Only One Question

A note from Erin, October 6 2023
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
– James Baldwin
Hello, dear human being, reading these words, wherever you might be…
Are you comfortable in your skin? Before you read on, can I invite you to take 30 seconds to feel your whole self, notice any tiny shifts you could make that might increase pleasure and decrease tension? Toes, neck, face, hands, shoulders, belly, posture? How about savoring 3 breaths just being here, in this body, on this spot, in this moment.
Breathing is a temporary gig.
Let’s enjoy it, shan’t we?
Go ahead, take your time. I’ll wait.
Ahh.
Mary Oliver had only one question: How to love this world?
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said “I want to be an extremist for love.”
Zen teacher Scott Morrison wrote it this way: “Do I wish to live this moment with as much attention, care, and affection as possible or am I going to do something else? There is no point in judging the something else as good or bad, it’s just important to know who is making the decision.”
And James Baldwin said it in such a moving way: “The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
May we be that person for one another.
May we be that person for our kin in the more-than-human world.
May the way we live, even in the tiniest of ways, make things a little easier, kinder, and more life-giving for others.
How do we embody these wise sentiments in our daily lives, in a world so rife with struggle, in late-stage capitalism when so many of us are busy, stressed, under-resourced, and society and ecosystems are so unpredictable, and our life circumstances can be so unsteady?
I’m inspired by wise elders like Mary Oliver who decided, though we may have called her a poet, that her real work was in loving the world.
Whether we are a parent, a cashier, a teacher, a scientist, an artist, a farmer, a medical caregiver, a philosopher – underneath it all, could our work, at its deep roots, be about loving the world? Loving it better and more generously? What if more and more of us understood our role in the world in just this way? Carl will be talking this evening about courting your unique genius way of doing so just this evening. :)
Years ago, one of my hero writers wrote a piece, wrestling with questions like: What are we supposed to do? What is there to hope for at the end of this time? Why bother trying to patch up the world while so many others seem intent on wrecking it? You can find her essay along with my commentary here. Here is a brief excerpt:
Kathleen Dean Moore writes, “If destructive forces are building under our lives, then our work in this time and place, I tell them, is to create refugia of the imagination. Refugia, places where ideas are sheltered and encouraged to grow. Even now, we can create small pockets of flourishing, and we can make ourselves into overhanging rock ledges to protect life so that the full measure of possibility can spread and reseed the world.” That is a beautiful way of embodying love in the world.
The piece ends with this quote:  “From these sheltered pockets of moral imagining, and from the protected pockets of flourishing, new ways of living will spread across the land, across the salt plains and beetle killed forests. Here is how life will start anew. Not from the edges over centuries of invasion; rather from small pockets of good work, shaped by an understanding that all life is interdependent, and driven by the one gift humans have that belongs to no other: practical imagination – the ability to imagine that things can be different from what they are now.”
Carl and I are in a deep process that’s been unfolding over the past several years of developing Refugia we’d like to invite you into in 2024. More details will emerge soon.
In the meantime, I hope, as I do, that you feel deeply fortified knowing how many (so many!) good hearted and wise people are out there, in every place around the planet, doing their humble best to be kind and to make the world a more liveable, just, and beautiful place for all, often quietly and hidden from view, but there nonetheless. Hallelujah.
Thanks for being one of them.
May you be permeable to beauty and resilient to despair and may you know how deeply your presence matters.
Grateful,
Erin
p.s. I loved rereading a piece I wrote several years ago on this topic: Everything is a gift and nothing lasts. You may enjoy it. It’s so tender to look back and read my own words and see yet again – yep, in fact that didn’t last. As Rilke said so gorgeously, “The knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.” During the autumn, I feel that truth in my bones. I hope you do too. May it blow on the embers of our determination to love fully while we can.
p.p.s. Here’s a favorite piece by Brian Doyle I can read again and again.
And this is a beautiful recent piece by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
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Erin

By training and profession, I am a somatic educator. Over the past 25+ years I have trained in and taught modern dance, tai chi, Indian and Tibetan yoga, yoga therapy (specializing in back pain). I completed a 4-year professional Feldenkrais training in 2007 and a 3-year Embodied Life training in 2014. I also study and work with somatic meditation and the profound practice of embodied inner listening known as Focusing.