When I was going through Breast Cancer treatment, I met a young woman named Kate. I have reconnected with her through Facebook. The day I met her was her first day without wearing a covering for her head. She, too, lost her hair in chemotherapy. I met her in radiation. We just looked at each other, connected in some inner knowing.
She is working with learning to "be," to accept that being is not only enough but maybe even a great thing. I feel that is where I am, also, in some sort of in between place of integrating being and doing. When one is in intense medical treatment, being is about all one can do, and there is incredible pleasure in that, in feeling the breath move in and out, in being grateful that it moves in and out, in honoring daily functions, and then, we get busy again, and maybe now, I am trying to understand, with some distance, what I went through, and what I learned. How do I use it now, share it?
I am reading Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin, a book that everyone should read, especially those responsible for children.
Rachel Carson wrote:
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in.
We can each be that child. We can each be that adult.
Zebulen posted today about his precious daughter, Emilia, meeting the river, murmuring to it, whispering as her toddler feet sank into the sand. This intimacy, this knowing, is available to us all, each moment, each day. We must connect with our own nature, the nature that we are and to what surrounds.
Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth:
We must go far beyond any transformation of contemporary culture. We must go back to the genetic imperative from which human cultures emerge originally and from which they can never be separated without losing their integrity and their survival capacity. None of our existing cultures can deal with this situation out of its own resources. We must invent, or reinvent, a sustainable human culture by a descent into our pre-rational, our instinctive resources. Our cultural resources have lost their integrity. They cannot be trusted. What is needed is not transcendence but "inscendence," not the brain but the gene.