Tag Archives: belonging

poem of the one world

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Mary Oliver.  A Kōtuku.  Belonging.  Beauty.  Rapture.

 

Kōtuku in flight photographed by Paul Knight.

 

This morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

 

and then into the sky of this

the one world

we all belong to

 

where everything

sooner or later

is part of everything else

 

which thought made me feel

for a little while

quite beautiful myself.

 

Mary Oliver
A Thousand Mornings

 

 

Kōtuku – New Zealand White Heron, photographed by Paul Knight.

The eastern great egret (Ardea alba modesta) is highly endangered in New Zealand, with only one breeding site at Okarito Lagoon.  This species was almost exterminated to satisfy the demand for feathers for women’s hats.  By 1941 there were only four nests at its breeding site in Okarito when it was declared a reserve and patrolled.  The feathers of Kōtuku and Huia were highly prized by Maori, who used them to adorn the heads of chiefs.

 

from longing to belonging

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5

Of late I’ve been marveling at the profound depth and breadth of this uncensored, unresisted, unfiltered experience of livingness. I’ve written about the immense sorrow and the exalted joyfulness and everything in between. It’s been both wondrous and humbling to realize how I managed, for decades, to make sure the door to unlimited livingness was kept safely chain-locked. Only manageable peeks allowed! Equilibrium must be maintained – no messy wetness around the eyelashes eh?

Well that’s all herstory now, as the scribblings here and elsewhere have made explicit. So it was only fitting that I would find myself – this past week – on retreat with a teacher whose immense and compassionate wisdom encompasses the limitless interbeing of life. And whose passion is the sharing of that wisdom.

Falling into this gracious and immeasurable Awareness and knowing it as ‘I’ is a big enough shock. Realizing that this inescapable un-locatable … whateveritis … melts one into seamless intimacy with the movement of Life in its inconceivable creative unfolding is the aftershock that keeps coming and coming and coming like an unstoppable orgasm.

Tarchin Hearn is wise to this. I think he’s a shaman disguised as a very non-sectarian Buddhist. He would chuckle and grin widely. I could write much about my week with him; how he helped me ‘adjust’ to this intimacy, how he opened up fresh vistas of wonderment and refreshed that soft fragile childlike curiosity that had been sidelined over the last difficult decade. But today I just want to offer you a taste of his gentle eco-poetry.
– ml

Going for refuge is ‘longing.’

Being refuge is ‘belonging.’

Everything mirroring, echoing, and creatively responding.
This mysterious temple of knowing.
This paramecium, this bacteria, this person,
this family, this forest, this butterfly,
each a temple of uniqueness,
mutually longing for
and belonging in
every other temple of longing and belonging.
Ocean currents of temple-ing
floating in sensual warmth of never ending
consummation and freshness.

– Tarchin Hearn

http://www.greendharmatreasury.org/
 

how to start the day on spaceship earth

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Begin your life, begin each day, begin a session of meditation, nourished by the experience of being seamlessly part of a vast living world.  Before even getting out of bed, pause for a few moments to feel the rhythm of your breathing and settle into the deep interior sensations of your body, an extraordinary community of tens of trillions of cells – all ‘talking’ to each other. Imagine uncountable cellular beings, each of them replicating, travelling, repairing, maintaining, eating, breathing, excreting, forming alliances and symbiotic associations, all functioning together in the process that is your body.

You are alive!  Not only that, but the community that is you, at this very moment is interbeing with myriad other communal beings.  Feel this billion year unfolding of embodied mystery.  In Buddhism, to enter this remembrance is to touch the essence of what is called ‘refuge’; a deep sense of belonging; a vivid acquiescence to participating in a living process that can never be completely mapped out.

Everything that you think, do and feel, has an affect on other beings.  You matter.  We matter.  Everyone matters.  Remembering our roots, or releasing into refuge, can bring a sense of abiding in a way of deep acceptance, wonderment and utter inclusiveness.  This moment before you roll out of bed is a time to feel your own unique sense of being enmeshed in and supported by, the living community of everything and everyone that makes up this world.

~ Tarchin Hearn

www.greendharmatreasury.org/blog/

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