Catch the Cosmos Doing Something Right

(zaporacle card # 552)

Catch the Cosmos Doing Something Right

They say that a good manager is one who emphasizes catching people doing things right. And yet, in our view of the world we tend to emphasize all the places where we think the cosmos is getting it wrong. The evolution of our brains emphasized threat detection over appreciation. From the point of view of the continuation of the genome, it is more important that a prairie dog detect the hawk overhead then to appreciate the quality of the sunshine or the abundance of air it’s able to breathe. Our minds are so often busy threat detectors worrying about what’s wrong or could go wrong. We don’t often stop to notice all the things that have gone right in the present moment. For example, right now you are interacting with an oracle and therefore you probably have eyes, and unlike all the other species on the planet you are able to comprehend complex language and explore new ideas.

My friend Rob Brezsny recently published a book entitled Pronoia. According to the book, Pronoia is a term “…coined in the mid-1970s by Grateful Dead lyricist and cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow, who defined it as the opposite of paranoia: ‘the suspicion that the universe is a conspiracy on your behalf.’ “

It is easy to view life as a catastrophe, a catastrophe we can head off only by a white knuckled grip on our body, money, possessions and relationships. But maybe your life is more of a “euchatastrophe” than a catastrophe.

From Wikipedia: Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien which refers to the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist’s well-being. He formed the word by affixing the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to catastrophe, the word traditionally used in classically-inspired literary criticism to refer to the “unraveling” or conclusion of a drama’s plot…It could be said that the ending of The Lord of the Rings is an Eucatastrophe. Though victory seems assured for Sauron, the One Ring is destroyed beyond all hope. Essentially a bad situation suddenly turning good. For more on Pronoia, go to Rob Brezsny’s site, freewillastrology.com, and/or read my review of Pronoia: Is the World Spiraling Toward Eucatastrophe or is that just my Pronoia? A new edition of Pronoia is available on 9-22-09

A couple of alternative images—pink panther balloon sculpture done by an itinerant street artist who was staying at the Boulder International Hostel and left a sample of his work on a large alabaster vase on the front desk.