's not staying still long enough to be normal. It's a shifting, poorly defined thing. Our toes are muddy, our hair wet. The surface of our skin is cold and we long for the warmth of what was left behind us, on those long lazy days where we sat in the sun and did all the things that we thought would last forever. But everything is shifting, drifting, awash with the unknown. The uncertainty of the river causes a deep, deep anxiety in our bones. Some of us will wake with the river in our throats. Some will find it's weeds tangling in our hair and pulling at our limbs, threatening to drown us. Some will pretend we are not in the river at all. We are on the old boat still, plugging the holes. We're building rafts in the old way - flimsy things, made of ashes and rotten strapping.

This energy of the river-world is alive, this we know. We don't know if it is is 'good' or 'bad', and perhaps to label it as such is to cast us adrift even further. Perhaps it just is. Perhaps it is the thing that has always been coming for us, even as we built our fool's rafts.

There are those that will reach the unsteady shore and built the same rafts again, only to fall back into the swirling water. There are those that will go back to their homes and lock the doors and rebuild the world they thought they loved the best, only to realise the water is lapping at the front steps again.

We are human things, not fishes, they say - resist the waters. What we had once, cannot die.

We resist the flow.

We are frightened of the muddy depths.

But there are others that know that the things brought up from the bottom can create new possibilities. That the river brings fertile waters downstream. That the water feeds the crops of a brave new world. That the energy of the world has shifted irrevocably, and that there is not grief, but joy in that.

They are the ones with scales on their legs and gills shimmering beneath the surface of their skin.

And I hope that I am one of them, and I will not drown in these changing waters of this new world.

at divider elephant.png

This week's Abundance Tribe question asks: a shift in planetary energy? If you have, how has that shift affected you? How has your energetic experience changed during this period in our collective experience?

I began to write, and the river rose up underneath me. It does feel as if we have been cast adrift from everything that's familiar, as so the river metaphor just continued, and I worry I haven't really answered the question, dear @indigoocean! Energetically, I believe this is a time of great change. I find it strange I'm adrift in England again, as I was as the Twin Towers came down - another point of great change for the world. But this is so much bigger as it affects us all. We're all in the shifting river together, looking at a strange shore.

Sometimes I believe this is the time we all change. The time we've all been longing for, as if humanity has been standing at the edge of the river longing to jump in. I myself longed for the apocalypse, because the end of the world as we knew it sounded fine, because the old one is broken. Yet being suddenly thrust into the freezing water, I was afraid with the best of them. I've watched everyone go from disbelief to fear to anger and everything in between. There simultaneously seems a huge amount of empathy (we are all in the river together) to disconnect and xenophobia (don't you dare get in MY part of the river, and how DARE you do that thing because I believe it puts ME at risk and I'd rather you just drowned).

I can't help but be cynical that the powers that be are so darn big that we can't really make this new world on the new shores post COVID. People's memories are short. Maybe the human race is on the eve of doomsday after all. Maybe this is how the world ends. I think of that Plague app, the game I once enjoyed, where the surviving humans die in caves. Where else is there to go?

I see blind faith in governments people believe are protecting them. I see longing for vaccines and tracking apps. I see illusions and ignorance. I see class and race divides - the poor and black suffer, whilst the rich play tennis and swim in their private pools and cannot fathom what it's like to be in a tiny flat with four children and no job. And that makes me energetically dark, and anxious, and angry and frustrated. I can't believe those things will change - historically, they never, ever have, not through plagues, nor war, nor economic collapse. Why should things be different in a post pandemic world?

And I see potential, too. I see families enjoying the time together. I see people reinventing their work lives, reassessing whether they want to go back to the treadmill they're on. In my own subtle body, there's a trembling of excitement - is this the moment I can truly let go all the trappings of the modern world that I myself fall for, even though I know they do not make me free? Is this the time I stop thinking travelling will free me, and I have to travel further to the heart's centre, rather than Morrocco or Egypt or Greece?

Surely, surely, I hope, we will at least recognise we've all been swimming together, fearing together, hoping together, even with the vast diversity of human experience?

Have I shifted energetically, personally? No more than I would usually in response to a crisis. There's been no earth shattering changes. Just me being a human being, resisting, going with the flow, letting it in, shutting it out, and doing all the other human things in response to what's going on around me. I like to think I'm evolving and changing, but I tend to, when the going demands it. I'll long for the old world and embrace the new at the same time. Ah, to be a human!

Hope is a fine thing. I hope and trust in this shifting energy, in this stream we're all swimming in together. I hope that this new world emerges a good 'un, and we all remember how we felt in the bitter cold of the river.