Sacred
Let’s meet there.
January 13, 2021From the Center of Action & Contemplation:
The hearts of more and more children, young people, adults, and senior citizens are yearning for a new story, a story of love rather than hate, of creativity rather than destruction, of win-win cooperation rather than win-lose competition, of peace-craft rather than war-craft.
They are waiting for a new story to explore, inhabit, and tell.
We are all looking for a larger and more loving story in which to participate.
[Brian D. McLaren and Gareth Higgins, The Seventh Story: Us, Them, & the End of Violence]
From activist and author Courtney Martin:
We continue to build the country of our dreams, the one worthy of our children. We counter tantrums with tenderness towards those all around us. People are grieving. People are tired. The vast majority of Americans have spent almost a year largely inside of our homes, trying to keep one another safe, our lives turned inside out in an attempt to protect ourselves from life-threatening disease, but also life-threatening leadership. This is no small thing.
We need to see each other. We need to look with ten times the magnification with which we are looking at this tantrum. We need to celebrate each other’s steadfastness and resilience, our neighborliness and creativity. We have shown up for one another in quiet, slow, manatee-like ways for so many months. So many have died—of covid, yes, but also cancer and heart attacks and a thousand other things probably exacerbated by stress and loneliness.
So much has been lost. Beautiful things—like banter with strangers and bellying up to a bar to laugh and cry with a friend. But toxic things, too—so many delusions about this country shed. We are not as far along on our moral arc as we may have thought. We are not as in control, either. Control being, as we are being reminded now, an addiction of wounded, unwise souls.
Sacred is all around us. Sacred is the steadfast sheltering in. Sacred is the children writing barely legible messages to their grandparents about how excited they are to see them when it is safe.
Sacred is the rising bread and the people’s peaceful footfalls during marches that filled these streets this summer. Sacred is the church that shaped MLK delivering a prophetic voice right in time. Sacred is the murmurations and the raging waves and the swaying Redwoods, ancient enough to withstand any man’s silly machinations. Sacred is the stupid zooms and the inside jokes and the living room forts that have gotten us through. Sacred is the soul searching of so many White Americans, the earnest attempts to find different ways of being with others, of being with ourselves. Sacred are the caregivers, who make our country less lonely, the organizers, who make our country more democratic, and the teachers, who aren’t giving up on our kids no matter what.
This is where my attention is going this week, this month, this year. While they flail, I will focus. While they desecrate, I will nurture. While they grasp for control, I will release—delusions, power, money, whatever will help this place heal. There is a version of this country that exists within and beyond this moment. I’ll meet you there.
“Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
-Rumi
The Enlightened Heart, p. 59
Sacred star stuff.
November 10, 2020‘‘The cosmos is within us, we’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself’.
Carl Sagan
︶⁀°• •° ⁀︶
Everything is sacred. For at the depths of all is the essence of life that backs all things. Therefore, nothing falls outside the scope of the all-encompassing. There is not a place we go, not a person we talk to, not an event that occurs that is void of this divine energy.
All is sacred, yet as I reflect on my experience I realize how few things I view as sacred: that ignorant statement made by a politician, the destruction of sacred indigenous lands, the clear-cutting of forests, the racial inequities that swirl across the globe, even the person who cut me off in traffic.
Perhaps spiritual understanding is not bypassing these real experiences and covering them with a blanket of oneness. Perhaps instead it’s about seeing and realizing that collectively we can align with something deeper to alleviate the real suffering in the lives of billions of our and sisters and brothers on the planet.
Perhaps it is a deep understand that Mother Earth…GAIA…is the greatest temple there is, our bodies are products of this temple, and how we honor the sacred ground beneath us and the holy temple we move on each day is a gift we bestow to the creator. If Mother Earth…GAIA…connects us and the Sacred Spirit unites us, then what I do to myself, to the Earth or to another, I do unto all.
Maybe it is not about seeing sacredness everywhere but living my life every day in a sacred way.
-Jeffon Seely, author and international speaker
[Seely is committed to dissolving barriers and dedicated to helping individuals break down internal barriers, reaching their potential. -Science of Mind]
“Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.
-Black Elk
