Led to Gratefulness
For the second year in a row an early fall storm soaks us with an inch of rain, followed by a robust sun. The air is thick and damp and the windows in the dojo steam over as the heat of moving bodies transforms the space into a translucent glaze of moisture. Despite the focused heat my waning garden reminds me it is not spring, as does the thickening light and the Vs of geese that arrow south. Mice, voles, and Brewer’s sparrows scurry in the underbrush, amending their rhythms to imminent change. As I harvest the last of the tomatoes, lettuce, and squash I’m reminded of what seeds were planted in the spring, both in the receptive earth and in my psyche. If we stop and quiet ourselves there’s a transparent abundance in this turning toward winter. Heeding our fragile place in its unfolding we are inevitably led to gratefulness. I perform a deep bow to the fence posts, to the corn, to the stones, to the gophers that ate the melons, to the emptiness of mind, to Life.
Our body is precisely the medium of exchange with this field of awareness we call Life. The body is life, it is the interface with life, it’s the ground in which we participate with the air, the falling leaves, the smile of a grandchild, the doe and its fawn darting through the live oaks. In concert with other bodies- waving our limbs, sighing and laughing, shouting to the night sky, walking into a shared unknown – we co-author a story that can be told an infinite number of ways, a pluralism that is mysteriously One. Our sentience is not a body in seclusion; it is birthed by our direct encounters with the terror of the night as well as the delight of a fresh Roma tomato dribbling off our chin; and everything in between. Let’s not fall into the trap of thinking that our capacity for conscious reflection is the result of only partnering with our self, rather than with the world at large.
Here’s a profoundly simple way of practicing that partnership: Align along your vertical line, extend through the crown of the head up towards the heavens and through the soles of the feet down to the earth. Now draw in a breath and let the vertebrae and rib cage swell while you both settle and straighten. Do this again, each time feel, and imagine, that the breath is connecting the world with your most inner places. Pull the breath from the outermost edge of the cosmos and feed it to your cells and let it expand your soul, and your skin. Notice how it is all tied together: breath, tissue, sensation, community, energy, self, the Mystery. Now say “Thank You” from this Unity.
Take It Easy, But Take It
Richard
Poem:
The Last Rites of the Bokononist Faith
(excerpt)
God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud
that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
(Cat’s Cradle)
Book Recommendation: Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Joy Degruy Leary, Ph.D., Uptone Press, 2005. This is a powerful inquiry into how the impact of chattel slavery on African Americans has produced an intergenerational trauma that has largely been ignored. Dr. Leary sounds a wake up call that is clear and often painful. Through the lens of history and psychology she spells out the cost of embodying this history of trauma for African -Americans as well as for everyone in this country.