I feel like writing something about making connections. And feeling connections.
I step away or perhaps I take a knee to feel a connection to the Earth and the things that come from the Earth that make up my body. It is effortless to know that my body and the Earth are one. Both are made of the same stardust, share the same space, and need the same nourishment. The intellectual step to oneness is not difficult. Spiritual integration moment to moment can be challenging. We’ve not been trained to think and feel so deeply. I realize too that living in this oneness can take a lifetime and many wise and profound spirits have committed their lives work to feeling it. Shamen, Priests, Zen Masters, Yogis many will speak of this oneness as if it is to be acheived. I think it is more like lifting a veil or making a choice, but what do I know….. I feel like writing about making connections……
First the common ones. I am connected when a patient tells me they hurt and I say sorry for the pain and try to take it away. I am connected when a child looks into my eyes and I smile with my heart and the child giggles. I am connected when I hug my mother or my sister or grandmother, when I talk to my brother on the phone or cuddle to my wife asleep. I feel connected when I see an old friend who I’ve not seen for some time. I feel a connection when I block a technique and when I land a punch. All of these…….connections like when you skip a rock on still water and forever break a mirrored surface till the stone stops and sinks, connection to know that stone will stay at the bottom of the water for a very long time and it was because of your throw where it landed. That place, the water, the stone and you all connected.
And connections are made when we don’t even mean to. Spirits are sometimes very touched and hearts are moved by things you don’t even remember saying. Connections are made by actions we don’t remember doing, stories we don’t remember listening to, gestures we don’t remember making.
These things are part of a bigger connection, a fabric of thought and heart holding everything together. The Spirit that Moves Through All Things, The Force, Chi or Ki, The Holy Spirit, all the same. This Connection can be seen when a flock of birds at once change direction without a leader, when animals flee an area days before a storm devestates the landscape, when a vine reaches across a wide gap to reach a branch and climb. We as humans are part of all that too even though, esspecially though we don’t realize. It is a connection you don’t have to realize, you don’t even have to believe. More learned people uses consoiusness, but I like connection don’t you? It feels closer.
The connection I am thinking of tonight is a touchable one, a connection between hand and heart. Tom Brown describes it as “when every step is like a blessing to the Earth, and the Earth blesses every step”. Fools Crow called this the way of the Hollow Bone. As the Sioux said Mitakuye Oyasin “All my Relations”.
A connection like this: selecting a loaf of bread in the supermarket and feeling the wheat in the field where it was sewn. Drinking wine and feeling, seeing and smelling the beautiful vineyard where the grapes grew. Pulling the plastic away from the flesh of an animal and knowing its sacrifice that you might have its energy. And not for guilt but gratefulness. Carving on a piece of wood and feeling the years of weather and wind. Connection to the years that you might feel new and refreshed in spring, young and playful in the summer, reaped and worn in the autumn and introspective, quiet and still in the winter. These do not require mediation, spiritual practice or great effort. This connection only needs imagination and a desire to know more fully the world and thus yourself.
Children know this too. Children see shapes in the clouds without trying, they see a bird soaring and imagine flying, they hear the ocean in shells. Feeling these connections takes only imagination and intention. As Bruce Lee said” we need emotional content”. We need added power to the connections or I feel they will diminish.
For all things are connected. And while my pulse cannot be felt on the other side of our Planet, the sun knows my face. And in the morning it warms a boy’s body in China, as I lie under the moon at night.
