Category: Main blog

A beautiful teaching from the wisdom of 🐬 dolphins!

Being Here

The natural world has so much to teach us about God, ourselves, and our connection to one another. Scholar and artist Alexis Pauline Gumbs shares wisdom from dolphins:  

Here we are, where presence meets offering, looking to Indus river dolphins who live by constantly using sound to mark where they are. . . . What could it mean to be present with each other across time and space and difference? Presence is interpersonal and interspecies and intergalactic, in some ways eternal. How can we rethink our presence on the planet and its precarity by paying attention to how the Indus dolphins have brought themselves back from the brink of extinction? Could we learn to love the humpback whale beyond its marketable mythology and love ourselves beyond what capitalism tells us is valuable about being us? Marine mammal mentorship offers us the chance for presence as celebration, as survival and its excess, as more than we even know how to love about ourselves and each other.

Most cetaceans have a crystalline lens over their eyes so they can see underwater. The South Asian river dolphins do not. Also the water moves so quickly, and is so full and turbid that not much would be visible if they were looking with their eyes. So they look instead with their voices.

The Indus and Ganges river dolphins live in sound. They make sound constantly, echolocating day and night. In a quickly moving environment they ask where, again where, again where.

The poem of the Indus river dolphin is the ongoing sound of here, a sonic consciousness of what surrounds them, a form of reflective presence. Here.

The home of the Indus river dolphin has gone through many manmade changes. . . . . Through all of it, the Indus river dolphin, who clicks all day and night, has been saying, here. Here. Here. Here. In a language I want to learn. . .

In the language I was raised in, “here” means “this place where we are,” and it also means “here” as in “I give this to you.” Could I learn from the Indus river dolphin a language of continuous presence and offering? A language that brings a species back from the brink, a life-giving language? Could I learn that? Could we learn that? We who click a different way, on linked computers day and night? . . .

What I want to say to you . . . requires me to reshape my forehead, my lungs. It requires me to redistribute my dependence on visual information. So I will close my eyes and say it: Here. Here I am. Here I am with you. Here is all of me. And here we are. Here. Inside this blinding presence. Here. A constant call in a moving world. Here. All of it. Here. Here. Humbly listening towards home. And here. And here. Right here. My poem for you. My offered presence. This turbid life. Yes. Here you go.

How might we offer to be “here” for ourselves, someone else, or the world around us today?

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (AK Press: 2020), 67‒69.

A friend sent this link to a new compilation of love stories to plants and trees that I just love! In this time of winter redux (last week I was posting budding trees, this week we’re buried under snow!) – it is a wonderful reminder of our beloved nature family and the many ways they show up for us.

Plant Love Stories

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I am forever filled with joy by these first brave harbingers of the coming spring.

The amazing sacred manuscript of Nature once again splendidly manifests its potency, resilience, and persistent life energies.

This sacred manuscript of Nature again blesses us with the reminder that we too can rise again, we too can blossom in spectacular creativity, even after the dark and cold have encouraged us into hibernation and needed rest in the healing soil of the mother.

The cycle of life coaxes us back into the sun and we remember our own potency and resilience in these trying times.

We are truly blessed.

I have been blessed last week with an opportunity to rest in deep silence in the mountains and forests around Lake Coeur de Alene in Idaho.

We call this silent meditation, “khilvat” in our Sufi tradition, and I was held by my dear teacher Saladin and in the container of 13 other beloveds for a full week of deepening.

Resting in that beauty I found myself reminded of the cycle of distress, fear, and anger that is so often elicited by the workings of our world as it slides and stumbles through this painful dark night and birth canal which is our current reality.

I was gifted with practices that allowed me to move from that state of pain to acceptance of the Divine One as the only compassionate, omniscient, all-knowing power that has the true ability to re-balance, and to access the flow of that balancing energy, as it surrounded me in natural beauty.

I also had a wonderful and shocking wake-up call from the full moon early Thursday morning, which elicited the following poem.

Rude Moon

Well before dawn
Spotlight moon rudely
Kicked my ass
Out of bed.

Cowering beneath her glare
Shivering in the frozen night
The interrogation began…

“Just who do you think you are?”
She inquired.
“What makes you think it’s ok to sleep
Through my magnificent glory!”
“And where were you at 5:30 am
On January 28th, 2021! Hmm!?”

I mumbled
I stammered
I might have whined
And moaned a bit…

But then I lifted my eyes
(After checking my watch)
And boldly spoke
into her blaze…

“Why,
I am here,
now,
just this,
only me,
with you,
beloved,
terrible,
most venerable
One.”

I heard a light chuckle
Then
She laughed!
At once joyful
And full of
Mysterious meaning.

And more gently spoke,
“Of course you are
Little one.
Of course you are.”

So,
Slowly, cautiously
I ducked my head
Beneath the sill,
Onto my pillow
Where She couldn’t
See me or
Hold me
In her brilliance.

And drifted back
Into
Lunatic
Dreams.

Once again the amazing and inspiring Youth Poet Laureate of our country rocks my world with this poetry she performed in 2018 –
“For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core, 
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for.”

With deep thanks to Katherine Amina who sent this out recently and reminded me of the amazing and powerful Valerie Kaur – a force for change and revolutionary love. So needed in these times.

TED

With gratitude to sister Janet who sent these earlier. The first by Saint Mary Oliver that reminds of the all important life lessons taught to us by the trees, ponds, and cattails, and the second a reminder to be engaged not only in hope and intention but in actual work done each day, each moment, with each breath.

May it be so…

In Blackwater Woods – Mary Oliver

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its name is, is
nameless now.

Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this:
the fires and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:

To love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones
knowing your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

***********************

What Have We Done Today? – Nixon Waterman

We shall do much in the years to come,

But what have we done today?

We shall give out gold in a princely sum,

                                     But what did we give today?

We shall lift the heart and dry the tear,

We shall plant hope in the place of fear,

We shall speak the words of love and cheer,

                                     But what did we speak today?

II

We shall be so kind in the after while,

But what have we been today?

We shall bring to each lonely life a smile,

                                    But what have we brought today?

We shall give to truth a grander birth,

And to steadfast faith a deeper worth,

We shall feed the hungering souls of earth,

                                    But whom have we fed today?

III

We shall reap such joys in the by and by,

                                    But what have we sown today?

We shall build us mansions in the sky,

                                    But what have we built today?

“Tis sweet in the idle dreams to bask;

But here and now, do we our task:

Yet, this is the thing our souls must ask,

                                    What have we done today?

Beloved Atum has posted this new practice that is so important for our time. He suggests using it daily until the end of March as we move through this birth canal.

The Practice:

Deeply rooted / In the present moment, Seeing with a clear, open, spacious mind / Beyond doubt and fear, Abiding in the luminous heart of equanimity, Dispelling the possession of ignorant delusions, The way to a greater awakening unfolds before us.

I was blessed to hear this beauty 4-directions poem-prayer during a Creation Spirituality webinar and wanted to share it with you:

Mother Earth, beloved garden, living treasure under foot,
All our days you ground our being: sage and thistle, grass and root.
Herbs to heal us, plants to feed us, land to till and tend and plow.
With the pendant, deep as midnight, North we ask you: be here now.

Father Air, your inspiration holds together all that lives.
As we breathe, our minds see clearly, leading us to love and give.
Raging whirlwind, whispered breezes, violent gale and gentle cloud.
With the blade as sharp as morning, East we ask you: be here now.

Brother Fire, great transformer, share the passion of the sun.
In our hearths, your warmth revives us, cooks our food and heats our homes.
Flaming candle, blood within us, blazing desert, will to grow.
With the wand, directing power, South we ask you: be here now.

Sister Water, ever flowing, ocean, river, pond and rain.
Drink we now and quench our thirsting, cleanse us, we begin again.
Mist and ice, a host of changes, all that courage will allow.
With the cup, the holy chalice, West we ask you, be here now.

Lover Spirit, intuition in the center of our souls.
In your love we find relation. All connected, we are whole.
Timeless mystery, quiet conscience, deepest values, voice inside.
With the drum and with the cauldron, this we ask you, be our guide.

~ Amanda Udis-Kessler ~

As I return today to my home after a wonderful road trip with my family, in my meditations this morning I was contemplating an email message that one of of my mureeds recently sent asking for guidance on holding patience and balance in these challenging times. I responded to my Sufi students this morning and then realized that I’d wanted to share it more widely with all of you.

This chant/dance of universal peace came to me. It is written by the wonderful Maitreya and is one of my favorites.

I have attached both a pdf with the words and explanations and short audio of the music. 
Here is more information about the three wasaif that are used:

Ya Muqtadir (yaa muk-TA-dir) Al-Muqtadir is the one who places you on a particular path to God and enables you to firmly put your feet on that path, and keep going on that path, step by step. It brings the ability to actualize the divine purpose in your life. The power that is guiding you has put you in this very specific situation, here and now. There are no mistakes, and nothing is ever wasted or lost. Each soul is unique, with a unique purpose in life. That is the meaning of al-Muqtadir. To realize its meaning, each person needs to recognize al-Qadir and lovingly engage his or her will to fulfill it. The lover thus makes use of whatever power the beloved has granted and uses that power in the wise and beautifully proportioned way present in its very nature.

From the Physicians of the Heart: A Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah (Kindle Locations 1791-1798)

Ya Qadir (yaa ḲAA-dir) Al-Qadir is the expression of all the purpose and all the strength and will in the universe as one power. Nothing is unconnected from this divine power. Through awakening to it, the traveler on the spiritual path realizes that there is a path and a specific destination. Al-Qadir gives a definite meaning and a real purpose to everything in life. Al-Qadir also means unlimited capacity, and that every person has that capacity. Such a realization gives you a sense of value, power, and spaciousness, as well as a confidence that all things are possible. You are inherently able to receive and contain anything that may come, and to regard it as a divine gift. Al-Qadir expresses omnipotence, power, endurance, and proportionality. It is the power to both manifest and contain manifestation. Invocation of Ya Qadir is an antidote to feeling worthless and powerless and offers relief to those who believe that they are living wasted lives. We recommend that it be combined with Ya Muqtadir

From Physicians of the Heart: A Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah (Kindle Locations 1781-1789).

Ya Matin (yaa ma-TEEN) Al-Matin is the kind of strength that makes one consistent and dependable. At the scale of the whole universe, this balanced rhythm is an expression of divine omnipotence. It gives the strength to keep on keeping on. It involves mastery as well as stability. You become like a rock or a mountain. You feel grounded in the world because you are grounded in your own self, and this gives you integrity as a human being. A quality that indicates al-Matin in your life is the presence of rhythm, daily rhythm. The power that comes from this rhythmic existence is a kind of balance, harmony, and wholeness. Al-Matin gives you the strength to handle both success and failure. It is the strength to balance and harmonize your individual needs with the needs of the group.

From Physicians of the Heart: A Sufi View of the Ninety-Nine Names of Allah (Kindle Locations 1638-1643).

Breathe, Remember, Persist.