Tag Archives: wonderment

memo to earth species H. sapiens

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Let us find our place:   on our knees in awe, wonderment and humility.

 

Earth, Jupiter and Venus seen from Mars

 
Consider that:

– You can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum.

– As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy.

– 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.”

– The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star.

– Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

– The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist.

So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it.

This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum.
 

 
Source: NASA Lunar Science Institute

Image: Earth, Jupiter and Venus, seen from Mars

Thanks to: love is a place
 

 
I posted this to Facebook a year ago.  It’s been circulating again recently and since many readers of this blog don’t ‘do’ Fb I decided to share it here as well.   It’s a keeper.
 
PS:
Where, in this whirling mix of cosmic biomaterial and activity can a solid, changeless self be found?  If such an entity can’t be found, what KNOWS this?
 

what is this?

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Since I began blogging a decade ago I’ve probably posted close to a thousand glimpses of the texture of my days in poetry and prose.

But I’d never looked back down my lifeline to track the trajectory from tiny-hood to crone-hood. There were revelations galore as I began to connect the dots of the decades, but one stands out because it threw my seemingly crazy life into exquisite focus. It was the recognition that pretty much everything I’ve experienced was (and still is) driven by just one little question.

It took Shanti Einolander to coax the story out of my brain and into words that would be included in her stunning online publication: ONE The Magazine. Parts of the article are posted below, along with the sub-headings. I know – it’s a teaser, but I do hope you’ll go over to the magazine and subscribe to read it all, and feast on the priceless array of inspiring writing, poetry and art you’ll find there.

– – –

Bubble Chamber

what is this?

so blatantly in my face
yet unable to be seen?

closer than my breath
yet unable to be reached?

shining through the mind
yet unable to be known?

~

It’s taken me a lifetime to understand that my personal motivation on the spiritual journey was a bit unusual.  I wasn’t looking for an antidote to suffering – not at the outset anyway.  I wasn’t trying to escape anything.  I didn’t feel incomplete.  I was a happy if ingenuous kind of person.

But in the lottery of life I was over-endowed with innate curiosity.  As a child I was a question mark on small feet – and I assumed everyone else was, as well.  In fact, my childhood assumption was that the content of all human brains was identical to my own.  I still remember the shock (I was about ten years old) of realizing that I was definitely ‘different’ from my brothers and school friends.  That was my tardy moment of individuation, the drop-kick into separation.  The birth of dear wee Queen Me.

I was also born with the ‘wonder’ switch turned on – the one that makes you wide-eyed with wonderment at the miracles of life.  (Later I came to understand curiosity and wonderment to be a natural pair.)  It seemed to me that the greatest wonder was that life happened at all.  How come it was so blithely taken for granted?  How come no one seemed to pay heed to this miracle?  How come it was never in the news except when it arrived as a newborn or departed someone’s body at death?

Miraculous: supernatural; surprising:
L miraculum from mirari: wonder; F mirus: wonderful
– Oxford Concise Dictionary

Looking back, it seems my journey has been about penetrating the nature of this “miraculousness” and the odd way its presence seems to cause me to disappear.  An important part of that journey has been my passion for making things.  From early childhood I loved making things because it was during playful immersion in creativity that the miraculous would often manifest.  (The word “art” didn’t come into it until much later, when there was an artist self up and running; I would notice that the miraculousness would only come to play in her absence.  But that’s another story.) […]

a kid with no head

In retrospect I realize that as a youngster there was no question as to what ‘I’ was.  It was unbounded spacious knowing.  I wouldn’t have had access to that vocabulary, but I do remember the sense of headlessness and the absence of solid boundaries to my body.  (This caused a few ownership problems with my brothers!)  Even after the arrival of individuation this experience remained constant – although preoccupation with the stories that were accreting around my teenage self slowly began to dominate my attention, heralding the beginning of The Great Forgetting. […]

finding my tribe

the free-fall

hacking the great hoodwink

the alchemy of emptying

ONE The Magazine: What is This?

Boundless gratitude to Shanti for the opportunity to reflect on my life from this perspective
and for the honour of being a contributor to ONE

from longing to belonging

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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/