Life Force

Friends, 

One of the great epiphanies in my life occurred in my mid-twenties while watching the alewife run at Damariscotta Mills in Maine. Like viewing spawning salmon, the teeming numbers of the alewife run alone was impressive, but what was most impactful and profoundly memorable for me was their compelling tenacity to overcome and survive against the seemingly impossible feat before them. After several years in salt water they reenter fresh water at exactly the tiny stream where they had begun. One after another they flip themselves up one fish ladder obstacle after another determined to fulfill their destiny and complete their life cycle and to continue to endure as a species. The longer I watched their struggle the more profoundly mesmerized and amazed I became. I felt the alewives were inviting me into a lifetime exploration to explain the mysterious life force that compels the alewife. I have often continued to imagine how that same life force is also  embedded in life in general, and somehow even in my own soul, heart and mind, not as a predestined fate, but as a steadying, resourceful force in my life that I experience as love. Whatever its source, this Grand Mystery of Life is the heart of the Great Commons, creation’s shared gift to us all, and I am satisfied to call it Love in accord with all great religious teachings. 

What initiated my reverie about the alewives was my sudden awareness of the life force that must compel so many refugees to endure desert, jungle, oceans, exploitation, painful travel, and daily risks of their lives for weeks if not months and years. I am deeply grateful I have never faced that level of the fateful threat of death, starvation, or war that many refugees are fleeing, or being driven to risk all to provide for the safety and a better life for my family and my children. So I can only imagine what a powerful sense of survival - whether fear, religious conviction, or survival - that would compel so many refugees to endure these hardships. My heart and prayers are evermore attuned to the plight of the world’s refugees, especially as they are further rejected if and when they arrive to presumed sanctuary. It is one thing to think of refugees in the political terms of how to control the numbers, and it is another to think of them as courageous and struggling individuals aspiring to safety and survival. 

The comparison between the alewives and the human life force, of course, is not exactly the same. The basic difference is that the human species has a level of intelligence that allows us to make life choices, limited as they may be. So as we struggle through difficult times of illness, loss and governmental efforts to restrict our freedom and control us, we often do have the ability to develop alternative strategies for survival and life fulfillment. That may be the primary task for us now as we live into and through the Trump administration.

May we all become attuned to the mysterious life force, whether it is through Love or another source of beneficent energy, that enters and guides us throughout our lives.

Peace, and may “The Life Force of Love” be with you,

Tom