Good Morning!
We Americans try to find the principle of a thing, the objective reality, the long and short term, the height and depth; we analyze and evaluate the truth of a thing and our democratic origins are so far back that we have utterly forgotten that process—due process, fair process, all process—is at bottom only a substitute for relationship. In a traditional culture the relationship is the key: it points the way to the truth, it is the source that signals whether a thing is credible or not. When the relationship is right the truth can be known.
Craig Barnes, Timeline May/June 1997
I never know where things will go on these Monday mornings, because as many of you know, I write fresh, open and unprepared for whatever might show up when I begin. I begin with an open mind, an open heart, and eyes opened by cocoa. This morning, I am again, as I am often doing, thinking about relationship. I am thinking about the many layers that surround a relationship and the many relationships that emerge upon some investigation. Most importantly perhaps, I am thinking about the relationship we make with ourselves.
The idea that a relationship can bring truth is very reassuring to me. Truth, however, remains a slippery fish. And many many more questions arise in the face of the very idea that there is a “T”ruth to be known. This quote, which remains a favorite of mine, seems to be pointing at something that lies at the very heart of both our demise and our salvation as we bear witness to the ongoing turmoil in the world.
All relationship must evolve from the first and primal relationship we have with ourselves, our body, our breath, our own knowing. How do you go about that very first and primal relationship? What do you do with yourself first thing in the morning? Where is the process? Is it always in the same place? To answer this for myself each morning, I place my hands on my body, one on my heart and one on my lower belly and I ask these three questions:
Where in my body do I feel the strongest sense of who I am?
Where in my body do I feel the strongest decision-making power?
Where in my body is the least tension?
These questions come from Angeles Arrien, a wonderful anthropologist, writing about how to use tarot cards to investigate your experience, but I’ve obviously taken them and applied to my own purposes, though I think those purposes are in complete accord with seeking your own guidance through tarot cards. As you can imagine if you’ve been here with me before, I was a very annoying child, continually asking questions, relentlessly curious, peppering the adults with questions that seemed unanswerable or even irrelevant at important moments.
Apparently, I plan to remain annoying in this way even as an adult. Questions remain my favorite way to connect, one of my favorite ways, you could say to create relationship. When I pose a question, I am reaching for something, seeking connection and looking for where and how that might happen. Critical, this act of seeking connection, to creating relationship. Mysteriously, not everyone finds questions an easy way into creating relationship. Even more mysteriously, I, who am often quite reticent, not shy mind you, just reticent, love questions despite their sometimes demanding or invasive nature.
Now, it seems to me, is a very important moment to be asking some questions. Now is a time in which our culture as well as each of us, are facing choices we might never have imagined, challenges to our ways of thinking, to our habits and to our ways of life, even our safety, a time when it would seem wise to pose some questions. I would like to pose the question about where it is most important to place my attention right now, on what relationship should I be focused?
In Buddhist practice, we examine the nature of mind and the nature of this thing we call self. We make a relationship with the so-called self, only to discover that such a thing does not exist in the way we might imagine. The safety, then, of the thing we call self, is just a fiction, a mirage, existing only in a world that imagines that things don't change or that we needn't feel pain. And though the self we think we have doesn't actually exist, our experience of our lives certainly does. This is the thing about relationship, it exists only as we live in it
The question, then, is where are you living? Are you living in the world of your own mind, the intellectual inquiry? Are you living in the world of emotion or feeling, in you or around you? Or are you living at the place in you that is timeless, centered in your purpose in this life?
I ask these things to shine the light on the relationship of the moment. Useful in this incredible moment of change, a moment rife with plague, famine and war, a moment infused with sunlight, possibility and bravery, is the question of where in you you are choosing to live, where in you you are choosing to place your attention and where in you the truth can be known.
Your truth, your knowing is credible (the body does not lie!) as long as you are honest with yourself. In the name of creating the relationship we call culture and society, I hope you will share your truth, society then becoming a joint creation, a relationship through which the truth can be known. I, for one, welcome your questions, your comments, you in whatever way you wish to be known.