The Guts of Life
One of my favorite people once told me:
If you want to build a world, you better build a wormhole.
As someone who has spent her life learning how reality works, this statement made sense to me on a level that isn’t logical or linear.
It landed where the best truths do: deep in the gut.
Study life long enough and you will start to notice organizing systems of intelligence emerge like one of those Magic Eye images. I find if I let my gaze relax, suddenly the facade cracks and the underlying message surfaces.
Look deep and you’ll see: the answers are everywhere.
What is astonishing is how limited our perception is.
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We are not born like this.
One could argue that we are lost gods, wandering through the world blindfolded.
But more and more, I am coming to understand that this all-connected way of seeing is a lost art in an arguably lost culture that has colonized the living world and turned it into an overpriced golf course.
In America, at least.
This inherited imperialism has made it difficult to see things as they are, for by nature it severs humans from their surroundings. It extracts resources and knowledge — the living wealth of a community — without considering the importance and necessity of context.
All things exist in relationship.
It is we who forget.
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I learned this while getting lost in the woods as a kid.
There I would talk to plants and scavenge for stones for hours. The strange language of nature was easy for me to read, and I cherished this special connection for what it revealed: the wisdom encoded in living things.
I fantasized about living in the forest permanently, deep inside a tree.
For the entirety of nature welcomed the entirety of me.
Then I grew up and found that my way, this untamable essence, this feral, instinctual language, put me at odds with much of the ‘modern’ world.
A bitter pill, but I am better for it.
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For you see, life taught me how to be adept at decoding complexity. Along the way, I became savvy at navigating many kinds of realities. We all did, to some extent. But not everyone dares to question the handed-down conditions — or to reinvent them.
Whereas my existence seems all but designed to break the rules.
Which helped me realize something crucial:
If you can break the rules, you have bought into an illusion.
Because here’s the thing: what is eternal is true. From that lens, you can begin to understand the game of life from a far more expansive perspective. You can start to notice what actually sustains and persists across great spans and intervals. Or as I like to put it:
Life doesn’t play to win.
No, life plays to expand.
I will say this again and again.
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Welcome to the fractal mindset, my friends! It is one of the building blocks of existence. If a fractal is a pattern that repeats ad infinitum at scale, then follow this logic forward for a minute, a month, a millennium, then add a billion+ years give or take since the beginning of everything. Inevitably, you will find similar structures developing in parallel at every level, from the atomic to the cosmic.
A lightning bolt is a vein is a root when you peer at the basic bones of it all.
If you are paying attention, you will notice that life is here to help you master crucial lessons. Most if not all of those lessons concern your PERSPECTIVE. And in order to do that, life will gladly give you helpful opportunities to attune your true vision.
But, given certain conditions, you might not remember your ability to see these timeless clues.
A metaphor, then, is a powerful teaching device. Used to reveal unlikely likeness between two things, it’s designed to bridge the unknowable; perhaps the previously incomprehensible.
In short: metaphors teach you how to see things you couldn’t see before.
But they do this by pointing to what already works.
Which brings me to that WORMHOLE.
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What am I meandering towards?
If life is a fractal, it follows that universal fundamental organizing intelligence will exist in…EVERYTHING.
In fact, I might go so far as to say: there is nothing you don’t contain the data for and thus: NOTHING you can’t know. An answer already exists in your field of vision.
Somewhere in your periphery, a pattern is waiting for you to pay attention. This is where the metaphor enters, and it is a very fun game to play with the guts of life, once you get the hang of it.
Struggling with something? Feeling stuck or at odds with things? Let go of the human need to explain and enter the metaphorical, mythical level of existence. Give yourself a break and stop trying to grok it for a minute.
Instead: Sense the hidden, subterranean signals. Taste the wind. What does life show you in the space of your listening?
What strange incident, what glorious serendipity, what obvious mess is blinking neon? What magical metaphor waits on the sidelines as you turn in circles? You might laugh when you finally see it. It’s been right there, beckoning to you. Because whether you believe it or not, you are already orbiting the knowledge you need.
But your belief in that possibility is the key to perceiving.
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So what I riff from my friend’s mind-bending sentiment is this:
Any new way of seeing requires a QUANTUM LEAP.
Real growth is a game of extending your SEEING because you can only BE what you have the consciousness to perceive.
Your leap of faith is the enchantment that brings the imaginal vision into physical reality.
In other words: it is not through the KNOWN PATHS that we arrive at NEW CONCLUSIONS.
WORMHOLES break the rules of one world in order to give birth to the next.
YOU are the doorway between them.
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Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
