Nearly everyone, sooner or later, experiences a moment in life when something that had seemed reliable and solid is suddenly revealed to be nothing of the kind. One of humankind’s oldest stories, the Tower of Babel from the Book of Genesis, provides the symbol for this experience.
The Tower experience is one of catastrophic loss, of devastating fear. It feels like the end of the world. In some small way, it is the end of the world. Norman Rockwell captured the Tower experience at its gentlest in his beloved painting Discovery (The Truth About Santa).
People deal with the Tower in their own ways. We can become disillusioned with life, growing bitter and cynical with age. We can try to escape the fear and pain by becoming passive, leaving the hard choices and the hard thinking to others. Or we can pick up the shattered pieces of whatever we thought was real, and try to build something better and stronger.
If we build a new Tower, we do so knowing that it, too, will someday crumble to pieces. But the alternative is to stop building, and since you are still reading this, quitting is probably not an option for you. The important thing is not to build an eternal, indestructible Tower – we humans are creatures far too small to be building eternities and indestructible edifices. What matters is that we learn that the Tower is not what we are meant to be building. Yes, the awful moment when our latest and greatest Tower falls to dust is a loss – but out of the ruin, new pieces emerge – new patterns are revealed for healing ourselves and the world.
This site is dedicated to the new patterns we create from our moments of desolation.