Do you know the story of Cupid and Psyche ?
Venus required Psyche to undergo great trials in order to find her husband, the god of Love, Cupid. That’s the situation we were in in 2025. We, like Psyche, were faced with what seemed to be insurmountable trials and sought to find Love. Psyche was able to complete some of her tasks, with the help of the vegetable and animal kingdoms who wanted her to succeed. Venus then challenged Psyche to go to the underworld and ask Persephone to put some of Psyche’s great beauty into a box. That accomplished, Cupid, God of Love, found her and helped her to become immortal and live with him on Mount Olympus.
We are now halfway through the 21st century. So much is happened since we were like Psyche, challenged with such daunting tasks as dissolving thickets of confusion and war and trusting Mother Earth to right the imbalances we ourselves had caused as She knew best.
25 years later we are grateful that we are now fully recognizing each other and living in harmony. Many of us experience joy on a daily basis. We notice the beauty of our children, play with them and appreciate their playing together. We develop new dances that we perform together at the beginning of each month. In each household we can make music and practice singing together in the evening. Each person can offer a song or a poem. We garden together. Our houses are becoming more and more simple so as not to disturb our Mother Earth. Daily, we enjoy listening to silence together. We notice the interconnection in Nature. We express ourselves on our walls as we change scrolls, panels, or hanging tapestries according to the number of us that wish to produce them.
Oh yes, this is very different from how it was 25 years ago!
Back then we only rarely had glimpses of awareness that we are not separate but instead are parts of an evolving Whole. Our assumption that we were separate had led us to fear each other and to compete in almost everything we did. We thought we needed to hoard and compete because we didn’t trust that we would help each other. In our fear we tried to trick, betray or ignore each other. In our stress we became physically ill or addicted. We effectively ignored each other or saw each other as embodying the problem we faced. There was so much buried pain out there that we thought we would try something new.
In 2024 we began to dissolve the snarls in our systems and see our deeper urge to healthy unity because we discovered a way to see that Unity. How did we make that shift? Immersed in the world’s complexity, with a few exceptions we had little capacity to detect our wholeness. But at that time, we were at the edge of a new understanding that we humans were more than just activated matter. We learned to focus our attention on Consciousness and, like Psyche, we were on the way to rediscover Love. We saw and understood that in the past, when faced with more than we could handle alone, we had reacted, compounding the problems by producing and spreading more troubles. We had been affected by our long histories of trauma due to entrenched habits of relating.
Gradually we realized that if you looked at that long picture none of us was at fault. We had all been reacting. But how could we help Psyche, (our individual psyche and our collective psyche) understand that we didn’t need to hurt and fear each other? We needed a tool. Nothing mechanized or electronic would do because we had realized that those tools had contributed to our problems.
Happily, it was noticed that we could see the Psyche. 100 years ago some children had pointed the way. They played in a smaller, framed world with figurines, and in that little enclosed world they could see and battle with or discover what they didn’t yet understand and uncover resources they hadn’t known. This worked! For 50 years this children’s invention was practiced with some benefit to the children and their families who practiced it. It went almost unnoticed, though, because our culture had relied so heavily on more airy, “heady,” controlling or technological approaches to problems. Play was considered beneath adults as an activity.
Then it dawned on us that if a number of us played together in that smaller than full size world the children had been playing in for “therapy,” we too could see our greater shared Psyche.
Part of Psyche’s beauty had been placed in the box! The open box, the tray of sand made it possible for a few of us to safely see where Psyche was troubled and adjust what we saw! Lo and behold, with each episode around the tray, it was as if we were walking through another doorway to the Light. Each time, we would see another clarification of what had been in the way of our living and feeling better together. Because Psyche can be relied upon to search for the Truth of her Love, we learned not to judge what we saw, but to see it as an opportunity to help out. We saw that the very habits fear and isolation had led us to could be gradually reduced because we were now able to see them with our eyes. Our shared field of information, our consciousness, far and wide, became greater, loving and more truthful. The habits of deceit were not possible because we now had a way to safely take in the whole picture seeing we were all intrinsic to it, together.
We continue this ritual regularly to avoid our old pitfalls and misconceptions. Meanwhile we have been trusting Mother Earth to work at balancing herself, and we adjust accordingly while we become a self-organizing and creative system, like Nature.
Sophia Hughes, PhD 1/17/2024
sophiahughes7@icloud.com