Wispy Morning Clouds
People typically see others through a self-referential lens, and thus are driven by the polarities of gaining and losing, having and lacking, seeking and rejecting, and, ultimately, success and failure. But whether in politics or everyday life, there are no real winners and losers, selfing and othering harms everyone. Guo Gu (Electing Freedom: Overcoming Despair – Lion’s Roar magazine)
Anger is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. … But anger truly felt at its centre is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. David Whyte (Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)
Picking up the pen early this summer morning these words came: We react with harsh, violent words yet we expect the world to be different. Judgement has replaced curiosity. I find it even in myself. I gulped and looked at the morning sky’s wispy clouds. I watched the feeding frenzy of the hummingbirds at the feeder. I sensed something deeper wanted to come forth.
The week past was an active one with more engagement, in person and online, than is my norm, participating in a weekend tour of several farms here in the valley and engaging in an exploration of tones and energetic frequencies via a fascinating online technology. Threads in the weave of my curiosity about health, personal and collective well-being, and, more broadly, the deeper workings of the energy that is Life.
Outside this active flow, but undoubtedly connected, I observed the extreme divides of dissonance in our world. Right here at home there were quick and volatile judgements in the wake of a fatal law enforcement/citizen event. Almost every day I notice harsh comments about something, the latest about the amount of rent being asked by someone willing to share their home. The following day I noticed a snide comment about a friend’s outreach to a particular political campaign.
I observed my own habit of judgement about these posts. My ‘self-referential lens’ bristles at such comments which further separation. I’m humbled to recognize this habit and to observe how it separates me not only from others, but also from knowing and living in the truth of Oneness, a way of being that for me holds the key to forging a new world. A world of compassion. A world of peace. A world of justice, freedom, and sovereignty that is our true nature. How is that we use tools that could bring us together to drive further wedges into our relationships?
I wondered what’s underneath my bristling, my othering, my judgement of others’ judgement and what’s at the root of these outbursts from others. What separates us from walking in the world knowing that we are One?
In asking and opening to possibilities, I was surprised to find anger, more specifically my habitual avoidance of it, as a thread in the fabric of possible answers. How might I pivot my relationship from avoidance to embrace, to dancing with anger as an “essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here”? How might it be to give anger space in the home of my life? What relationship with anger would have me see that it has a role to play in living the very Oneness of my heart’s longing?
I carry these questions as I look to the days ahead, not as questions to which I must discover the answer, but as threads of curiosity, the weaving of which opens new possibilities for co-creating a world beyond our differences, a world in which we again know and live from our wholeness.
As he so often does, John O’Donohue offers additional threads for the fabric of life in his poem For Citizenship.
For Citizenship
In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.
John O'Donohue (from To Bless the Space Between Us)
Breakfast at the Local Diner