For this first offering, perhaps reflection, of the new year of Gregory, our Lord of time, 2024, I’m going to start on that threshold of cliché grounded in some much more enduring wisdom. I’m going to speak to intention.
Free will, or no free will; profound emptiness, or material certainty: truth or fiction, intention is a paradox in the family of war.
“There is a war between the ones who say there is a war
And the ones who say that there isn't”
This “being human,” says Rumi, “is a guesthouse.” Each moment’s experience arrives, lingers a while in its way, and moves on making room for the next traveler to greet us at the doors of our perception.
Lacking intention, we fall prey to these revelers, caught in their unique brand of merriment and often insanity. We are tumbled from one to the next, to the next, like paper boats tossed in the river and eventually reclaimed by the sea.
Without awareness, this is just so. But there’s the kick. Always awareness. Checked in or checked out, omni-encompassing, or swimming in some daydream, always awareness. If our awareness lacks the construct of intention, either explicit or implicit, we persist with it nonetheless. It is our natural disposition to grasp for those brightly colored moments, and retreat from those unpleasant travelers who seem to stain our joy.
Intention washes in and washes out, just one more traveler on the road. As this guest returns again and again, taking respite in our humble little abode, we may grow to admire them for their clear pointedness. By the same token, we might begin to wonder if their demeanor is a bit futile in the fullness of this fluid expanse.
As it comes, we may intend to embody the teachings of intention, or we may intend to grasp-not that certain insistence which gives us rise in the face of the divine. As you see, there is a war…
Too un-careful and we might forget the boundless notice of water and think ourselves, the drop, the sole source of all virtue and concern. The Darth Vader move in Force mastery. We might enjoy our good fortune, dismissing the relative nature of good and evil, forgetting that our privilege most often comes with a cost. We may begin to take things for granted, letting those suffer that will, while we remain oblivious to our intention and its impact in the divine play.
Where am I going with this? I do recall… I want to go from here to that place where intention meets other; other, or perhaps said another way, object. I want to do this carefully, leveraging this polarity without doing harm to the whole from which it emerges.
“This being human is a guesthouse…” We arrive here, innkeeper and host; gentle caregiver for those weary moments on the long path of eternity. In beautiful symmetry, we are both proprietor in our own grace and guest in the beholders whose eyes also we rest.
“Don’t recall. Don’t imagine. Don’t think. Don’t examine. Don’t control. Just rest.” Says Tailopa in his six points of sage advice. For most, this is easier said than done. If I have ever had the good fortune of touching that for even a moment, I think through that window I saw what Rumi also pointed to…
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.”
There is a river. I have mentioned it above. This metaphor of fluid water; you and I, drops; home, the ocean. But what do we mean when we speak of these waves, these travelers, these moments of selfhood arising?
There is a war…
[While I turn that phrase here, in hopes of offering some poetic flavor, some evocative tool intended to share and connect across the way towards some deeper felt sense of beauty, the words linger in the air.
There is a war. In Ukraine, there is a war. In the Middle East, there is a war. Sadly, I’m sure there are others of which I do not know. There has been a war for much of my life in this most profane sense of the word. This must be honored if we are to intend something else.]
I use LLM (AI) software to create the images that go along with these posts. Seeking to give a picture to these current comments, this was generated by my prompt. I almost didn’t use it, but it invites a consideration that I think is important and relevant as we venture into these uncertain territories.
I expect many of you will recognize the face of the girl in the foreground. While one could claim homage, this is clearly a case of artifactual appropriation. I was surprised, and not surprised to see reflections of the girl in the famous war photograph, and immediately struck with a sense of subtle copyright violation. The generated image is good, reflecting the youthfulness of too many soldiers, the sadness in the eyes of the elder, and the tender fragility in life itself.
I’d welcome any comments on the tensions inherent in this particular application and usage of the technology.
What is that tearing open of the heart? What is that moment of longing, not for greed, but for wellness and beauty to fill our awareness, without denial, turning away from nothing… Is this not compassion?
As that heart tears open, pouring forth its crimson gift, that gift is love. In each drop of that precious rain, intention.
“May you be well and happy.
May you be safe.
May you feel peaceful and at ease.
May all beings be well and happy.
May they be safe.
May they feel peaceful and at ease.”
This simple prayer of lovingkindness captures that essential hope that must find its way, in the same breath, into action or drift away, pretty but meaningless, like mist in the breeze.
There is a war. There is intention.
I do suspect that if one can manage the fullness of realizing those six points of sage advice, these things take care of themselves. Indeed, I practice in aspiration that I may become one with that very awareness. In the meantime, or perhaps as an expression of it, I intend my mind upon that point of compassion, and the pouring out of love which gives itself that life and beauty and evolution itself might flourish season after season.
In all of this, though I may wax at times didactic, I do mean to see and hear these words for myself. I write here, in open exploration of what matters most. Each gesture, a longing, a prayer intended towards some greater grace of beauty in the richness of the world.
Thanks to Greg, we have a new year. A time to mark beginnings and endings, a time to honor thresholds and upon them to set our prayers of intention.
Intention is drawn from context, and the richness and sophistication of intention mirrors that depth of context from which it arises. For me, therefore, this intention seeks to rise to the space of this human world, to the space of this living jewel twirling about a spark of light, to the ocean of majesty through which we sail.
But this boat is taking on water. All of these words here fall from the tongue of a human mouth, sitting in a square box, staring into a square box, calling on tamed electrons to carry them to other square boxes and into the eyes, and minds, and perhaps hearts of kindred souls who share this concern; this boat is taking on water.
I do not mean the jewel twirling about the spark, that will continue, though the particular qualities of jewellike nature are not entirely free of risk in this day of our madness and wars.
Here I drive that word a bit more towards Otto Scharmer’s turn of the phrase:
Three divides:
Self from self. Self from other. Self from nature. Put more elaborately:
The ecological, the social, and the spiritual-cultural divides.
What, in this moment of 2024 to intend? The scope of our precipitous condition holds the profound quality of being so complex in its nature as to be beyond even seeing by all but the most careful of eyes.
Certainly, most of us on one level or another can sense its presence, but the granularity of that sensation tends not to rise to the point of action; rather boiling deep down on a simmer of anxiety, just out of sight, but plain in our daily helpless business as usual.
I do not mean this assertion as a point of reprimand or judgments of failure on the parts of you or me or some other. I am saying it simply in hopes of contributing to my own sense of situational awareness, seeking to embrace the lived presence of our metacrisis context.
Truly this expression of helpless business as usual could be said grounded in the “real” material facts of the day. Considered from a certain light, the situation is grim indeed. Six of nine planetary stability boundaries broken, giving rise to incomprehensible cascades of decay. How many, literally hundreds of millions of people face near term habitation disruption from sea level rise? There are not yet any apparent mechanisms of well-being in the larger human world to absorb such a refugee crisis. This does not even begin to touch on the immediate poverty present in the world today.
“The system” is in cascade. There are of course those who ramble on that we’ve made it this far and our inherent nobility demands to hold the course and we will, in our fundamentalist righteous sovereignty as the rulers of the world, prevail. (Yes, a little reprimand and judgment. ;-) The system is in cascade and, this being the Anthropocene and all, it is we that must change.
I have written recently, that the odds are against us, but I also hold an optimistic view of the possibility space and even some of the broader patterns of evolution flickering on the walls of my mind remain open to a path forward of global flourishing.
I think the key threshold here is that in the grandest scope of things, evolution remains agnostic to our success or failure. At the same moment, the essence of evolution expresses as the pattern of an ever giving love discerning its course through the wisdom of compassion. Therein lies me with Gregory’s gift of threshold and new beginnings.
This is not a New Year’s resolution. This is me seeking the careful path stones of clarity through the divine confusion of this clamorous guesthouse hall.
I want to be a little audacious. I want to speak to an intention; the fulfillment of which requires of me to become something more connected, more capable, more intelligent, more wise and skillful, more agile and more free. Thankfully I have experience in each of those domains, and many more unnamed but necessary to the task. Couched in the human metacrisis, which pours over and impacting many others beyond our anthropocentric narcissism, I intend to find a path of loving service. A path, rich with compassion, that discerns the finest grains essential to treat this terminal malady in our human civilization.
These are many words, and not yet entirely to the point. I have other work to do today, to find my feet in the economics of this new year and this intention to serve something in the land of this guesthouse. Within that work lies the refinement of already crystallizing design criteria and structural integrity to the body of this intention rising up to live through me and so many others.
For now I will leave with the words of Jonathan Rowson who said something in one of his recent articles about the future being yet unwritten, and as such, we having an ethical responsibility to leave it as well prepared and well provisioned as we may. I like this sentiment very much. It is my intention to live into that with all of the capacity, grace, and good fortune that I might.
Happy new year, I’m glad you are here.
May you be well and happy. May you be safe. May you find yourself always peaceful and at ease, dancing on this world like sunlight through the trees.