How are you Kabir?

Long a kerfuffle, this question has been up for me this week…

Left to itself, this body tries to aspirate and choke its oxygen supply. Absent fairly constant supervision and maintenance, it tries to breed unfriendly bacteria in the urinary tract. For the state of the world, or for age, or for some other matter of well-being, I seem often tired of late. Six months ago, and perhaps a bit longer, my right shoulder started to itch; that spread around my neck and shoulders and head, becoming almost unbearable – much lesser now it still persists. Keeping balance in my care system (necessary for getting out of bed and getting to work or play) calls for constant gardening. I could go on, but a list of ostensible grievances is not the point, nor even the lived experience, truly.

So much of my time gets devoted (like so many others) to simply staying afloat in this mad mad world of ours. I feel often behind and unavailable to rest, or better still, to get away to the wilderness for forest bathing.

I practice Dharma and, in doing so, benefit from countless beings who have developed these teachings of profound wellness. This fills me with gratitude, always. I live in San Diego, the sun is shining (almost always), and the temperature is perfect (nearly always.) I have a heart filled with love and can find its reflection in every drop of light when I remember to look, which is often.

The “new normal” remnants of pandemic ebb and flow to and from the communities of which I’m a part. The politics of my country seem dashed upon the rocks, yet I still believe I have it better than most. The world boils under techno-optimism and environmental devastation. Anxiety and depression stand to be counted every day in those I love and beyond.

I am loved and cared for in so many ways and yet my personal future, like that of the world, seems volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous. This gives rise to humility and faith and devotion to the refinement of clarity and conduct in the moment.

“How are you Kabir?” Came the call again the other day…

Like a fish swimming, evolving into/with and through a fluid, slowly and long, increasing in degrees of viscosity.

I feel it in my skin, in my muscles, and in my bones. My attention adapts slowly over time with this transforming context, moving along the edge of harmony with novel dynamics coming into being across all scales in the moment and time.

All of this shapes the expression of my gratitude, my love, my joy, and yet their essence remains the same.

What a marvelous kosmos, what mysterious radiance and beauty! Look closely, birth, endurance, decay, seasons turning into seasons, turning into darkness and light.

How am I? It is polite to ask, to be sure. There is work to be done, and little time to dwell. Is that true? Surely compassion demands brevity on occasion, and still I lean in… :-)

There lies a gift in every moment, it’s threshold quality the intersection of creative certainty (flow state), and profound awe in the face of the transcendent majesty.

I seek to embody the living expression of that gift. Perhaps I reflect that is “how do I do…”

Recent efforts to establish some integrity to the ground from which I act have proven for the moment sufficient to allow my attention to diversify from a sole focus on survival and maintenance of the meditative practice, to pairing that more wholly with the expression of that work as an emergent participation in the world affair.

I mean to find a balance in the writings on this thread between sharing a personal journey and human story of my own while contributing to the weaving of wonder/wisdom threads in our emerging tapestry of care for a biosphere in turmoil.

I have not yet reached the place where grand essays or important book works seem the right application of my actions, and may not (we shall see.) Conversations that engender discussion that give rise to principles that reveal prototypes and the subsequent action inquiry of those expressions seems more likely in the near term.

Nonetheless, in honor of my intention that these pages give some sense and invitation to these elements moving through the mesoteric strata of my being, may the reader kindly forgive me for including now just some random notes from the past week’s review of discussions in the field.

The casual reader is encouraged to read no further. ;-)

You have been warned and welcomed and thanked. :-)

What is the highest and widest level of impact that can be enacted by a caring and discrete group of individuals exercising influence at the global scale, while honoring deep ecosystemic integrity with long foresight and flourishing along the way?

We must make a distinction between “flourishing outcomes” and the imagined “best paths” to those outcomes; advocating for and developing the likelihood of the former while remaining agnostic to the latter. These distinctions, advocacy, and development lend themselves to action inquiry prototype, but only from that touchstone ground of discernment.

How to craft dialogue such that my own views/questions (human species initiation, wisdom sufficiency, etc.) may be challenged, developed, refined, while also invoking novel insight and reflection from interlocutors?

Perhaps there is a new relationship we must develop to the idea of “want;” (probably inspect the Intention polarity) it may be much less about “desirable” futures (H1,) and much more about realistically integrated futures (H3.) This subtle shift could prove definitive to future identity conditions and potentially an entirely new set of “optimal” future (H2) trajectories related to that.

There seems to be some part in the discipline of remaining agnostic to any conceptions of future, except by means of holding firm on certain fundamental thresholds of integrity that must be met for the initiation to have been considered a success.

On an outer threshold, there is this clarity on principles of evolutionary sufficiency to be met in integrity with future states of flourishing.

Closer in, and following this established ground, there is a discernment of process and pathways that lead reliably towards that sufficiency, while resisting tendencies of the pre-initiatory state to co-opt and claim those processes and pathways as their own.

Finally, the inner condition is the advent of practical and injunctive prototypes of action/creation that become the accessible ground of broad collective testing for alignment with Right Story.

Sometimes in the course of creative initiative, a certain avenue develops and is let aside; it’s material construction will not be a part of the ongoing work, though lessons derived from its process will carry forward in the ever-increasing body of wisdom and insight. This happens at all scales, from momentary and slight “directional change,” all the way through grand evolutionary cycles where entire planetary systems cease to exist the course of the supernova…

I think it is wise that we must learn to evaluate any of our human initiative relative to this metric. :-)

I don’t see the key work so much as building a new world, a new society, or a new economy (and probably especially not a new religion,), but rather in finding ways to skillfully care for the pre-existing fundamental goodness and simplest elements of well-being as the necessary soil nutrient for any future flourishing of those novelties.

Many others do feel compelled to those elements of the work and I wholeheartedly applaud any ounce of discipline, care, or effort that they put into that/those endeavors. I think these are valuable contributions to the transformational ecosystemic diversity and flourishing in real time, though I think that gardening in this great terrain needs as much as anything to attend to the soil, water, and sunshine of which these new flora will grow.

In contrast to a basic service initiative that seeks to provide nutritive and nurturing support to this otherwise diversity of aspirational care, this metaphor of soil tending seeks, I think, to incur some degree of… [Perhaps magic is not quite the right word.] In other words, how to tend the basic nutrients of the world in such a way that those things that emerge do so with the greatest resiliency, internal integrity, boundaries inclined towards synergy, and biophilic care for all those dimensions they call home.

fin.