The Centre Always Holds

Started my day listening to a little Jesus Christ Superstar; it has struck me of late that, with so much focus on drought, political turmoil, war, etc, there are more than a few folk with a little Armageddon on their minds. Blame it on the Tzolkin.  This, naturally, got me thinking about Yeats' The Second Coming:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Of course, we Western folk tend to be a bit on the selfish side.  We look at time through our own lens, "like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives" kind of thing.  Not everyone looks at the world through such linear terms; in fact, even when you look at systems theory in the West, there's a recognition of boom and bust cycles.  After all, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

Days, seasons, the rise and fall of empires, the boom and bust of economies, the spiral outwards to political extremes and the oppositional contraction to the political middle - these aren't linear things; they're turns of the wheel.

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

The closer we collectively get to the middle, the more stability we have.  This is what Lao Tzu meant when he said "hold on to the centre."

In the mean time, the wheel keeps turning - we're just along for the ride.