Interesting that of the top five most popular posts on my blog, two begin the past two new years. No Detours, January 8^th 2011, described in my last post and Creation Stories and the Sacrifice of Creation, written January 1^st, 2010 .

In that latter post I asked the question: What do we need to sacrifice in order to live a new cultural story that will help us co-evolve a more meaningful human wholeness and … contribute to resilient life on the planet?

 Sacrifice in our modern urban world tends to be rejected as something with which we don’t want to associate, as if it’s bad, that the only way to sacrifice is by killing something else so that we may live.  No wonder we avoid sacrifice with definitions like this one from Websters’: to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief or end.

Yet haven’t we also been taught the end justifies the means? What if the end we sought was the ideal of an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just world? What then might we be willing to sacrifice?

What if the end we sought was the belief that humans might actually love living with and for each other, that they might participate fully, not just “spectate”, in the creative juice coursing through life itself. What, then, might we sacrifice?

 What if we humans remembered that ecstasy  revivifies our love of living? What if the ego could relax its stranglehold on our psyches and embrace its role as a helpmate not a controller? What if we remembered that happiness is feeling embodied and in touch with the constant flow of this energy called living, that happiness is a process of loving not a product? How then might we sacrifice?

Folks are still finding Creation Stories and serendipitously that post connects us to the unfinished thread of November 1st, 2011 titled False Faces.

See how an unfinished story is now catching up with itself? Nothing lost, nothing gained, the plot just continues. Our lives in the proverbial nutshell!

You who read this blog regularly may remember that I chronicled the story of our masked dance last August in which we moved toward imagining a new myth to support all life on eairth. I hoped to discover more precisely what our dominant cultural paradigm might have to sacrifice in order to rewrite new storylines for a resilient American culture that contributes to the planet.

My only post in November brought us to the moment before we began the actual ceremony. We were garbed in our masks and costumes and then, and then I faltered. I left you on the precipice about to jump into the mythic world and by now you’ve probably forgotten it all. That’s all right.

Our August ceremony was so complex and richly textured, it was simply beyond words.

We did experience for a few short hours living the new myth of a communal, resilient culture that includes unseen neighbors and animal companions, but I didn’t know how to give it tooth in this linear fashion.

I can chronicle some of the storylines though:

Leadership shifts from one to another to another

Diversity is respected

We all need recognition and support

Light and dark balance each other

Feelings are honored
Love is bedrock,
Fear deserves recognition and serves as a barometer,
Anger’s purpose is noble – to protect and to empower

Everyday magic is everywhereallthetime, expect the unexpected,
life – and ceremony – never turn out the way you think they will

Context cradles us

Spirit orchestrates the human symphony

Perfection depends on our response to imperfection

We lived in a world like that – for a brief afternoon and early evening – and the memory sustains me today. Will you please tell me how this list of qualities moves in your life today? How do these storylines brew in you?

And thank you for reading!