Every human choice bows like a slave in submission to
the absolute’s creative will,
yet this does not deprive us of freedom, or
of taking responsibility for what we choose.
~ Rumi ~
(Translated by Coleman Barks in, “The Soul of Rumi.”)
Hearing the news of the Christchurch mosque shootings, I sit stunned with sadness and grief, first for the people directly involved, and further, that humans have have come to such a way of being. How can we as a community, hold this raw suffering along with all its causes, in a way that can augment wholesome unfolding? The practice of love, hand in hand with the clear and compassionate seeing of diversity inseparable from inter-being/inter-knowingness, is surely the most pro-active thing we can do. I pray we may all flower in this, quickly, for the sake of everyone.
The following verses began their journey into expression a number of months back. It is as if they were waiting to be synergised by these tragic events, refined in the fire of feeling to meet the moment. The fully formatted PDF version will be visually easier to read. Please click here to download.
I am animate.
I am an animal.
I am born from life and living
And so, dear friend, are you.
Everything we experience reverberates with these truths.
Beginning with the fullness of what you are;
not what you name, describe or explain,
but what you actually are;
finding yourself awash
on a timeless beach of ever-fresh now,
discovering beingness anew.
Feeling the recurring waves,
Rhythmically similar,
yet individually unique;
pushing and pulling,
filling and emptying,
covering and exposing,
revealing and hiding;
A space of revelation.
This domain of gestation,
A birthing room of values.
What, on earth, is happening?
What, in mind, is happening?
Dancings of moon and sand and flowing liquids,
The seamless meeting of wet and dry;
emotion and detached observation,
inner and outer,
self and other,
knowing, known and knower.
And here, dancing this indescribable omni-process
involving everything and everyone,
We discover our breathing;
These flowings within flowings
Branchings and giftings
This tree of life and living
Connections of all of us.
Stardust to stardust, waves of probability proliferating
This breathing of everyone.
How might we call this suchness-in-action?
Looking?
Being ?
Softening?
Dissolving?
Bending?
Blending?
Stretching?
Responding?
Opening?
Praying?
Contemplating?
Meditating? Worshipping?
Reverencing?
Perhaps we could call it awareness
or awakening,
or continual transcendence,
or whole-ing,
or primordial healing,
Or do we need to call it anything?
Expanding into the gifting fullness,
living collaborations of sensitive responsiveness,
Volumes of sentience within volumes of sentience,
Oceans of knowing in the tiniest drops,
Creation creating
Always fresh and anew,
spacious, open and unpindownable.
Gratitude sparkling all over.
And what can we do but surrender?
each one of us,
all of us,
new modes of languaging
celebrating this perennial growing,
Freshly wrought today;
this beach, this sand, this salty ocean
cradled in radiance,
gestating the universe
This womb of mystery
ever preparing
in love,
and we see.
We are brothers and sisters;
Conceived and gestated and born and nurtured
and matured by our mother, Wholeness Inter-being.
And through our reaching bones and flesh,
extending and retracting,
drawn forward in wonder
and transforming as we go,
we learn our bodies;
babies, children, adolescents and adults
all of us making and remaking the stories of our journey
life-bards, each one of us
singing the world into being,
our mother tongue sounding forth in myriad cultural dialects,
through movement and gesture
touch by touch, we know ourselves into the world,
lives of mystery,
journeys of transforming understanding.
We are in this together.
Together we are born,
together we learn,
together we thrive,
together we suffer,
together we grieve,
together we console and,
together we die.
By we – I mean every manner of us:
humans of myriad shapes, flavours, colours and beliefs,
we mammals, we reptiles; we birds, insects and fish,
we trees and flowers, fungi and bacteria;
brothers and sisters all
we are in this together,
whirling round a life giving star
flowerings of sunlight
dancing in sunlight
knowings of sunlight
fabrics of radiance – bodies and minds
woven from a common source
sons and daughters all, singing our stories
celebrating this living creation.
Each one of us belong; needed and valued,
Each one of us, and all of us together,
mysteries of interbeing
continuously awash on primordial beaches of now
reaching forth with cautious sensitivity and finding ourselves
finger to finger,
heart to heart.
Moons of aspiration
Shedding tears for our forgetfulness.
May our communal heart, our goodness, our centre,
may it stay firm.
May we remember our whakapapa
remembrance in the functioning of flesh and bone and action;
not this sect or that group,
but the great and venerable whakapapa that joins and heals
This journey of all of us.
And through remembering,
our continuously transforming ever-fresh communion
becomes the womb and mother
of unimaginable futures and future beings
conceived in love,
yet to be born.
May the balms of love and healing and deep understanding
bless us to our core.
Sarva Mangalam