The Dragon

Join enough of these small sovereign communities, each itself, each rooted in its own ground, and something appears that no one designed and no one rules: a living whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Not an empire, which swallows its parts into a center. Not a hierarchy, which ranks them. Something more like an organism. Something more like a planet beginning to think.

For we do not stand outside nature, managing it from a distance. We are one of the things the Earth is doing, one of the ways it has begun to see, to remember, and to choose. What the old traditions called a dragon was never the monster of later, more frightened tellings. In East Asian traditions the dragon is a benevolent power, keeper of the waters, bringer of rain and river and spring, the very vitality of life moving through the world, generative and intelligent and kind. That is the dragon meant here, and the borrowing is symbolic rather than a complete account of those traditions.

Name it plainly, then. The dragon is the whole living body of Earth grown aware of itself, the total life of the planet, its oceans and forests and creatures and minds, gathered into a single awareness; and we, for now, are the place where that awareness is beginning to wake. It is the life force of the world, running at last consciously through the beings who can feel it. To sense even a thread of it is to feel the ground change underfoot, to walk not upon dead matter but upon a living, thriving being, one that can be felt, and aligned with, and in time perhaps even spoken with, as we grow quiet and sensitive enough to listen. That is the image at its full strength. Whether it names a fact about the world or a way of standing in it is a question this book leaves open.

This is no longer only poetry; it is a supposition with a method. Suppose that human beings came, in great numbers, into their purpose and into the capacity to call forth the best in one another, to presence, in each other, the depth that ordinarily goes a whole life unseen. Then the dragon would stir. The Earth would begin to think more clearly through us, because we would have become clearer instruments of it. We do not arrive there by conquering anything. We arrive only by entering the current at last. It is not ours to rule. It is ours to belong to, to help wake, and to answer for.

That belonging can be practiced, in our listening, our intimacy, our balance, our Art & Alchemy, our embodiment, our worship, our providence. These are the Seven Initiates of a B.O.W., a Body of Worship, which the volumes still to come will teach us to know more deeply.

TO GO DEEPER Volume V: "The Dragon Named Earth"

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