Come To Awaken, But Not For Yourself

Decay

The day the

call came that would

change everything, I went

walking…and

everything

did in fact

shift.

Sometimes the unanticipated tincture of

mortality is the only balm

brash enough to heal a

deeper blindness.

Outside, the world greeted me

with an indifferent beauty, brilliant and severe,

an aliveness only known to

intimates of decay.

A growing ache of

recognition,

long-forgotten wisdoms

buried in bones,

remembered.

“This is the way of things,”

nurse log whispered,

“My body, given for seedlings.”

Rotting Coho feeds her eggs, her

Ancestors’ bodies swept up,

roots now waving leaves,

cooling waters of

grave and womb alike.

This is the way of things.

This is the way of things.

No great loss to fall apart, to die

so a Greater Life may flourish.

When cancer came again, I went walking.  Familiar streets with trees I knew awaited me, but the hue of everything was starkly different from my normal strolls. So often, I walk lost in my own stories, ruminating on my own dramas, when suddenly I realize I’m back at my porch with little memory of the previous 45 minutes.  It seems I just went on a sleepwalk, more than anything else.  But there is nothing like the immediacy of mortality to jolt you awake.  

On this particular day, the distance between me and everything flattened, and something akin to a momentary but utterly pure sense of union ended up breaking in on the scene.  Light poured from the branches, and the words of Julian of Norwich rose up: “All shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.”  Clearly, this was no simple assurance that I would beat cancer. No. It was something far, far better.  This grace showed that regardless of what happened, a radical Love was holding us all.  I exhaled and felt caught, even carried by the Mystery.

When we remember that our lives are as fleeting as the grass, we are better suited to consciously and fully live them, rather than merely sleepwalking through our days. The urgency of the essential rivets us. Our senses sharpen.  Food tastes better, colors brighten, music sounds more intense, and, if the moon is right, we just might find ourselves acutely aware of our connections to absolutely everything.  It is a kind of birth, a sort of waking up, and, in my experience, this was a waking up deeper into our common belovedness.  

In the Pacific Northwest, Illuman brothers speak of “awakening men into their belovedness, that they might love the world.” Belovedness says we were created and continually exist on the receiving end of Love.  There is no Beloved without the Lover, and, cosmically speaking, my belovedness and your belovedness and the belovedness of all are all the same One Belovedness.  Either it all holds together, or it all falls apart. This birthright can’t be earned or lost, marred or improved. We don’t have to do anything to get it or keep it. It just abides beneath, within, before and after all the pulsing of our days.  This is who we are, before, during, and after all we do, think, and say in our lives.

Our job is to simply awaken to our belovedness before we forget it again, remember it once more, and, with practice, allow it to change everything.  The working out of love is more often the patient tending of suffering than a euphoric dance, but whatever the current manifestation, our reality is never the same.  We can’t contain it, and love flows like a river, in and out of our lives, between us all, until we’re all caught up in the same heartbeat. As an indigenous woman in the broader Co-Salish tribes put it to a friend of mine recently, “My life is not my own, it belongs to those who love me.”  Were that our lived reality each day, this alone would change everything!

Some have noted that there is simply too much focus in white culture on the self and on one’s individual calling.  “What is yours to do?” “Who do you want to be?”  We seek self-actualization in therapy, attend self-improvement workshops, and tend to “my” own soul in places of worship.  Many white Christians think of salvation as an individual process rather than a collective one. Young folk feel the pressure to choose what they want to do in life, rather than first focusing on who they are in their universal call as a Beloved son or daughter in the midst of a particular place and people.  If we were grounded deeply enough in our universal inheritance, the rest of life would just be details to be entered into with curiosity and delight rather than anxiety.

Belovedness refuses to be siloed as merely individual. It is communal if it is anything. Otherwise, it is nothing.  This is seen in the Bodhisattvas of Buddhism, enlightened ones who refuse to enter paradise as individuals, instead returning to keep working until all are free and can cross together.  It is MLK’s “inescapable network of mutuality” in which our destinies are so intertwined as to be inseparable.  It is the notion of ubuntu in South Africa, which Desmond Tutu taught as revealing how our humanity is tied up in each other’s, as we can only be human together. We see it in Pope Francis’s teachings that salvation is for a people, not a person, as well as the teachings of the Dalai Lama, Chief Seattle, Jesus, Thich Nhat Hanh, and a host of others.  Here in the US, the thread weaves through the American spirituality of the Black Church, the Shakers, Quakers, Amish, and Brethren, to name a few who emphasized communal life as essential to the individual life.

It seems that only in the consumerist and individualistic versions of America is the pursuit of happiness deemed something an individual could or should attempt alone.  Most others realize that joy is a common good, arrived through common work.  Thich Nhat Hanh said we are to “Awaken from the illusion of our separateness,” and that “enlightenment is when a wave realizes it is the ocean.”  

Thus, as we prepare to gather at Awaken, it is a great time to consider this not as a conference that individuals might attend for their own benefit, but rather as a space in which we come for the benefit of others.  For whom might you attend?  How might this make you a more passionate lover of your spouse, your children, your neighbor?  The theme this year inherently connects us not only with all those with whom we share the earth now, but also across time and space as we tend to our Ancestors and descendants as well.  

The field of epigenetics has revealed to us that, scientifically speaking, our traumas are both inherited from our ancestors via the sperm and egg, and passed on as well.  Whatever we are able to do to heal the suffering we inherit, prevents that suffering from being passed on to future generations.  In other words, doing your own inner work is not just your own work at all, but work that is done on behalf of, and belongs to, us all!  It is a gift to the world.  In fact, if we were to believe the great traditions, your own healing may be your greatest contribution to the healing of all.

The implications, of course, mean that even if you are not able to join us in person at Awaken, you can still be connected and involved from wherever you might find yourself.  So, join us, join us, join us.  We belong to each other, in many senses, regardless of where our feet touch the earth at any given moment.

For all that has been: Thanks.

For all that will be: Yes.

—Dag Hammarskjöld