Yesterday, I wrote about developing communities of spirit while living within the bounds of empire, about challenging the power that empire wields–not by running to safety or to a noiseless desert, but by tending our own inner gardens, building our own inner castles and safe havens, and reaching out to each other to support and strengthen each other in spiritual solidarity.

I have been thinking about communities of spirit in the last day, about how this community is always available in some form. I believe that everyone has the capacity for spiritual depth and inner reflection. The trick is to recognize it in each other, to call it forth in our interactions.

Each encounter with another person is a chance to make that deeper human spirit connection.  So often I just glance off the sides, live alone in my own bubble, think only in terms of getting my tasks done. You know those people who really look you in the eye? Not intrusively or forcefully, but openly and honestly. How you want to smile or nod.  How that thing happens in your brain–perhaps not even consciously–where this person clicks with you, and you know you are of the same tribe? I think that moment is when spirit calls to spirit, when we recognize each other, and we are drawn to being our best and most honest selves. I want to practice and learn to be that person, Present in each encounter, not intrusively, but openly.

Let’s practice the art of Presence and Recognition these days, shall we? When we’re with people, let’s keep the people-moment, the Encounter, at the center, and let the tasks be secondary to our experiences. Let’s call forth the spirit in each other. It’s not that every encounter has to become a deep conversation, but that that depth can be achieved even in a glance of recognition, a smile, a word. We’re the same thing, you and I. We belong in the same tribe. We have vastly different and separate experiences, but we’re parts of the same organism, and we can recognize our connection in the moments that we encounter each other.

Gratitude List:
1. The humming sound of the hummingbird.  I know that I have heard the sound before, but it is always a surprise.  “Like a rubberband thrumming,” I said.  “I think it sounds like Fred purring,” said a boy.  Of course it does.
2. Cool morning.  Cool, cool, comfortable cool.
3. Preparations. Getting ready for school.  Like tilling the soil for a field, imagining the way the small plants will begin to grow, how the green will deepen, the stems will harden, the shoots will dive upward into sky, the small hard buds will form and the flowers burst forth.  How the flowers will fade but the fruit will grow, filling out and finding its color, ripening in the sun.  Now is the time to prepare the rows, to look to the health of the soil and seed, so that the plant may have the greatest chance to grow and thrive.
4. Dark of the moon.  It’s so dark without the moon, especially when the night is hazy. (I tried to do a tree pose last night out in the darkness, and I could not find my balance–in the darkness I simply could not balance. I wonder what that is about?) How our own hearts echo the shifts in the cosmos, ready for the time of waxing to fullness.
5. Resolve. Will. Determination.

May we walk in Beauty!

I’m not sure that watching the conventions or reading the analyses of the US election campaigns is helping me to feel any sense of ease about our upcoming vote.  I have lots of random thoughts:

–I feel really bad for the sensible conservatives.  While I don’t agree with people like Kasich on many issues, I think he would have been a really thoughtful person to run.  Respectable.  I wish there were an outlet for conservative people with good ideas to slip out from behind the current wall of bombast and rhetoric.
–I feel really bad for the sensible liberals, too.  I disagree with Hillary Clinton on many issues.  Still, it feels as though I can vote on the liberal side, with the hope that Sanders and Warren will continue to keep the conversation real.  I think it is going to be important for the sensible liberals to hold tightly to their ideals in the coming months.
–I feel especially bad for the sensible progressives.  Still, I think that there is at least a platform for their voices to be heard.
–I hate that my vote is partly an anti-vote.
–I love Brooks and Shields: i trust their analysis of politics.  They don’t get caught up in the rhetoric of either side.
–The Obamas are really satisfying speech-makers: intellectual, thoughtful, compassionate, aware of the world.
–Bill Clinton is an amazing storyteller.  I don’t know if I trust him, but I enjoy listening to his stories.
–I was not particularly impressed with Bloomberg’s speech as a speech, but he did speak to me, and I remembered that I have been a registered Independent.  I think I might do that again.
–It’s hard to listen to the “Greatest Nation” rhetoric, the nationalism and militarism that seeps into most of the speeches.
–As a pacifist, perhaps I cannot ethically vote at all for a commander in chief. I think that this is a tension that I should keep alive within myself if I am to participate in the US political process. Even though I have appreciated quite a lot about Barack Obama as a president, I have been deeply disturbed by his use of drones.
–I like speeches that call us to be our best selves, that remind us of great thinkers and doers of the past.

Gratitude List:
1. Being unsettled: I don’t really like it, but I think the discomfort helps to keep the ideals alive.
2. Children playing in the water together, catching and cooking crabs for their supper, working together to engineer the payload on a hypothetical NASA project.
3. New birds.  The delicate black-necked stilt.  The scarlet beak of the oyster catcher.
4. Our incredible farm crew
5. Bridges, causeways, liminal spaces.  Shall we stand together on the bridges and in the doorways?
6. The names we all choose for the different types of puzzle pieces.  We use different words, but we

May we walk in Beauty!