In Buddhism, one of the metaphors for the inter-connectedness of all things is found in Indra’s Net. In Vedic mythology, the net hangs over the palace of the god Indra. The net is held together by a jewel located at each intersection of the net’s fibers and when the sun shines on one jewel, the reflection of that jewel becomes a part of all the other jewels’ radiance. 

Indra’s Net is part of a Buddhist sutra- a teaching- which describes infinite realms of space within infinite realms of space, all connected, all dependent on the others. Developed in the 3rd century C.E., the metaphor attempts to explain not only the spaces which we can see because they are larger than we are, but also the spaces too small to be seen with the naked eye. Before microscopes, before telescopes, there was an understanding of the similarities of spatial realities, no matter what their size, that were only able to be confirmed with electron microscopes and Hubble and Cassini telescopes late in the 20th century!

Those microscopes and telescopes confirmed what the Vedics and other ancient peoples had begun to know: Jupiter is connected to Io is connected to the Milky Way is connected to Alpha Centauri is connected to the Atlantic Ocean is connected to oyster shells, fish gills, snake lungs, the Moon, the Sahara Desert, and human circulatory systems.

Now hear the word of the Lord..

Really. 1 Corinthian 12: 12,13- “The human body has many parts, but the many parts make up one whole body. So it is with the body of Christ. Some of us are Jews, some are Gentiles, some are slaves, and some are free. But we have all been baptized into one body by one Spirit, and we all share the same Spirit.”

In the 13th century, Brother Francis wrote:

“We praise You, Lord, for all Your creatures,
especially for Brother Sun,
who is the day through whom You give us light.
And he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor,
of You Most High, he bears your likeness.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Moon and the stars,
in the heavens you have made them bright, precious and fair.

We praise You, Lord, for Brothers Wind and Air,
fair and stormy, all weather’s moods,
by which You cherish all that You have made.

We praise You, Lord, for Sister Water..Brother Fire..Sister Earth..for Sister Death.”1.

The interconnectedness of all things. The Buddhists also call it the interpenetration of all things: the in-ness of all things within everything else. It is when we deny that wholeness, that completeness and dependency of each thing, each being, on the other, that we are able to conceive, condone, and conduct violence on that which is outside of our own small and self-defined circle of life. We are able to more easily discriminate, stereotype, deny, disregard, ignore, abuse, even destroy that from which we convince ourselves we are forever separate.

And that, as should be more and more apparent to more and more people, has become a frighteningly dangerous way to live. It has brought us to the edge of both nuclear and environmental disaster. And the only way to stop our slide into extinction will be to say with more frequency ,fervency, veracity, and sincerity:

Brother, Sister, Mother, Father..

1.from The Canticle of the Creatures, Saint Francis (1181-1226)

You say I took the name in vain
I don’t even know the name
But if I did, well really, what’s it to you?
There’s a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightening storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now – whenever
we’re not looking.  Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade – surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

© Mary Oliver

Can you imagine beyond the words, into midrash? Can you imagine beyond Sabbath, into eternity? Can you imagine beyond law, into gospel? Can you imagine beyond what you think you know about God, into what you think you know about yourself?

And then, can you imagine, as Hafiz asks, begging Reason to come outside and play?

But trees can’t dance! I’m not like God! Flowers don’t bloom in winter! That’s just the way I was brought up! There’s nothing good comes out of Nazareth!

Close your eyes and discover the fields of color lying between the black and white boundaries to which you’ve confined yourself. Close your eyes and listen to the ten thousand songs being sung by your heart instead of the rules and regulations being recited and repeated by your intellect.  Stop keeping God in that rough little box that is so awkward to carry around; take the lid off and say this,

“Play with me, God. You’re it! Run with me! Beat you to that tree! Rock, Paper, Scissors- ha! I win! You wanna go to the store with me and get a Coke? Where do you live anyway? Oh, look at that dog..and those cats..and the birds up in the air! What’s your real name, God?”

Close your eyes, now. And listen for the answers..

© David Weber

from “An Encounter”

I confessed that I am afraid to die                      

with poems left unsaid inside me,                         

and he said, “You will.                                      

You’ll die with a great poem in your heart          

that will never see paper.”

We were quiet then. A bee buzzed             

perilously close to my sweaty thigh,                     

and I heard it: I heard                                          

the danger and sweetness inside everything.

(“An Encounter” © Alison Luterman in The Sun, January, 2010)

We suffer, wanting to make our mark, leave our mark, and be remembered. We suffer, because we think we must know what we won’t know will no longer be able to know cannot know. We suffer- too often- simply because we are unable to say so.

So. And our words tumble, in unknown tongues.

So. We mumble through sighs and groans.

So. And then we are breathed upon and it becomes clear that we are that great poem, the greatest poem, and it is being written by Both of Us in  languages that can’t be counted and it will always be written and it will always be read..

© David Weber

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–

over and over announcing your place  in the family of things.

© Mary Oliver

And one day, when we expect it least, or when we need it most, we see. We see beyond the confines of our imaginations, we see past the accumulated knowledge that has blocked our seeing before this day, these moments.  We see, and we know. We know that Our Name and Your Name are are without end or beginning. We reach for the edges of our understanding and there are none; nor, we know now, will there ever be the need for them again.

We are without words and so we look beseechingly to the sky, the geese, the summer winds for syntax and syllable, for punctuation and paragraph, and we hear instead the trees laughing and the clouds remembering when they, too, sought to reduce love, This Love, to language.

© David Weber

I dreamt, after wakening, that there really are prophets who can hear the One Sound- the music of Creation as it battles Death.

It is the Sound of the Ocean and of Blood, the rhythm of the Moon and the response of our Pulse in a saltwater symphony. It is the voice, not of the god of our imagined fears, but of the triumphal entry of All That Is into the squalor of Jerusalem.

It is the music that proclaims, “it is finished,” even as crabs scurry across the sand and even as ocean waves spread New Life in metered rhythms of New Beginnings.

There are prophets who hear that terrible Harmony even as they are crushed by its Beauty.They laugh and they cry at once for the horror behind them and the hope in which they are wetly standing.

And they must tell others- those few others who can hear the music wherever they, too, are wetly standing. So that they know their feet are not wet in vain, and so they know their always breaking hearts are vital to the continuing Music.

The Wind thrusts relentlessly

against the ocean’s surface

until, in liquid gratitude,

a Current rises to meet the Wind

and be freed from the pressure

of an underwater existence

for awhile..and

In that cataclysmic meeting of

Moving Air and Counter-moving Water,

In that orgasmic movement of Power

In, out, around, on, over, and through-

One, a part of the Other now..until!

A Wave begins to rise,

Birthed in ecstatic release

for awhile..and

Rolling, cascading, turning down, turning up,

the Wave, separate now from the Current

moves westward, toward its someday Lover

with other offspring of the Ocean’s expansive bed

and hand in hand at times, dancing together

in white-capped frenzy and then

alone, in gentle surges onward

for awhile..and

One day, in the fullness of its Life

The Wave enters the gravitational

Inevitabilities and intimate destinies

of the Lover’s grasp.

And, spreading wide its watery arms,

full of strength with which to embrace

and filled, too, with nautical stories

of distance, storms, and oceanic denizens,

the Beach, the perfect and only Lover-

the culmination of Wavy dreams and

Unwavering hope-

is met,

for awhile..and

In a wet and lengthy kiss

The Wave fades into its Beloved destiny,

with every drop of its existence still whole,

and every moment of its Life still existent

in the Lives of everything it has touched

on its long shoreward journey.

The Wave- dissipated- becomes part of the Currents

that circle the Planet..

Currents, flowing from their Beloved in tender trust

and singular surety;

Currents, beginning their time of waiting

for the powerful but sweet, and thrusting but gentle,

invitations of the Winds, to rise

and meet them, and give birth to

a new Creation.

7 12 08 (with love for Thich Nhat Hahn)

Between my eyes and that bois d’arc tree

just across the way,

in the seven seconds it took to remember the

spelling of bois d’arc,

the history of humankind has blown by.

There! The indestructible atomic remnants

of Caesar’s gasp as

Brutus’s knife entered his ribcage,

and of the basso profundo sung

in Gregorian Chant at Chartres.

Oxygen ventilated at the Battle of Hastings,

passed on through photosynthetic generations

of pine trees, plankton, and petunias,

then inhaled again by Shakespeare, Chopin,

and the guy who played Chewbacca.

And even the breath of Jesus, let loose

in the world with the words,

“It is finished;”

only, it was just beginning.

A dog carried that expelled expiration

back to Jerusalem, passed it on to

a fig tree, which gave it to pigeon,

who deposited it on the street

where it was stepped on by a donkey

and delivered to a field outside of the city

from where it was delivered eventually,

after being present in a hundred thousand

manifestations

to this pasture in Texas..

where part of it was grabbed by the bois d’arc

and part of it by me.

And that, of course, is a bit of the reason

we are both still alive.

(to be continued)

Life teems.

From my perspective

(a single breath in the winds

of the Universe)

what is, was; and what will be,

is now.

But that is illusion,

a vagary of the glimpse I have

of these moments, of this Now

in eternity.

Life teems, and thrusts-

asserting itself into generations

of which it is unaware

but, nonetheless, bidden.

Driven by upward forces

toward the sun,

pushed across barren soils

toward rivers and seas,

called by the future

toward a presence

in the harmonic symphony

that is always being written.

I am

in the midst of it

Now.

I am the teeming desires

of my ancestors to see

what they would not see,

to touch what would be

beyond their grasp,

and to feel the wind, the warmth,

the wonder of it all,

which they had known.

I am their thrusting, lusting,

desiring need for

presence in the panorama

of continuing Creation.

I am the accumulated starstuff

of dying suns, ocean tides, volcanic eruptions,

thunder, lightning, simmering summers,

melting glaciers, and rivered canyons.

I am part of the meandering tapestry

of the Earth’s green response

to planetary cataclysms; and

I am part of the hungry, crawling,

expanding and replicating,

movement of consciousness through time.

I am their resurrection.

I am their Life.

I am.

Hummingbirds belong in manicured back yards

hovering near red plastic feeders bought at Walmart

(On Sale, $6.95),

zoom-zooming back and forth for the amusement

of those of us behind plate glass doors

within thermostat-cooled rooms,

our toes nestled in thickly carpeted

representations of the bug-filled grass outside

(just beyond the redwood deck, and Weber gas cooker).

But these hummingbirds-

2 of them, 3, no..4 !

These hummingbirds are watching

for pink lipped blossoms

full of sweet kisses.

These hummingbirds sit in mesquite trees

(for a moment)

planning erotic dances

with the wild sisters

newly arrived from the Yucatan.

These hummingbirds have not been to Walmart;

but they have flown over a thousand miles of

white-capped oceans .

From the jungles of Chiapis

they heard the voices of 10,000 generations

calling them to grass-filled plains

and shale hills to the north

where mockingbirds and vultures,

prairie hens and quail,

crows and robins, cowbirds, sparrows, and cardinals

have gathered since before the moon set or the sun rose

as backdrops against a single, human-lit campfire.

These hummingbirds have never tasted sugar water

tinted with red dye #2 from the local IGA.

But they have tasted the essential and subtle

syrups of primroses

(growing in profusion).

They have licked the sugary insides of

Trumpet creeper stamens and

and honeysuckle pistels,

whose names are without meaning

in the brilliant beckoning

of the flowers’ sun-drenched petals.

Now, they are flying close enough to watch me.

The buzz of their wings is too fast for me to see;

I can only hear their blurry presence,

their so-curious hummed inquiries

and look quickly into their eyes,

as they determine that there is no pink, red, magenta,

or scarlet signs here worth further investigation.

I say “hello,” before they leave, while regretting

(a little, and for several minutes, a lot)

that I will never see the pyramids of Teotihuacan

or bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico

with them.