Refugia

“Refugia” comes from the world of ecology. Refugia are places that survive the ravages of fires, floods, wind damage, etc. They are places where life not only survives but requires the destruction around them. They thrive on the intensity of the disruption. It’s often how I feel these days: I carry on because of the disruption, not in spite of it.

It could be a place where fires have leapt over ravines and they are transformed into a regenerative place. Refugia could be lakes that remain in tact while floods swirl all around them, leaving untouched sanctuaries. These are areas where elements of life thrive while much of what was abundant has been disrupted or destroyed.

Refugia thrive in liminal time.

Liminal time is what we are living through right now. Liminal time is when much of what we’ve known is gone and what comes next has not revealed itself.

The primary quality of liminal time is uncertainty.

The terrain of any transformative process follows the same template: first there is a death, the end of things as we knew them. After the death, comes liminal time. After liminal time and uncertainty, comes rebirth.

The word “transformation” means to change from one form to another. Think of the process of caterpillar to butterfly, there’s a template for the journey. Chrysalises are refugia.

Uncertainty is a difficult experience for humans. We want to know, we want to figure it out, we want answers, we want predictability!

Uncertainty is not meant to be comfortable.

To stay sane, it’s important to recognize where we are on the journey of transformation. You may say I didn’t sign up to be transformed, I just want life how it used to be! Fair enough, but life is nothing but change.

We can argue with change which is part of the process, I certainly don’t accept change immediately upon being given notice. Refusing to accept things as they are is often slow amongst we humans and it’s where our greatest growth happens too.

The musculature of resilience is, to a degree, built in the intensity of resistance.

Endings/Liminality/Rebirth are what life does. It’s not a mistake, it’s not a pathology. We are not the first humans to endure times of uncertainty and we will not be the last.

Some years ago I shared an ecology class with a Native man from the Coastal Salish Tribes of the Pacific Northwest of the US. His lineage stretches back about13,000 years. He quietly but clearly stated that according to his oral traditions, there were periods of time when human life was threatened and limited but it managed to survive. I was jolted by such an idea, after all, aren’t we humans the center of the universe who fix everything?

What I am saying is that regardless of what we may think, change happens and along with it is the discomfort of uncertainty.

Change is nothing personal— it is part of how the universe works on a much larger scale. We do experience it as personal and from that perspective change becomes an invitation for personal growth, it becomes an initiation if we choose. It’s important to recognize that we do have free will as to how we engage with the limitations of uncertainty.

Recognizing we have choices even within limitations is an essential step to our own personal evolution.

Our humanity sorely needs “refugia” at this time: protected places both within ourselves and outside of ourselves. Refugia need to form where what used to be in great abundance has been ravaged by curated chaos.

Our collective evolution depends intimately on our personal evolution and our capacity to seek and find places where we thrive amongst the chaos, not in spite of it, but because of it.