Month: May 2022

We seek salvation from others.

“What is the world coming to?” “Society is broken.” “What is wrong with our leaders?” “We need a new social contract.”

Help me, we cry. Save us, we plead. Somebody. Soon.

None of us are God. Yet some portion of that which is God, some essence of that which is good, some small spark of what is purposeful, what is possible, what is present in this world lives within each and every one of us. It breathes in us. It springs from the very movement of individual respiration. Inhale; relax. Inspire; release. Take in the new. Hold it. Let it modify you. Let yourself modify it. Exhale. Share what you just learned.

Long ago many of us were taught that exhalation, the act of returning to the world our used breath, was somehow an act of discarding, of rejection, of abandonment. Our bodies extract what we need. They eliminate what we don’t. To expire is to rid ourselves of damaged air. Breathe in the new. Breathe out the old.

That perspective is so limiting, so restricted. There is much more to the breathing cycle than the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Because within each respiration is the potential of sharing, of recharging, of recognizing our common dependence on the air we exchange, the ground we walk, the journeys we chose to embark on, together. When we forget that an expiration, for every one of us, is a potential act of inspiration, or someone else, we fail to understand that salvation is not uniquely dependent on external forces.

Consequently, we take. And we wait. We take again. We wait some more.

Who will rescue us, when the flame of innocence is snuffed out by the arms of brutality forged through centuries of fear, corruptness, and greed? Is it you, Senator? How about you, Congresswoman? Can you, Judge, find some new interpretation of 27 words written some 231 years ago by a small group of men afraid of re-invasion from a distant political power? Can you, Preacher, shame contemporary political leadership into some action that isn’t so frustratingly nonsensical? Are we destined to continue on an unending cycle of violence, avarice, and hopelessness? Are we broken? Will be always be broken? Is it our nature to be broken?

Help me, we cry. Save us, we plead. Somebody. Anybody.

We scan the horizons, of our religions, our spiritual traditions, our history books, our media, straining to see our rescuer. We gulp at the air surrounding us. We use what we can. We discard. We try to discard more.

We miss what is right before our eyes, what even now fills our lungs. The divine is not a promise. Good lives within us.

There is wrong in the world, yes. There are people who would seek to do us harm, others who would seek only to bring themselves benefit. And yet – yes, yet – there is you. There is me. We are by no means perfect, no. We are, however, fairly decent. We don’t breathe so that others cannot. We take in air because our bodies need it. We release air so that the environment can replenish it. We seek good. We want to be part of the solution. We desperately want to help.

So then we should. So then we should inspire. So then we should inspire someone else. So then we should inspire someone else each and every day.

You say that inspiration of this nature comes from outside, from some prime mover force? I say that this prime mover force speaks through and with you. It breathes into you so that you can breathe into someone else.

You say you don’t believe in such a thing, that you don’t care for a concept such as God, but that you believe in something else, something you call love, Gaia, or universal consciousness? I say that love, Gaia, universal consciousness exist only because you exist. They need you. You are their manifestation.

The power for good does not uniquely emanate from interpretations of things such as religious texts, government constitutions, social laws, or political philosophies. Those constructs can advance good, they can seek to voice the nature of good, they may even be based on revelation from something I might call the Supreme Good. But they still require human choice and action. They still need you. They need your breath. They need your ability to be inspired. They need your ability to inspire those around you.

You can hold a hand. You can hold the heart of a stranger you will never meet. You can hold the memory of an innocent child, a fallen hero, an imperfect neighbor, anyone whom your instinct for good may benefit. A thought makes a difference. A lightly touched elbow. A word of solace. Gratitude. A shared tear.

I refuse to accept that we – the people – are unable to keep good alive. I refuse to resign myself to fatalistic defeat in the face of immorality, inaction, and inane social decision-making. I refuse to permit myself to drink our common air as if it is mine along to ingest.

And the God of my belief system, the power in which I believe, reminds me, all too regularly, that It/They/She/He only lives as much as I do.

I am tiny; so are you. I am inadequate; so are you. I am selfish and a sad repository for the magnificence of what is possible with love, God, Gaia, or universal consciousness. Yet we are the opportunity for the manifestation of such a force. We are its potential. We live as its embodiment.

Please – humbly, regularly, share the power that you have for good. Do so through the smallest of favors, gestures, and reassurances. Honor the memory of what is possible by never surrendering your optimism, your hope, your heart.

Inspire. Someone. Daily.

There are things of tomorrow that I could tell you, things of splendor, of wonder, of joyful relief, if I could only recall them.

The sea rolls. It moves. It is incessant. It is seeking. It is perfectly unpredictable. It is recognizably unshaped. It knows not its next form. It understands completely that its waves will be.

I watch them, my fellow travelers. We come in many shapes and forms. Some of us are bipedal. Some are winged. Some trot on the ends of cords. Some sun on the rocks, flippers pointing like guideposts. Our senses flare. At the ocean’s edge, we stretch ourselves. Something about the juncture of sea, land, and salty air beckons us. We lose boundaries. We forget to think. We breathe.

The waves, oh how they roll. They swell, they soothe, they lash out in fury, they caress like butter spreading atop warm bread. Shifting, constantly. Pausing, interminably. Nameless. Yet somehow identifiable.

Turn your face to the distant horizon! Smell the saturated air of being! Feel the sun, wind, and sound against your closed eyes, your upturned brow, your yearning soul.

Forget to think. Sink into the simple undulation of awareness.

And still the expanse of sea shifts, humming in murmurs, pounding the shoreline with emphatic phrasing. It is calling in a language you instinctively understand.

Notice – how people move on dry land akin to the rolls of liquid that roil the border between standing and floating. The currents of intentionality buoy us. We bob. We set anchor. We lean into an invisible compass of pointless yet purposeful orientation that mysteriously manipulates and guides us, as if we were magnets pulled and repelled, pulled and repelled, pulled and repelled, pulled, pulled by some massive force of attraction, some unseen but constantly present lodestone, a reminder, a susurrus, a wordless whisper.

A remembrance of things to come.

We belong – the ocean knows it. We have always belonged – the tingle in our skin declares it. Hark! the breakers bellow. Release! the undulating tide admonishes. Reconnect! the unbounded essence of the sea, sand, and sky urge.

I am fastened to the future, which holds tight to the past, both balanced atop the most minuscule pin of a point I call the present. Somehow I stand tiptoe on this moment with you, with everything, each and all of us straining to extend ourselves, individually, from the tiniest touch with terra firma to the most fragile attachment with intangible etherea, collectively. There is a true lingua franca in our world, an actual bridging language of being; we can sense it. Awash in a daily plethora of dialects for living, we long for a common form of communication, a wordless reassurance that you, me, us, this – all of it – that it has coherence, that it has meaning, that it makes sense. And then we smell the salty sea, we lose focus on its heaving horizon, we close our eyes and we breathe, we inhale, we keep inhaling, we inhale like each gulp that fills our lungs is the first one, inhaled for the first time, we do all of us, without thinking, and we know, we understand, we feel comfort. We forget to remember to be.

The waves are us. When time looks and listens, it sees and hears how we moved together, not how any of us somersaulted, spun, sank, or spiraled aloft as solitary droplets. The surges, the swells, the rollers of today recede into the collective memory of tomorrow, not with regret, never with remorse, but with relaxed acquiescence, with humble acceptance. A myriad of ripples rejoice in their partnership with the breakers they form, all exquisitely formed curls of nature that spread out and over the shores of this present, and then this one, and the next one. And the next.

We are all bridges that the stream of time’s consciousness dares to cross. Feel the connection. Let the future flow through you. Let it be you.