MY JOURNEY OF SOUL INITIATION PART 6
ENACTMENT
Enactment is “The fifth and final phase of Descent to Soul when you begin to embody your mythopoetic identity [or true purpose, JG] through acts of service to your community, when you launch your giveaway, the wholehearted performance of your vision.” pp.378-379. You start to offer your gifts to the world because you can’t help it. You become, to use Plotkin’s words borrowed from Thomas Berry, an active agent for the dream of the earth. (p.300)
It is imperative to understand that “discovering who you are, in other words, doesn’t end the moment you receive a vision. That’s actually when the discovery begins.” (p.301) This whole process takes a while and “while” is measured in years, not months. As a teacher said to a friend of mine after a vision fast, you come down from the mountain and think the next step is to quit your job and implement your vision. But it doesn’t work like that; you have to become the vision or worthy of carrying the vision out into the world—that’s Metamorphosis. Then you have to stick your toe in the water and try out some methods of sharing who you are, sharing your vision, to see what might work.
Plotkin writes “When in Metamorphosis, embodiments of mythopoetic identity (primarily through ETCs) are mainly for the purpose of shape shifting the Ego (even if they might sometimes provide a service to others). During Enactment in contrast, mythopoetic embodiments are focused on providing a service (even though they also contribute to the shape shifting of the Ego).” p.306
People during Enactment often experience more soul encounters, have to continue working on becoming their vision and need to do more healing and wholing, a process that never ends as far as I can tell. But I think the difference between these experiences during Enactment and these comparable experiences before Enactment is that during Enactment you have a much, much, much better idea of where you are headed. Before your start to climb out of the soul canyon, your actions are done in the faith that something is possible, but you know not what exactly. By the time you get to enactment, your actions are in service to your vision, which is in service to the more than human world (or Dream of the earth if you prefer that framing).
My enactment probably started around the time that I remembered my name—Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth, coinciding with my impending retirement from my day to day work at my company, thus allowing me the space to focus on my teaching and writing. This is all in the 2020 to 2022 time frame. Let’s take the specific example of writing. I’ve always been a scribbler—I have unreadable journals in my filing cabinets back to when I was in College. They’ve mostly been personal stuff, but there are also a few stories, some attempts at magazine pieces, a novel, some writing about Moses and myth etc. But predominantly they were focused on my chronicling and working through what was happening in my life. Now I am still scribbling as evidenced by these blogs, but they are focused more on “providing a service (even though they also contribute to the shape shifting of the Ego.”) I’m less working to understand when I went through enactment than I am in showing my readers that enactment is a slow process and giving a feel for one person’s path in the hopes that it might inform your understanding.
The distinction between a delivery system and an ETC undertaken as part of enactment can be a little vague. Take my teaching of the parsha class I’ve done the last two years. Delivery system or part of Enactment? Maybe somewhere in between? There’s a lot of the text in the 5 books of Moses that don’t sing to me. But I wanted to start with something that I could wrap my head around because it was more contained than something as complicated as this project of giving maps to discovering your true earth based Jewish purpose. Launching the website was definitely at ETC and it was public—it’s not like I have millions of readers, but I have more than read my private journals, that’s for sure.
One note about the linear aspect of the Journey to Soul Initiation. Plotkin presents it as a linear process, but he also hints at the cyclical aspects of it, the need for instance of ongoing soul encounters (what we in Judaism would call ongoing revelation). He also rightly talks about the continued need for self healing and wholing, and I imagine that means revisiting wounded places—that’s a cyclical process. One core thing about being Dances with the Rhythms of the Earth is being more and more connected with the earth—so this year I have a relationship with a chipmunk near my prayer spot that I’ve never had before and a relationship with growing bok-choi that is new to me. I know there will always be more and more deepening of this relationship until I die and maybe, for one fleeting moment, my human rhythm and the rhythms of the more than human world will be in perfect attunement. And then the cycle will begin again, all knowledge wiped from me before my next birth.
