Yesterday morning I read a post by Laura Grace Weldon, "Tableau." I started to respond in a comment below her post, and my response got longer and more involved until I realized I may as well gather it all up and dump it here.

We'll get to what I wrote down the page, and you can skip to that if you like. But it will make more sense if you read Laura's story first. I've copied it below, with a few bits removed to make it shorter (not that it was super long to start with).

Laura's story ("Tableau")

"It’s dusk. I am in a line of traffic slowed to five mph. Behind several eighteen-wheelers, I can’t see what’s happening till I’m right there at the accident’s jarring tableau.

A woman prone on the pavement.

A uniformed man reaching into a ruckled car.

Medics leaping from orderly ambulances into chaos.

I’m still moving at three mph, but a different slow motion takes over. For what must be only a moment it seems I see past and future slide into now. I can’t explain it.

Some glitch in the filter between what we can know and cannot know shows me the injured woman already recovered. I hear her say, improbably, the accident turned her life around.

I see the cop who is waving us along with an orange-nosed flashlight recognize, much later, he will train to be a paramedic. He shakes his head at all the schooling it will take to save lives yet earn half as much. I even see arguments about this with a wife, who holds a small child between them like a wall. I look right in his eyes as I pass and see somewhere in him he already knows this too.

I recognize whoever is trapped in the car has left his body long enough to see Beyond before coming back. It changes him.

Something like an incomprehensible geometry shimmers over the whole scene, illuminating patterns too large and complex for me to comprehend.

This all happens in the seconds it takes me to drive past. Did that really happen? Are these possible futures? Already it seems unreal."

Maybe any future is possible

Here's what I started to say in my comment at the bottom of Laura's post. (I was responding not only to her post but also to her responses to some of her reader comments. In one of her responses she said that one possibility is that she has a vivid imagination.)

Laura, I am sure you do have a vivid imagination (and that may have been a contributing factor in why you were able to comprehend what you saw, as opposed to just brushing it off), but I don't think you "made it up."

There's no question in my mind that most of the assumptions most of us make--about things like time, space, and what is "possible" vs what is "not possible"--are very limiting.

I could even ask, what is this thing we're calling "the future"? Maybe I'm being naive, and I certainly have no proper qualifications for engaging in such a discussion, but why couldn't all possible "pasts" and "futures" be happening concurrently with "now" in dimensions we don't usually see into?

My understanding (which I choose deliberately from among many possibilities) is that any "future" is possible. Some are more probable than others, for sure, but anything is possible.

A vote for a certain kind of future

What we look for in the world around us, how we interpret what we see, what we choose to focus on and give our attention to -- are all ways of voting for (or perhaps holding space for) the kind of world we want to live in.

In my opinion, when Laura had the courage and presence to allow herself to focus on what she saw, write it down, and share it (versus just shrugging it off) she was casting a strong vote for a particular kind of future. One in which an accident can turn a woman's life around, a man can go Beyond and return, changed, and a policeman, while directing traffic, wrestles with what is truly his to do.

I too would vote for a future like that.

"Threads from the unknown," with which to weave "a fabric of possibility"

The reason I was so interested in Laura's story was that it's the kind of story that suggests that nothing is as it seems.

If everything were as it seems to our physical senses and our modern minds, then it would be true that the only way to shift a big problem is with a big lever. Force and leverage would be all that mattered.

But if things are not as they seem--if, for example, what appears to us as energy, matter, space, and time turn out to be inter-related expressions of intelligence, and there are unseen worlds filled with endless possibility at play just beyond our normal awareness--then what?

Unexpected and improbable...

Another person who commented on Laura's post mentioned a phrase I had never heard: "deus ex machina." I looked up what that means, and found this:

"The term was first used in ancient Greek and Roman drama, where it meant the timely appearance of a god to unravel and resolve the plot. The deus ex machina was named for the convention of the god’s appearance in the sky, an effect achieved by means of a crane (Greek: mēchanē). The dramatic device dates from the 5th Century BC; a god appears in [many plays] to solve a crisis by divine intervention.

Since ancient times, the phrase has also been applied to an unexpected savior or to an improbable event that brings order out of chaos..."

Why shouldn't it be possible that the plot we currently find ourselves in, with all the challenges and crises we're collectively and individually facing, could be resolved by unexpected and improbable divine intervention?

Welcoming and aligning all the parts

It's tempting to think that if we engage in enough wishful thinking and virtue signaling, sooner or later the divine (or some such) will come from somewhere outside us, probably from above, to put the world right.

It won't.

(I don't know much, but I do feel pretty sure about this one point.)

There's only one place an effective divine intervention can come from, and that's inside us.

One of the things I mean by that is that deliverance isn't handed to us from outside of us; we have to work for it.

And the work isn't what you might be thinking. The work I'm referring to here is the shifty, uncomfortable business of making a sincere effort to get very clear and aligned within ourselves.

The awkward, messy, painful business of welcoming home (integrating) all our parts. Including the hurting ones, the angry ones, the "too loud," "too big," "too [insert adjective here]" parts.

(Nobody is suggesting perfection, mind you. Just a sincere effort.)

Because clarity and integration enable us to cast much more effective votes for our chosen kind of future.

Is anybody listening?

Is it worth it, all the inner work? 

Is anybody listening?

Does anybody care?

My answers would be Yes, Yes, and Yes. I'd go so far as to say that the harder it is, the more it matters.

I'm quite certain that the Universe, or some incomprehensibly vast Intelligence that you can call by any name you like, is listening.

Not random. Intelligent.

I'll finish by paraphrasing some bits from an interview I listened to a few days ago.

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