When in the body of a donkey…

On the nature of creative novelty.

In honor of Charles, who encouraged me to write and helped to polish some of the roughness from the craft.

Here as the earth spins, wandering spirals around the sun which in turn drifts lazily bobbing up and down through the disc of the Milky Way, the song of the modern world counts out its contrived beat,… 2022… 2023…

A child of that world, my mind dances in step, eyes fixed on some horizon while the flesh embodies the mantra, “begin again…”

In honor of Charles and innumerable other keepers of the clock, I write today in prayer that offering find its way through me in this new turning of the age.

MMXXIII. A certain symmetry impresses itself upon me through this telling of the time, some predisposition for hopefulness seeping through.

All of this of course references an acute sensation in my being, that of the constructed nature of these agreements, time, years, markers of beginnings and ends… In particular, that sensation of who WE are emerging from this collective story.

I return again and again to the primacy of perception. After all, it matters less how many times I receive instruction on the nature of time or the importance of punctuality or freedom, and so much more on my own subjective lived experience of some moment regardless of whether I parse it as femtosecond, hour, minute, or eternity.

Standing in the point of perception, however, emptiness expands to fill all things with a fleeting yet luminous, still yet dancing fullness of boundless, timeless eternity.

As the poet says,

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.

From here the joyfulness and the suffering of the world merge together and there is nothing to be done, except perhaps to hold all things in a frame of loving compassion.

And yet…

The year according to Gregory is 2023. War persists in the Ukraine. Machine learning and AI technology continues to evolve far beyond the speed of conventional comprehension. Algorithmic capitalism munches happily on the bones of democracy. The Anthropocene leans heavily on the clock of climate and ecosystemic cycles, and we appear ill-equipped to keep pace.

A wise friend of mine points out our reluctance to consider even the fragile nature of our species (and this biosphere) hanging in the balance.

A profound acceptance and surrender might allow a retreat into the spacious heart of patience filled with love, a willingness to let go and see what comes.

Daniel, on the other hand, points out the importance of not losing touch with the active compassion that compels us to act at the mere sight of suffering in our presence.

“When in the body of a donkey, enjoy the taste of grass.” (Quoting from the text of another important mentor in my life.)

So here we are, in these frail yet surprisingly resilient human bodies, spiraling our little lifetimes around a mere moment of the cosmic year. What to do with this magical gift, this popping spark of life flickering out of the bonfire of eternity?

In my experience, oscillation between bias for action and bias for reflection underlies the tick-tock time of evolutionary journey through the space of relativity.

The pages (and purpose?) of these writings stretches back now a number of years. The theme seems distinctly autobiographical, though in my mind I have leaned towards telling a wider story, and sometimes in the opposite direction towards something aspiring to be purely mundane.

Which is to say that I think today, at the beginning of this year, to stand in the square of owning a little more personally the missive of this particular thread.

“The last few years…” Seems almost cliché, here in the shadow of ongoing pandemic (and did I mention wars, and climate change, and the rise of nationalism, and…). But leaning into that personal story, the last few years have been a pressure cooker to be sure.

I have survived the enormous cost of my care and upkeep, only through the generosity and kindness of community. Undoubtedly, I found the fortitude within to endure the uncertainty through the grace of wise guidance maintained in the lineage community of time.

Here on the eve of the first day of the new year, I think the purpose of these pages, in honor of Charles who encouraged a bias for the action side of the Intent polarity (the Virtue of Doing, Generosity, Becoming Gratitude) has something to do with drawing that line in the sand, asserting intent, speaking words in prayer for what might become…

In the ocean of time, a universe of matter that is mostly empty space seems to persist moment to moment with degrees of familiarity intact. Hydrogen atoms spin on as they have for billions of years, and yet somehow, in the vastness of it all, creative novelty seeps through, as though a dreamer awakening.

This time on earth is ripe for profoundly creative innovation. A seeing through the habitual nature of our conventional ways of conceiving time and self and society and world, and into something more empowered by an awakened sense of synergistic justice and vitality is not only necessary, but due.

For my part, in honoring the constructions of time, tomorrow is Monday, the first day of the workweek, the first workweek of the year, the next day in my life; I am going to lean into building novel contribution to the evolutionary dialogue, a note in the grand symphony uplifting and filled with light, a song of happiness and possibility. Stay tuned for a developing invitation seeking first the ground of committed community, growing then through cycles of expanding collaboration, before reaching a crescendo of pollination in the global spring lying just beyond the horizon of this winter’s trek.

Life is short. Moment to moment uncertain. Time, while illusory, is bound also to the fleeting illusion of Self. “When in the body of a donkey…”