“Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up, when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts, embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders, teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies, recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.”
–Aurora Levins Morales, from V’ahavta
Me standing with our glorious corn in my new shirt Erin got me from the Bitter Southerner.
A note from Carl
Greetings, friend.
As I write this, I am looking out my office window at all the bees and hummingbirds hovering around the corn in our garden. The corn is now over 12 feet tall! This whole glorious expanse of corn, teeming with life, grown from the seeds of 1/2 of a single ear of blue corn that was gifted to Erin by a friend who grew it from corn given her by one of Martin Prechtel’s students some years ago. Erin planted it in the spring while singing to the corn seeds… Along with everything else that is happening, there is this, too. What a miracle!
Thank you for opening this email. We so appreciate being connected with you.
Before I continue with the newsletter, I wanted to let you know that we have our last 90-minute Pockets of Flourishing online mini-retreat this evening at 4:00 p.m. Pacific Time, on the theme of Sacred Stillness, Silence, and Spaciousness, and Reviving the Soft Animal of Your Body. It will be soooo good. Stillness, silence, and spaciousness seem like endangered species these days, and reviving the soft animal of one’s body in a disembodied culture is always a breath of fresh air.
We have loved these gatherings, exploring each of the themes that we will dive deeply into in our upcoming year-long Refugia training program. (details coming soon.) Recordings will be provided if you cannot attend live. We’d love to have you join us.
Local Utah folks, I’d love to let you know that I’ll be offering a Fall Tai Chi and Natural Movement in the Park series beginning on September 10th.
Erin begins her 9-month depth container Women Embodied: Deepening Your Roots (online and/or in-person) on Sept. 24th. Applications are open and it’s going to be potent and beautiful.
I’d like to share a few reflections, but first, an invitation.
As you read this, might you feel the support of the ground underneath you? Is there any small shift you could make to be a bit more comfortable?
These are inquiries that, even after decades, I still love to return to over and over.
Recently, we had dinner with our dear friends Diane Hamilton Roshi and Michael Zimmerman Roshi. We get together every few months to enjoy a meal and dive into the great mystery (and the great shitshow) of being human in these times. I always appreciate the freshness of where we are taken in conversation.
At one point in the evening, Diane invited each of us to share one thing that was breaking our hearts and one thing that was giving us hope. As I reflected, I noticed that the thing that was breaking my heart turned out to be the very same thing that gave me hope. I was brokenhearted by the bone-deep knowing that it doesn’t have to be this way. Another world is possible. I was simultaneously heartened by the knowledge that it doesn’t have to be this way. Another world is possible.
The ICE raids, the endless wars, the mass shootings, the starving children, the species extinction, the billionaire tax breaks – doesn’t it all feel like such a failure of the imagination?
I love this passage from Toko-pa Turner’s book, The Dreaming Way:
“At the most fundamental level, it is our disconnection from the rest of nature – from our own wild, dreaming self – that has set the collapse in motion. So how do we come back into connection? Where can we start in our own small lives to find a sense of purpose in relation to the larger whole? How do we find meaning in these difficult times, so that our lives feel necessary to the world? We can begin by reuniting our estranged worlds, seen and unseen, by tending to their equivalence in our lives. Reversing the culture’s materialist approach to life would be like turning a mighty ship around in a powerful current, but at the individual level, it’s a much more manageable shift. Every one of us can learn to take cues from the imagination. And if enough people pivot to follow the way of their dreams, we become like a murmuration that can reorient on a dime. There is a new world waiting to be realized through each of our lives, one individual at a time.”
I often imagine this collective murmuration that could reorient on a dime. When we were in conversation with poet and teacher, Mark Nepo, on our podcast, he shared how he imagines us all as makeweights. We never know what small moment or gesture could tip the scales in the direction of goodness and love.
Imagine: A tipping point toward life, toward a thriving Earth, toward freedom, toward beauty, toward future generations’ well-being, toward healing, toward equality, toward care and respect for all of life, toward, as the book title goes, the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
This is at the heart of all our work. Creating places and ways where life can be protected and thrive amidst all the destruction, collapse, and unravelling. Pockets of flourishing where we can feed that other world that is possible.
I’m so grateful to be imagining and feeding that world together with you.
With love and heartbreak and hope,
Carl
Here is the full poem I excerpted above:
V’ahavta
Aurora Levins Morales
Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. Inscribe them on your doorposts,
embroider them on your garments, tattoo them on your shoulders,
teach them to your children, your neighbors, your enemies,
recite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.
Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:
All together they have more death than we,
but all together, we have more life than they.
There is more bloody death in their hands
than we could ever wield, unless
we lay down our souls to become them,
and then we will lose everything. So instead,
imagine winning. This is your sacred task.
This is your power. Imagine
every detail of winning, the exact smell of the summer streets
in which no one has been shot, the muscles you have never
unclenched from worry, gone soft as newborn skin,
the sparkling taste of food when we know
that no one on earth is hungry, that the beggars are fed,
that the old man under the bridge and the woman
wrapping herself in thin sheets in the back seat of a car,
and the children who suck on stones,
nest under a flock of roofs that keep multiplying their shelter.
Lean with all your being towards that day
when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune
out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.
Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.
It is your child.
Defend it as if it were your lover.
It is your lover.
When you inhale and when you exhale
breathe the possibility of another world
into the 37.2 trillion cells of your body
until it shines with hope.
Then imagine more.
Imagine rape is unimaginable. Imagine war is a scarcely credible rumor
That the crimes of our age, the grotesque inhumanities of greed,
the sheer and astounding shamelessness of it, the vast fortunes
made by stealing lives, the horrible normalcy it came to have,
is unimaginable to our heirs, the generations of the free.
Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you sing. Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.
Make them burn clear as a starry drinking gourd
Over the grim fog of exhaustion, and keep walking.
Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our children’s children
may live.
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