Unseen Communion

Our job, though we may accept other work as well, is simply to honor our place in that terrain, and act accordingly.

There have always been those people in my orbit who have taken the big leap in some special, powerful direction. I suppose some think that is the case with me. After diving deep into meditation and various movement practices, I went through a crises, walking away from grad school offers to work on myself, eventually studying shamanism for decades.

Others found gurus, traveled the world, became devoted to something. That kind of choice was always considered special in some way. It’s something only a few of us did: stepping off the carousel of modern life to pursue the terrain within. I see now how misbegotten that way of thinking truly is.

Nowhere in the landscape of our culture is the acceptance and perhaps expectation that each one of us will look within to find something mysterious and enormous. If we go off seeking an experience in life that is numinous, transcendent, we are seen as an outlier at best. I remember how vehemently my father argued against me going off to spend time at a local Zen monastery. He had to agitate against such notions, preferring to keep me busy, achieving more. Ironically his resistance helped precipitate an inner collapse that took me away from everything.

I think our resistance to the inner degrades our vision of each other. When we meet someone, rarely do we wonder at what discoveries they may have found within themselves. Rarely do we begin a conversation by sharing what is happening in that space of vastness we all can access just by slowing down a little and being curious.

Recently I was working on the introduction to my book of 31 poems about grief titled Grief Mends, and I was trying to work out exactly what it is that grief tends to. Yes it opens us up to our feelings, but there is something more, something of that profound inner terrain that it touches.

“Grief mends the unseen communion we are all part of in every moment that we are alive. That place makes life possible and nourishes our souls in ways we rarely notice.”

Grief weaves us back into that larger experience of being, the one we can find within that also infuses the universe for those who see. Unfortunately our religions, industries and culture seem to have guided us away from that experience over the last few centuries. Thankfully, tiny blossoms from that place have been appearing from time to time in the last century.

So many movements began with some awareness of an aspect of being that was ignored, fighting to be seen. Feminism, civil rights for many marginalized communities, even the environment movement all have as at least one shared underpinning: the knowledge that each being is sacred, expressing something worthy of a societies respect and care.

I’ve come to see that it doesn’t matter our gender, sexuality age or even intelligence, we are all gifted with paths to the soul of ourselves and everything.

The recent political shift has brought into awareness our collective unwillingness to embrace the beingness of each one of us. The small indications of a willingness to see and support the unseen communion we are all a part of, and accountable to, seems to have been sacrificed wholesale. It is the outer, the artifice that matters now. No deeper inner truth or experience is welcome.

But there is cause for great hope.

We are good at this. Those of us who have touched the inner terrain that connects to everything have remembered something essential that can never be forgotten. Our realization of that place is untouched. Many of us have cultivated this awareness on our own, in private, away from the prying eyes of the appearance driven world. We have also been sharing, finding ways to connect our experiences with others. This work is teeming in our culture, though it seems silent at times.

We are not fighting for rules or laws that will have some dubious outcome. We are tending an eternal terrain that belongs to all beings, human or otherwise. That work is invulnerable to politics, even to death itself. Our job, though we may accept other work as well, is simply to honor our place in that terrain, and act accordingly.

I returned to my practice at the edge of a river not far from my daughters school when I drop her off in the mornings. It only takes a few minutes, I’m so experienced in shifting my consciousness I’m able to slip into a meditative state immediately. The river comes alive to me as a being I can know and commune with. Our Dog and I go for a run in the gray fall morning when I’m done.

This simple practice brings me into immediate contact with the eternal with almost no effort on my part. The depth of my experience has only grown over the last few years. It has been affected in no way by anyones vote or any political shift.

There may be many battles to fight in the coming years. My childrens lives will undoubtedly be affected by political outcomes. But the unseen communion will continue to unfold and I will be a part of it. I invite you and yours to join me there, if you haven’t already.