Happy rainy spring morning to you. We are still basking in the delight of having had Russell Delman in town for an Embodied Life weekend.
What comes to mind as I reflect on the weekend is a line from Rachel Naomi Remen on the root of education:
Educare- the root of the word education means “to lead forth the hidden wholeness, the innate integrity that is in every person.”
I can just take that in again…
“To lead forth the hidden wholeness, the innate integrity that is in every person”
A reflection for me this morning is this:
How to water the seeds, nourish the activities, the contexts, the connections that call forth that hidden (or not so hidden) wholeness, that bring light to the innate integrity that has never left, yet sometimes needs some reminding? Like St Francis and the Sow, as you’ll read below.
Here is an image of Russell playing the shakuhachi in between Rumi poems at the end of the talk at Avenues Yoga. You can imagine the sound as you take in two of my favorite poems below…
This we have now
is not imagination.
This is not grief,
or joy, not a judging state,
or an elation, or a sadness.Those come and go.
This is the presence
that doesn’t.It’s dawn, Husam,
here in the splendor of coral,
inside the Friend, in the simple truth
of what Hallaj said.What else could human beings want?
When grapes turn to wine,
they’re wanting this.
When the night sky pours by,
it’s really a crowd of beggars,
and they all want some of this.This we are now
created the body, cell by cell,
like bees building a honeycomb.The human body and the universe
grew from this, not this
from the universe and the human body.-Rumi
St. Francis And The Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;as St. Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.– Galway Kinnell
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