I’ve been noticing a pattern. We are surrounded by mine, yours, and ours. I was walking the other night alone but then found myself at the rim of a pond filled with frogs. If you push play below, you can hear those frogs.
It was cool because they usually stop when they hear me coming but this time they didn’t, they kept going.
I like being at the edge of water, little swamps or big oceans.
When we get into quagmires or normal every day happenings with other people, it’s good to inquire about what’s mine, yours, and ours, the collective.
You know how we study civilizations by looking through their garbage? The toilets can store the precious.
I imagine we might sink down with others and pick through our collective things and look at them and they may spark joy or not, may be a point of entry into another path, or uncover a feeling which could become a portal.
I might pick up a chunk of myself and feel no relevance and chuck it back. I might feel relevance many years later and remember that piece and think, “oh.”
It helps to go low, underground and in the water or just below the surface if you can get there. The water washes off the surface and makes for brighter colors, even magnifying.
Jumping into environmental work, like restoration, how do you know what is us and them? Ours, mine? Over there, over here? Who’s in charge?
The Tao consistently says, do nothing. That is a virtue. I kind of like this though it’s not an exciting call, is it?
I like the idea of managing my own patch of space, the physical and invisible, for my own centeredness and the collective, and it could involve eating some willows, chewing over things, and setting up my smell to let others know I’m here.
I’ve been singing Shabbat Shalom, Shabbat Shalom all day. I learned it Saturday during a day retreat about peace.
We got into a circle, held hands, and learned dances of universal peace and one had two words, Shabbat and Shalom. We stepped right, and left, into the middle, back out of the circle, lifted our hands together in the air. It was a new thing for me, dancing for peace.
Later someone asked, what is peace?
Before that we had a talk from peace workers and they explained that peace making is, for example, making clean water and increasing literacy, and that was a new thought for me as I had thought of peace as simply: not war. It is much more than that.
Sometimes talking about solutions or plans of help can be like having a conversation about landing planes on an airstrip that moves around. How to be the pilot, copilot, passenger and flight attendant at once? How to find oxygen if you need it. What if you could just be the wings stretching and reaching into the thermals. Maybe you could be the whole bird and fly around without needing separate parts to stay in the air?
I read a poem at the peace event that had nothing to do with peace but it did have something to do with levity and perspective. Here it is: Questions For a Comet.
Yours, mine, ours