“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.”
– Dylan Thomas “The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower”
I fell in love with this Dylan Thomas poem the first time I read it. The appeal wasn’t in the composition style or mechanics of the poem, although it’s a well-written piece. What drew me was an idea that I was just beginning to grasp at the time – that there is a power fueling the cycle of life, death, and change and that all things are subject to this force.
I’ve never found a better label for this underlying flow of energy (if energy is the right word) than the ‘Force’. To call it a life or vital force only tells one part of the story. It is simultaneously creator and destroyer, the bringer of change, the well-spring that feeds the cycles of nature. It’s something that I strongly associate with certain deities – Cernunnos and Kali in particular.
While each of us is driven by this force, from birth to death and beyond, most of us never try to consciously connect with it. To tap into directly into this force is, for me, at once terrifying and exhilarating, breath-taking and scream-evoking, terrible and beautiful, enlightening and confounding. To use the only analogy that I can think of at the moment… it is like cresting the highest hill of the cosmic roller coaster and peering down on the universe (multiverse?), knowing that you’re about to plummet into the very heart of it.
I’ve been lucky, if you want to call it that, to accidentally/inadvertently tap into the this force during the process of doing particularly intense threshold work. How I connected to it I really can’t say, so I’m afraid that I won’t be writing the Idiot’s Guide to Tapping into the Force any time in the foreseeable future. For now, I’m very content to know that this force is out there, driving all that I know in this world, connecting us to each other and to every other part of our universe. How awesome is that?
*I should probably issue an apology to my fellow geeks who, after reading the title, anticipated a post about Luke, Yoda, and their heavy-breathing nemesis in black. I really wasn’t thinking of that force when I sat down to write this. Although now that I think about it, that force might not be so different than the one I was actually writing about… a great invisible metaphysical source that energizes the universe and those who tap into it touch upon an extraordinary power source. Hmm, maybe Yoda was on to something there.
Into the Mists 
Yes! I think that the Force that the Jedi master uses is not so different from the force that makes the flowers grow. It is the invisible force that is the magic of life.