Category: Poems

Community of Practice (CoP), Poems, Resources & Networks

Poem that Reconnects: “Please Call me by my True Names”

Joanna Tomkins

by Thich Nhat Hanh

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of the poem:

After the Vietnam War, many people wrote to us in Plum Village. We received hundreds of letters each week from the refugee camps in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, hundreds each week. It was very painful to read them, but we had to be in contact. We tried our best to help, but the suffering was enormous, and sometimes we were discouraged. It is said that half the boat people fleeing Vietnam died in the ocean; only half arrived at the shores of Southeast Asia.

There are many young girls, boat people, who were raped by sea pirates. Even though the United Nations and many countries tried to help the government of Thailand prevent that kind of piracy, sea pirates continued to inflict much suffering on the refugees. One day, we received a letter telling us about a young girl on a small boat who was raped by a Thai pirate.

She was only twelve, and she jumped into the ocean and drowned herself.
When you first learn of something like that, you get angry at the pirate. You naturally take the side of the girl. As you look more deeply you will see it differently. If you take the side of the little girl, then it is easy. You only have to take a gun and shoot the pirate. But we can’t do that. In my meditation, I saw that if I had been born in the village of the pirate and raised in the same conditions as he was, I would now be the pirate. There is a great likelihood that I would become a pirate. I can’t condemn myself so easily. In my meditation, I saw that many babies are born along the Gulf of Siam, hundreds every day, and if we educators, social workers, politicians, and others do not do something about the situation, in twenty-five years a number of them will become sea pirates. That is certain. If you or I were born today in those fishing villages, we might become sea pirates in twenty-five years. If you take a gun and shoot the pirate, you shoot all of us, because all of us are to some extent responsible for this state of affairs.

After a long meditation, I wrote this poem. In it, there are three people: the twelve-year-old girl, the pirate, and me. Can we look at each other and recognize ourselves in each other? The title of the poem is “Please Call Me by My True Names,” because I have so many names. When I hear one of the of these names, I have to say, “Yes.”

Note by Joanna Tomkins:

After Thay’s death, in 2022, I listened to the podcast hereunder, a conversation between Joanna Macy, founder of the Work that Reconnects and presenters of the podcast “The Way Out is In: the Zen Art of Living” Brother Phap Huu and Jo Confino. Here is the link if you want to listen too:

Articles, Poems, Resources & Networks, Uncategorized

The Empty Bowl and the Alchemy of Uncertainty

Joanna Tomkins

by Barbara Ford

To listen to this article read by the author, please visit the Deep Times Journal where it was originally published last year: https://journal.workthatreconnects.org/2023/09/02/the-empty-bowl-and-the-alchemy-of-uncertainty/

Last year, I had the great good luck to visit my beloved friend and teacher, Joanna Macy, a brilliant elder of our time. We spent the afternoon together, catching up on family and news in the dappled sunshine in her backyard. Ukraine was on her mind. She traveled throughout Russia after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 and had dedicated herself to supporting the communities there as they coped with the physical, emotional, and cultural injuries of that event. (As an aside, some communities there are still using Geiger counters to find the least radioactive spots in their environs, so that they can plant gardens and guard the children from the ongoing threat of exposure as toxic particles move with the wind and the dust.)

At some point after this deep and thoroughly unvarnished conversation about the state of the world, she looked up into the tree branches above us, newly opening buds filtering the sunlight, turned to me smiling widely and said, “I am so grateful to be alive at this moment in history!”

how to stay present in the face of those reckonings, and the unavoidable truth of uncertainty as our constant companion on the journey. 

This is not uncharacteristic of her, to be honest, but I was sitting with a kind of stunned awe, again, at this person who, while willing to stare deeply into the abyss of the pain of the world, still found herself in this place of deep gratitude. That statement, and that moment, reminded me of all the times over the years she talked about the reckonings our world was bound for, the tumult of fires, literal and cultural, that threaten our world. Her work, and mine, is largely centered on how to stay present in the face of those reckonings, and the unavoidable truth of uncertainty as our constant companion on the journey. 

In the Work That Reconnects, a body of practices developed by Joanna, there is one practice called the Truth Mandala, or Circle of Truth. Within a circle of witnesses, a person enters and interacts with objects symbolic of emotional states that might arise in confronting one’s pain for the world. For example, a pile of dead leaves symbolizes grief. A large stick, tightly held, symbolizes anger. One of the objects I have a great resonance with is an empty bowl, which is connected to confusion, uncertainty, numbness. Each object has a correlating quality to each emotional state. Grief is connected to love. Anger, to one’s passion for justice. The emptiness in the bowl makes a space for the new to arise.

That empty space is a kind of scrying bowl, a place to seek new meanings, new ways of being with the unknown.

For me, the empty bowl has been a deeply meaningful image in my life and creative work. It comes up in dreams, in paintings, in poetry. That empty space is a kind of scrying bowl, a place to seek new meanings, new ways of being with the unknown. As such, the bowl becomes the container of process that helps transform my struggles with uncertainty and reclaim qualities that are born out of that alchemy.

I’ve been a climate activist for over twenty years now, and the climate crisis has been a difficult but important teacher in this endeavor. We are still learning so much along the way, including how the climate crisis intersects with so many other crises of the human and more-than human world. As more and more communities start to experience, first-hand, the unprecedented changes in climate phenomena, more of us are faced with a deep uncertainty about everything: Where can we live, safely? What will our children have to contend with? What is worth focusing on? And, lastly, is there a future at all?

Climate futurist Alex Steffen is a voice I’ve come to appreciate in this moment. He writes, 

…the planetary crisis ain’t the Apocalypse. We do not face the End of Everything. We face the obliteration of our certainties, sure. We also face the destruction of many of the wonders of nature. And we face the reality that for billions of people, life will feel pretty damned apocalyptic, even as humanity as a whole staggers along. We live now in a trans-apocalyptic world. (1)

I need to breathe here, as I write. To breathe, and to also mention that the word “apocalypse” does not mean the end of everything, but, in fact, comes from the Greek words that mean “to uncover or reveal.”

So much is being revealed.

The truth is, whole communities of people have gone through some version of apocalypse

All the cultural crises of our time–climate chaos, fascism, racism, inequality–have deep roots in time, and in consciousness. The truth is, whole communities of people have gone through some version of apocalypse, whether it is the genocide of Native American communities, the enslavement of African people, or the Holocaust. Worlds have ended, if not the world. The results of colonization and domination cultures have spread to the entire planet. While some communities are disproportionately affected, what’s new is that, now, all people, species, landscapes, and living systems are threatened by the effects of the mindset that put climate chaos into motion.

Alex goes on to say:

It’s important to live when we are. Being native to now, I think, is our deepest responsibility… being at home in the world we actually inhabit means refusing to consign ourselves to living in the ruins of continuity, but instead realizing we live in the rising foundations of a future that actually works. It may be a fierce, wild, unrecognizable future, but that doesn’t mean it’s a broken future. Indeed, it’s the present that’s broken beyond redemption. (1)

 It’s not that our future is broken, but our present. And, if enough people find a way to offer themselves to this present brokenness, a viable, less broken, and more just future might be built.

Nothing has ever been certain, actually. Crops fail. Health fails. Accidents happen. This has always been true. Joanna Macy says this: 

I know we’re not sure how the story will end.  I want so much to feel sure. I want to be able to tell people…it’s going to be alright.” And I realize  that wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. First of all, we can’t know. But secondly, if… we could be given a pill to be convinced, “don’t worry, it’s going to be okay”, would that elicit from us our greatest creativity and courage? No. It’s that knife edge of uncertainty where we come alive to our greatest power. (2)

We all have different lived experiences of uncertainty, and varied capacities to cope. People are facing houselessness, disability, family difficulties, oppression. I’m not here to tell anyone how they should be strong in any adversity. However, some folks might find comfort in the exploration of ways to navigate these times.

Let’s talk about the connection between uncertainty and creativity, for example. The writer Meg Wheatley says that we can’t be creative if we refuse to be confused. She states: “Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what’s new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.” (3)

Fire bowl by Barbara Ford

Artists of all kinds have always known this. The very act of creating is dependent in a large part on opening to possibility, to emergence, to unpredictable discoveries.  As an artist and a poet, I find that the best work is born out of not knowing what the hell I’m doing, honestly. I continue to struggle with the process. It’s not an easy path. It is humbling and sometimes disorienting. At the same time, when something unexpected and wonderful arises, it feels like I have been a vessel for some other, larger truth teller. Call it Muse, or God, or Trickster, it is a feeling of deep connection.

One creative practice I’ve tried is improvisational singing. That’s when you literally open your mouth and sing sounds or words and you don’t know what they will be until they are sung. In the beginning, I was afraid- of sounding bad, of getting it wrong, even of being boring. But the truth is, the more you just throw yourself out there, risking shame and oblivion, there are moments of clarity and communion between all the so-called “bad” notes. The power of those moments can eclipse the fear of failure.

two of the gifts of uncertainty are artistry and emergence, the empty bowl that holds all that can be born

So, I posit that two of the gifts of uncertainty are artistry and emergence, the empty bowl that holds all that can be born. Releasing ourselves from “needing to know” in order to act can lead us through a portal to the mystery, a sometimes messy, divine truth.

And, as you might imagine, this portal also can lead to wonder. What is wonder, after all, but a kind of beautiful, embodied acknowledgement of the workings of mystery? The fact of a sunset isn’t what makes us wonder. The confluence of color, space, the moment as it meets our open heart is where wonder arises.

Another gift of uncertainty is honesty. Many of us have grown up with a bias towards facts over truth. Our educational systems reward the learning of facts, sometimes more than the gifts of curiosity and wonder. If more of us were taught the valuable skill of honoring what we don’t know, of being okay with the vulnerability of that stance, I think our capacity for rich and honest relationships, for experimentation, for creativity, would grow our hearts and communities in some lovely ways. 

Ironically, if we were honest about our not-knowing, we would be more in touch with our own truth and the truth of others.

Right now, around the world, there is a growing tide of fascism. Fascism, in effect, is a kind of evil sureness of one’s right to absolute power over a populace and the planet. We watch in horror as Russia invades Ukraine. We see in the United States actions by politicians and plutocrats asserting similar ideals. This kind of toxic certainty, coupled with a disdain for empathy and mutuality, is at the heart of so much unnecessary pain and destruction. It is the antithesis of justice. It is the antithesis of care.

The ones who embrace uncertainty are the ones who, through their vulnerability, reap the twin gifts of humility and empathy.

The ones who embrace uncertainty are the ones who, through their vulnerability, reap the twin gifts of humility and empathy. Humility reminds us of what we still need to learn, and what to unlearn. It softens our armor, our resistance to change the parts of ourselves who, unknowingly, have learned habits and assumptions that perpetrate harm. Here’s one example from my life: As a white person striving to unlearn the racism I absorbed growing up, I strive to read and learn as much as I can about racism. However, it has taken some experiences that broke me a little, interactions and truth-telling that brought me into a deeper conversation with my humility. At first it was difficult. I resisted. I was attached to my innocence. When, over time, I became more comfortable with not-knowing, and less attached to protecting myself, I found myself better able to learn, more grateful for the learning. It’s definitely an ongoing journey, but one, now, I value as some of the deepest learning of my life.

Humility and empathy dwell together. They both depend on focusing outside of the self, on the willingness to see and honor other viewpoints. Both remind us of our true belonging to each other and the world, and of the pointlessness of perfection. Both are born out of an acceptance of the uncertainties we all face, and the truth that we need each other to face and navigate them together.

The writer Rebecca Solnit has made it her business to address ideas of hope, courage, and what she calls “radical uncertainty”. Her book, Hope in the Dark, is essential reading. She writes:

Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. (4)

Did you notice how she links uncertainty with possibility? And how she links certainty, in either direction, as a potential limitation to take action in the world?

“Who shall I be, no matter what?”

As a result of this kind of inquiry, my deepest question right now as an activist, and, indeed, just as an individual, is “Who shall I be, no matter what?” It releases me from the false binary choice of success or failure. What is courage, after all, but the heart’s strong dance forward in the face of uncertainty? In fact, uncertainty is a parent of courage, and the sibling of hope. Not a passive, waiting kind of hope, but an active hope that compels us toward the future with agency and love.

Here’s another quote from Rebecca that I hold dear:

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable. (4)

Creativity. Vulnerability. Honesty. Humility. Empathy. Courage. Hope.  May these alchemical qualities guide us into the complicated and tumultuous future, and may we find joy in the company of brave, artful, and loving friends in the journey.

Song for the Empty Bowl

we fill the emptiness with stones
with fire, with memory and bones
with fury songs and quiet poems
and prayers for all the quiet ones

this emptiness can hold a drum
a knife, a seed, a place to hide
but mostly what I fear has come
a bowl of tears, a rising tide

uncertainty is my lament
my prayer, my home, my quiet friend
the spells of all the breaths we hold
the songs unsung, the tales untold

to find this dance, to sing this song
an ancient sphere, to waltz upon
this empty bowl, my deep unknown
my curve of grace, my silent koan

References:

  1. Steffen, A.,”We All Live in California Now,” essay at:   https://alexsteffen.substack.com/p/we-all-live-in-california-now. June 10, 2022.
  2. Macy, J., interview Joanna Macy and the Great Turning in film by Christopher Landry, 2016.
  3. Wheatley, M. J., Turning to One Another, Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc., 2009, p.45.
  4. Solnit, R., Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, Haymarket Books, Chicago IL, 2016.


Barbara Ford is a longtime WTR facilitator, artist, writer, and activist living in Portland, Oregon. She has been active in the climate justice movement for over twenty years as an arts organizer, as well as supporting the activist community with WTR inspired events to grow a culture of self and community care. She has created the Radical Gratitude model for expanding our ideas about gratitude, and is offering new writings in her Substack newsletter called Cultural Artisanship in a Changing World (https://barbaraford.substack.com). 

Check out Barbara’s new artist website at:
www.confluence-arts.net

Articles, Poems, Resources & Networks

Emergence and Power-With

Joanna Tomkins

Extracts from the book Active Hope by Chris Johnstone and Joanna Macy

Hereunder are some of my favourite extracts from the book Active Hope, some which we used for our online Gaia Speaking course “Active Hope in the Great Turning” this month during the Seeing with New Eyes session. I am drawing inspiration again from this section of the book as I prepare the section Going Forth, as it indeeds fills me with Active Hope.

It illustrates so well how we can Go Forth with the joy of being an synergetic part of humanity, one through who inevitably emergence with happen. And if we align with the concept and practice of “power-with”, this emergence will most certainly be produced in the direction that we personally wish humanity to follow. I hope these words provide as much relief as they do to me in these challenging times where we feel called to make a difference. – Joanna Tomkins

While the conversations between Mandela and de Klerk played a pivotal role in bringing apartheid to an end, this historic change wouldn’t have happened without a much larger context of support. Within South Africa, people risked their lives daily to engage in the struggle for change. Around the world, millions of people played supporting roles by joining boycotts and campaigns. If we focus only on each separate activity, it is easy to dismiss it by thinking, “That won’t do much.” To see the power of a step, we need to ask, “What is it part of?” An action that might seem inconsequential by itself adds to and interacts with other actions in ways that contribute to a much bigger picture of change.
Remember our example of the newspaper photograph? When seen under a magnifying glass it appears as just a collection of tiny dots, but when, from a little distance, we see the photo as a whole, the larger pattern comes into view. In a similar fashion, a bigger picture of change emerges out of the many tiny dots of separate actions and choices. This link between small steps and big changes opens up our power in an entirely new way. Each individual step doesn’t have to make a big impact on its own — because we can understand that the benefit of an action may not be visible at the level at which that action is taken.
Shared visions, values, and purposes flow through and between people. Nelson Mandela was deeply committed to a vision for his country that many were holding; the power of that vision moved through him and was transmitted to others. This type of power can’t be hoarded or held back by prison walls; it is like a kind of electricity that lights us up inside and inspires those around us. When a vision moves through us, it becomes expressed in what we do, how we are, and what we say. The alignment of these three creates a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The words below, from Mandela’s defense at his trial in the 1960s, mean so much more because of the actions that followed them:

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

THE POWER OF EMERGENCE

The concept of power-with contains hidden depths; so far we’ve described four aspects. First, there is the power of inner strengths drawn from us when we engage with challenges and rise to the occasion. Second, there is the power arising out of cooperation with others. Third, there is the subtle power of small steps whose impact only becomes evident when we step back and see the larger picture they contribute to. And last, there is the energizing power of an inspiring vision that moves through and strengthens us when we act for a purpose bigger than ourselves. All these are products of synergy and emergence; they come about when different elements interact to become a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.
At every level, from atoms and molecules to cells, organs, and organisms, complex wholes arise bringing new capacities into existence.

At each level, the whole acts through its parts to achieve more than we could ever imagine from examining the parts alone. So what new capacities emerge when groups of people act together to form larger complex social systems?
Our technologically advanced society has achieved wonders our ancestors could never have envisioned. We’ve put people on the moon, decoded DNA, and cured diseases. The problem is this collective level of power is also destroying our world. Countless seemingly innocent activities and choices are acting together to bring about the sixth mass extinction in our planet’s history.
Seeing with new eyes, we recognize that we’re not separate individuals in our own little bubbles but connected parts in a much larger story. A question that helps us develop this wider view is “What is happening through me?” Is the sixth mass extinction happening through us as a result of our habits, choices, and actions? By recognizing the ways we contribute to the unraveling of our world, we identify choice points at which we can turn toward its healing. The question “How could the Great Turning happen through me?” invites a different story to flow through us. This type of power happens through what we say and do and are.

NOT NEEDING TO KNOW THE OUTCOME

The concept of emergence is liberating because it frees us from the need to see the results of our actions. Many of our planet’s problems, such as climate change, mass starvation, and habitat loss, are so much bigger than we are that it is easy to believe we are wasting our time trying to solve them. If we depend on seeing the positive results of our individual steps, we’ll avoid challenges that seem beyond what we can visibly influence. Yet our actions take effect through such multiplicities of synergy that we can’t trace their causal chain. Everything we do has ripples of influence extending far beyond what we can see.
When we face a problem, a single brain cell doesn’t come up with a solution, though it can participate in one. The process of thinking happens at a level higher than just individual brain cells — it happens through them. Similarly, there’s no way that we personally can fix the mess our world is in, but the process of healing and recovery at a planetary level can happen through us and through what we do. ”

For this to happen, we need to play our part. That’s where power-with comes in.

THE HELPING HAND OF GRACE

All the individuals on a team may each be brilliant by themselves, but if they don’t shift their story from personal success to team success, their net effectiveness will be greatly reduced. When people experience themselves as part of a group with a shared purpose, team spirit flows through them, and their central organizing principle changes. The guiding question moves from “What can I gain?” to “What can I give?”
We can develop a similar team spirit with life. When we are guided by our willingness to find and play our part, we can feel as if we are acting not just alone but as part of a larger team of life that acts with us and through us. Since this team involves many other players, unsuspected allies can emerge at crucial moments; unseen helpers can remove obstacles we didn’t even know were there. When we’re guided by questions such as “What can I offer?” and “What can I give?” we might sometimes play the role of stepping out in front and at other times that of being the ally giving support. Either way, we think of the additional support behind our actions as a form of grace. Based on an interview with Joanna, this poem, edited into verse by Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, expresses well the grace that comes from belonging to life:

When you act on behalf
of something greater than yourself,
you begin
to feel it acting through you
with a power that is greater than your own.

This is grace.

Today, as we take risks
for the sake of something greater
than our separate, individual lives,
we are feeling graced
by other beings and by Earth itself.

Those with whom and on whose behalf we act
give us strength
and eloquence
and staying power
we didn’t know we had.
We just need to practice knowing that
and remembering that we are sustained
by each other in the web of life.

Our true power comes as a gift, like grace,
because in truth it is sustained by others.
If we practice drawing on the wisdom
and beauty
and strengths
of our fellow human beings
and our fellow species
we can go into any situation
and trust
that the courage and intelligence required
will be supplied.

POWER-WITH IN ACTION

Here are three ways we can open to the kind of power we’ve been describing. We can:
• hear our call to action and choose to answer it.
• understand that power-with arises from what we do, not what we have.
• draw on the strengths of others.

There will be times when we become alerted to an issue and experience an inner call to respond. Choosing to respond to that call empowers us. Once we take that first step, we start on a journey presenting us with situations that increase our capacity to respond. Strengths such as courage, determination, and creativity are drawn forth from us most when we rise to the challenges that evoke them. When we share our cause with others, allies appear; synergy occurs. And when we act for causes larger than ourselves, the larger community for whom we do this will be acting through us.
We can experience our call to action in many different ways. Sometimes the uncomfortable discrepancy of realizing that our behavior is out of step with our values motivates us. Our conscience calls, and when we step into integrity, more of who we are heads in the same direction. At other times our call is more of a powerful summoning. We just know, even if we’re not sure how, that we need to be somewhere, do something, or contact a particular person.
If we think of ourselves only as separate individuals, then we understand these intuitive calls purely in personal terms. Recognizing ourselves as part of the larger web of life leads to a different view. Just as we experience the Earth crying within us as pain for the world, we can experience the Earth thinking within us as a guiding impulse pulling us in a particular direction. We can view this as “cointelligence,” an ability to think and feel with our world.


Developing a sense of partnership with Earth involves listening for guiding signals and taking them seriously when we hear them.

Poems

Poems that Reconnect

Joanna Tomkins

Intro by Joanna Tomkins

I find myself often pressured by my fear of the passing of time, by my feeling of not doing enough to change the course of events in these challenging times. And in doing I forget to honour the things that I do gift the universe, and other human and more than human beings around me, even if they seem not transcendental or “productive” in the business from the business as usual or “y.o.l.o.” perspective.

We are all essential parts, fractals in the Great Turning. We are like the messages that travel to and fro in the mycelium under our feet… There is no knowing what will be the penny that drops or the smile that tips the balance.

Let’s celebrate the pauses in between the breaths of inspiration and expiration. Let’s remember the magic that happens while we sleep, the digestion that happens while we rest, the flourishing that happens when we are rested…

Bodhisattvas, your warrior’s rest is an essential weapon for these times…

Gratitude for this poem….

REST by David Whyte

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. Rest is the essence of giving and receiving; an act of remembering, imaginatively and intellectually but also psychologically and physically. To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavor, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally or figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.

The template of natural exchange is the breath, the autonomic giving and receiving that forms the basis and the measure of life itself. We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world; we are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way, we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when perhaps, most importantly, we arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.

In the first state of rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we have been doing or how have been being. In the second, is the sense of slowly coming home, the physical journey into the body’s uncoerced and unbullied self, as if trying to remember the way or even the destination itself. In the third state is a sense of healing and self-forgiveness and of arrival. In the fourth state, deep in the primal exchange of the breath, is the give and the take, the blessing and the being blessed and the ability to delight in both. The fifth stage is a sense of absolute readiness and presence, a delight in and an anticipation of the world and all its forms; a sense of being the meeting itself between inner and outer, and that receiving and responding occur in one spontaneous moment.

A deep experience of rest is the template of perfection in the human imagination, a perspective from which we are able to perceive the outer specific forms of our work and our relationships whilst being nourished by the shared foundational gift of the breath itself.

From this perspective we can be rested while putting together an elaborate meal for an arriving crowd, whilst climbing the highest mountain or sitting at home surrounded by the chaos of a loving family.

Rested, we are ready for the world but not held hostage by it, rested we care again for the right things and the right people in the right way. In rest we reestablish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.

~David Whyte, Consolations (2015)