Where to begin? A quiet, gray, soulful window of daylight permeates my being as this paralyzed body rides patiently around the axis of spaceship Earth. A timeless journey filled with so much light and motion and altogether still in the uniform expression of boundless transformation and no fixed point of reference. A certain moment in all of this, a moment of commitment to this very page.
I dreamt the other night — On a wall in a room hung a pair of images, one representing Love, the other Music; each had a unique woven character, perhaps its name in some mystical language. The shape of these names was very similar, as if the two terms shared some deep underlying phenomenological unity.
I contemplate often the movement, the vibrational, aspect of being. (The particle nature of existence.) The poetic voice known as Bayo recently expressed it in a way that strummed the strings of my heart, “We are but a murmuration of becoming.” (The wave nature of existence?) Love and music, total embrace and harmonic relating, no place from which to begin, and no end to beginnings and endings.
I want to write here to share a perspective; some point of view and it’s revealed vista to illuminate paths forward, offer nutrients for transformation, invite the resonance that is the sound of vital unfolding. The question drives me; what synergy of polarities breathes fourth the greatest love offering in this unique and intimate moment, in this profoundly infinite space of possibility?
And so it seems, I begin with some prayer of gentle vulnerability, seeking earth in a groundless ground from which to grow the roots, stalk, flowers and fruit of evolution’s eternal seed.
I intend to ground this piece in a concrete view of the world, and our place in it. Some clear statement of objects to grasp, and yet not taking ourselves so far outside and apart from those practical and practicable murmurations. In the words of Rumi, “let the beauty we love be what we do.”
I thought for a moment that I might start by speaking from my own body, and it seems I may. Under the aforementioned gray skies, I found myself this morning feeling the soulful dampness behind the eyes, that sensation of tears not quite flowing. Like the rain not fallen from the clouds above, and still the heart broken with beauty and vulnerable humility, feeling one with the more delicate aspects of our nature.
“Answer me this,
I won’t take you to court.
Did you go crazy,
or did you report
on that day they wounded New York?”
Leonard singing from the next room as I showered. The softness, like a living sponge, welled up.
Returning to the bedroom, finishing drying and moving towards dressing for the day, XTC comes over the airwaves, “Dear God…” More softness. Such pervasive existential humility, are we not so much as said the poet, “a somewhat something moving dreamlike on a fading road…”
Perhaps I have, for now, made plain the ephemeral nature of this soil from which I propose to grow this flower and offer some pollen into what may be a new spring for our world.
Body, mind, spirit. I trust you are familiar with this version of the holy Trinity.
These distinctions within the unity have been present since the dawn of material existence at the very least. The body as the subatomic particle; the mind as the rules to which it is bound by its nature; and the spirit as that quantum field void, the emptiness from which it springs and to which it returns.
They are certainly present within me, when “I set” my mind in that way. They are with us now as, in the spirit of love, I give body as words to these emanations of my mind.
Another way of calling these distinctions arises in the view of the world as a concrete, a material substance, a firm and enduring ontological reality. To bring it home: soil, air, water, and space.
In that material context, we find ourselves, an awakened experience of identity, a point of view. This point of view is not body per se, it is mind. It cannot be grasped, or hammered or broken in the way of a stone. In the body of the world, this is the subtle mind. Awareness peering around every corner, discovering itself in myriad forms.
On its own terms, the content of awareness, its own self-realization is material enough. These triads are, after all, fractal and recursive to an infinite degree. Within awareness arises its own subtle fluency, the mystery of its arising in the first place, the ground of awareness, the ground of the subtle world, is spirit. This meta-awareness, a vast and unbroken mystery, present, sparkling, glinting and reflecting back through every particle, every nebula, and every kosmos, and every child, this is the spirit of being in which we are.
Body, mind, spirit. Concrete, subtle, Metaware. Each one singular, and at once a community within itself.
With that, we begin to approach the underlying intent of all these words…
This world in which we find ourselves — this planet, this solar trajectory, this corner of marvelous cosmos — to the degree that we are each ourselves, we share this place, this material plane, not only with one another, but all life that inhabits it, and if we are being generous, we hold in trust all of this concrete existence in common.
For hundreds of thousands of years our remarkable species has negotiated this physical material commons. With increasing breadth of impact, we have managed to hold varying degrees of harmony within often arbitrary boundary conditions of community. The natural intent of this harmony has been the health and well-being of our physical commons. Clean water to drink, enough food, a beautiful environment, safety in our homes and our communities, a just existence in the eyes of the Great Perfection (however named;) these have been our common goals as our tribes have wandered and grown.
Still, as successful as we have been in crafting morals, laws, treaties, and paradigmatic negotiation with the world, we have, over time, externalized much of the relative cost of these social determinants. We have enacted a variety of protocols for achieving these states of “balance;” from maintaining our populations in a state of true ecological balance, to states of war and their associated treaties. On balance, we have met the practical thresholds of these injunction, and must find new ways forward if we are to thrive in this next moment of evolution’s arc.
Let me summarize that as: Our responsible engagement (for better and for worse) with the reality of our Concrete Commons.
Within boundaries of communities throughout time, we have enacted also the care and upkeep of our Subtle Commons. This can be seen in the cultural morality or ethics of a given group. These guidelines are passed down through storytelling, through formal education, through religious commandment, and through laws in their various expression.
Today it has become incumbent upon us to realize our nature as a global species. The stewardship of our Concrete Commons strains to the point of breaking (we defile not only ourselves and one another, but nearly every living ecosystem and its inhabitants worldwide) in this time of species transformation.
This is a matter of identity, the subtle underlying awareness that gives rise to our singular body as humanity. This point of view, this mind embodied as species so far thriving as to number in the near double-digit billions and waging such impact on our shared home as to evoke the term of Anthropocene, this awareness only now beginning to realize itself in its contiguous continuity as one nature, must come to grips with the common themes of existential integrity. What are the fundamental phonemes in the harmonic body of humanity?
While we struggle to negotiate our Concrete Commons, concerned that we might continue the destruction of our habitable material existence through climate change, species destruction, war, and other bodily decay, we increasingly find the presence of pollution (or perhaps better said, fragile maturity) in our Subtle Commons to be largely at play. Depression, anxiety, increasing ideological contention, these are symptoms of an underlying neglect whose time of address is ripening quickly.
While many might argue that it is our spiritual maturity that is the breaking point along which we must strive to survive, I would offer that it is, “all things in their time,” and that we have not yet reached that milestone in our collective growth. Of course, I say an enthusiastic “Yes!” to this encouragement towards the nurturance of our ever present spiritual nature and aspects to our expression, but we are still some ways away, if only just one step, from that move in our collective maturity as a species.
I think we still have some long way to travel along these roads of cultural, religious, social, and ideological diversity. Indeed, this length of our journey has very much fruit yet to bear in its ecological fecundity as offering of life in the garden of material existence. However, to tread this path of succession we must transcend the warring and neglectful contentions that have characterized the gradual joining of so many individual expressions towards this oneness of a planetary species.
We have matured our industrial metaphors and must, as Paul so eloquently suggested, put aside these childish things, and take up the mantle of a greater maturity. Returning to the earth, might we now leave aside the transportation infrastructure of a now over-hurried progress, and turn our bodies and minds and spirits once again towards the integrative weaving of threads in the fabric of life?
What does that look like?
Indeed there are countless (often warring) ideological groups vying for attention that we might all be cajoled into the “right” point of view, way of thinking about, or way of understanding our place, condition, and paths forward. While these ideological constructs are indeed the inhabitants of our collective Subtle Commons, it is not by one colonizing another that we shall find a harmonic coherence in that dimension; no more so than it has been by one culture colonizing another that we have found peace in the Concrete Commons.
It is not these ideologies, for they are the many-varied flowers and fruits of this collective field, and not the shared soil that is the true Commons nature of this territory. What then of the soil? Or to mix the metaphors in this search for harmony, what then are the underlying notes or vibrations that make this music possible?
Words are concrete. Language is subtle. There will remain many diverse and distinct cultural ways of seeing and saying the words of love, singing the songs of harmony. They all will use language, gesture, sounds in this metaphor of our unified harmonic expression.
Indeed, it is foolish to suggest or attempt to perpetrate one truth in such a murmuration of our shared existence, but also it is equally foolish to neglect the shared ground from which we all uplift our voices in a symphony of peace. So what are these common nutrients, common vibrations, common phonemes from which we each alone and in communities diverse will uplift our gifts in this garden of our precious existence?
I will make that gesture humbly in a moment, but first I want to exhale, to let go and relax in surrender, just to say that it is with utmost conviction that I imagine a deep goodness, a grace of divine proportion, a natural justice in our fundamental existence that brings us to this precipitous moment in our evolutionary journey. Should we find our ways successfully through this transitory moment without too much terrible suffering, death, and destruction, it will be due to that grace and good fortune that gives us this very life to begin with.
Perhaps I am inadvertently spilling the punchline… Indeed, it is the feeling that I know as Gratitude to which I am gesturing just now, and it is that deeper level of values and their expressed virtues that might speak to this potential shared territory for universifying our collective efforts to inhabit and care for our Subtle Commons.
Gratitude may indeed be universal in the intersection of global human values, and then again it may not be — perhaps there are cultures who have no analog for this and yet still sustain a meaningful integrity in their coherence and their context. Be that as it may, I strongly suspect that such a universal set exists. Maybe it is values and virtues, or perhaps it is something else, but somewhere, known to and practiced by nearly all of us, and objectionable to none, I do believe we can find the stuff of this soil, that which grows to fiber and finds its way spun into threads, and woven together into a thriving future for this garden planet on the palace grounds of this great cosmos of “ours.”