Vortex

Vortex is defined as: a region and a fluid in which the flow is rotating around an access line which may be straight or curved. Think tornado. Now think on the pull of the rotation, as in you being suctioned into the spin. Without your consent, you are spun faster and faster with no time to grab hold let alone break free. Besides, everything and everyone around you is caught up too, there is no one thing that you can anchor yourself to. The only gravitational force is the mighty seemingly relentless wind with its deafening thunder in your ears, preventing thought and consideration of what to do? What can you do? Just when you feel hopeless and helpless taking over your soul with doom looming and death beckoning, you feel the grip release and you are tossed centre, into the calm, the eye of the storm. Now you are in it, not of it. In the storm but no longer a rag doll like piece of unconsidered debris. And yet, the storm, it still does not care a whit about you Dear One, it goes about its whirling destructive business because that is what storms, tornados, do. You cannot blame a tornado for being one, not logically anyway. You are in the middle now and in the calm you consider the possibilities of survival, a way out while maintaining life, despite the battering and bruising you sustained while you were a part of the storm. Whatever will you do? The whirlwind and its gail forces would have you destroyed without sentimentality, remorse, regret. If you attempt a rushing through of the powerfully encasing wall of turmoil, you risk death. Staying in the centre means waiting, and perhaps never getting out? 

I am considering all of the vortexes I have experienced, all of the pulling into someone else's ways that I have unwittingly been caught up in. They couldn't help it, they were them and I was me and somehow, the spinning and swirling had us caught up until we were spit out and picked up again by someone else's tornado like suction and drag. I too, have been a storm, a tornado of sorts. My perception, my way, my thinking feeling and doing all pulling others in, hearts and souls akimbo. I am laughing at the imagery, although at the same time it saddens me. The destructive path of a storm, a tornado, leaves devastating and sometimes permanent marks. I am considering the peace and calm of the eye of the storm. Fighting my way out does not seem valiant, even feasible. While waiting and considering options in the centre, I see that it is not up to me to dissolve, resolve, solve the problem of the storm, it is up to me to trust that just as it gathered force, it will of itself, weaken and drop out of sight as though it never existed. Just as I must wait and trust, I must give others the gift of believing that in their centre, the calm will guide them, teach them, show them the way out of their own spinning and storming, if they are ready for fair weather, that is. Peace is strangely and seemingly contradictorily, a struggle to achieve and acquire, almost humanly impossible...this brings me to our God: Who do you trust when all around you there is chaos, whirling dervishes, dramatic anti-peace, soul exhausting words and behaviours that you must, for need of holy preservation, disengage from? Tornadoes, yours, mine, and the ones created by others, can be circumvented. I am claiming harmony and peace for myself, even when the whirlwind pull would have me experience something completely different. I don't have a solution for you if vortex has your life in a spin. I can say this: ou can be in the storm, without having to be of it. I end with Colossians 2:8 "See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ."