Baby cones and every needle belong with the tree …
I love ‘belonging’ coming into beautiful clarity as more than unity expressing as diversity. All and everyone of us, just as every leaf on every tree, every snowflake, every drop of water, belongs to the entire sentience of our living and loving universe. And it is a journey where nothing has been wasted … to bring us to this point and invites us onwards into this great adventure of what awaits if we say ‘yes’ to this invitation. Dr. Jude Currivan (interview with Heather Ensworth – watch it here)
To be human is to belong. Belonging is a circle that embraces everything; if we reject it, we damage our nature. The word ‘belonging’ holds together the two fundamental aspects of life: being and longing, the Longing of our being and the Being of our longing. … True belonging is gracious receptivity. (John O’Donohue – Belonging: the Wisdom of Rhythm in Eternal Echoes: Exploring Our Hunger to Belong – read it here)
Watching this rich interview, I heard Jude Currivan’s words as if they’d been written bold and highlighted on a page. ‘This!’ I thought. To live more deeply into belonging is the truth that I long to live more fully into. To know beyond the construct of mind that I BElong. That WE belong.
This is after all the Truth of Oneness. And living into this, living this is an invitation to the evolutionary party of the age. We are invited to BE what we LONG for. We are invited to know from the inside out that we belong to the ‘entire sentience of our living and loving universe’. How can we be graciously receptive to what is so?
The great adventure in saying ‘yes’ is that of being hospice workers for the old systems of separation, gratefully releasing that which no longer serves and attending to birthing, nurturing, and building systems and structures that are grounded in and honor our belonging with All Life. With one another. With our Mother, Gaia. With the vast cosmos.
In an exercise years ago at a coaching conference, participants were invited into an hour of quiet, slowly walking around indoors and out, stopping at each thing we noticed, and quietly speaking, ‘I am that’. I am that chair. I am that door. I am that tree. I am that beautiful flower, that blade of grass I am that trash in the dumpster. I am That I am.
I revisited the exercise on a short segment of my morning walk, remembering its potency. As I write, I sense this potency as support for our journey to Oneness, to Interbeing, to a deeper knowing and living that we belong with All Life.
The practice is simple. And, sometimes challenging to engage. I can easily accept and speak ‘I am that hummingbird at the feeder’. Or those baby cones on the pine tree. ‘I am you, dear reader,’ I can speak with heart-felt gratitude. Easy. Yet my mind, well trained in separation, is challenged to accept and speak that I am an individual with whom I disagree, with those who do harm, with weapons, with vitriolic words. But, indeed, I am that too. I am each of those as surely as I am each member of the community that I love.
In this gap is our opportunity. The invitation. The path of our evolving to a new level of wholeness. A new reality. All is part of this living, loving universe. All is part of this evolutionary impulse to pivot from crisis to opportunity, or as Currivan suggests, “from meta-crisis to metamorphosis”.
At the crossroads of choice, to what will I/we give our attention and to what will we belong in so doing? Will we listen to the doom and gloom of meta-crisis and follow along with those who continue to try to solve the crises with the consciousness of separation, the very thinking that created them?
Or will we invest our attention, our energy, our lives in the evolutionary impulse of metamorphosis that invites us to break free of the cocoon of separation that has held us for far too long?
Every choice we make matters to the greater whole of life. In those choices let’s be butterflies! Let’s fly!
Every drop of water belongs with the creek … Every sunbeam belongs with the cosmos …