Beloved friends,
In the places where I am blessed to be a spiritual mentor, I spend a lot of time talking to people about lovingkindness. A key question that tends to arise when cultivating lovingkindness --cultivating unconditional love – either for oneself or for others is the question of worthiness, because most of us have been raised with the idea that love is something we must be worthy of, something we earn with our actions.
To my eye, the worth of a human being arises in the same way as the worth of swallowtail butterflies, the worth of the budding orchid which hangs beside me as I write, the worth of the forest from which I speak: because it exists. Not because they please me, though they do please me – that would be conditional love – but because they exist. That’s unconditional love. That's lovingkindness. Meeting life with friendly curiosity.
Right now in my meditation teaching, I am embarking upon teaching the practice of cosmic grounding, because this is where I find the foundation for lovingkindness.
If life is precious, I am worthy because I am life. I am worthy because I exist. If life is precious, then everything that lives, everything that exists is worthy. Which means that worthiness doesn’t really exist. Everything is sacred.
Maybe sacred does not resonate for you. Sometimes it chafes. We could say: precious. We could say: miraculous. Mysterious. Astonishing. Infinitely dear. Fleeting in every form and eternal in whole. The Yoga sutras and as a result Buddhism – because Siddhartha Gautama studied yogic philosophy and his own way arose from that – both of these wisdom traditions say that the source of all suffering is the illusion of separation. Cosmic grounding melts the illusion of separation. And not with anything you need to take a leap of faith toward. We’re feeling deeply into what is factual, into existing and existence.
My prayersong says: "I am the life of the universe. All is the life of the universe. All of this is the life of the universe dancing." Lovingkindness is the way we relate to that. We are the life of the universe, conscious for a time in this form. Alive, friendly, curious. What is a baby, most of all, if it is safe and well? Friendly. Curious. This is our nature. In cosmic grounding we play with connecting with the universe that dances around us, as us. We find that there is no separation. The yogis say Tat Twam Asi: Thou Art That. I am the life of the universe. The life of the universe is precious miracle, fact, and mystery, and we are that. We are resourced by that. We belong to that. This internal access to vastness, belonging, mystery, and certainty is a profound resource.
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These words are adapted from the opening lecture of my winter Workshop for Living: Cosmic Grounding. You could join us, still! Whether you choose to do that or not, I wanted to share these ideas with you because they are so powerful. They are powerful in every moment, always, and oh, how powerful they are right now. When we ground, we sense into our connection with the Earth. We are the life of the Earth. When we practice cosmic grounding, we sense into our connection with the cosmos. We are the life of the universe, dancing. On a spinning planet orbiting a star, which is part of a spiral galaxy, which is one of trillions of galaxies in this universe.
You could explore this by gazing at the night sky or by watching the sun rise or set. You could explore earthly grounding by walking, anywhere, and especially in wild places or under trees. When the human world is painful, the patience of the wider life of the Earth is a balm and a teaching. The morning after the 2016 presidential election I climbed up to the roof of the apartment building we were living in to watch the sun rise. I sat wrapped in a blanket, sobbing, watching the gulls play in the thermals created by the warming of the Earth by the rising sun. The glorious dawn comes again every day. The gulls are joyful. Feeling into the freedom that the more-than-human world has can help us tap into our own sense of freedom, possibility, pleasure, and peace.
It's okay to feel those things, even in a terrible time. It is essential to feel those things in a terrible time. In a terrible time, there is a dangerous tendency to decide that we don't have the time or strength to feel our feelings about it, to put your head down and carry on. But we need to change the world; we need to call it back to order, compassion, and justice. In order to change the world, we have to feel our feelings about it. I need to feel sorrow and determination. I need hope and joy. Meditation makes space for me to feel. Feeling helps me orient me to my values. This helps me choose the actions that make up my life. Staying grounded keeps me connected to my love of the life of all things, which is at the heart of my sense of justice.
I took the photograph above as I pulled into my driveway this evening. In the midst of the months of grey that is Pacific Northwest winter, we've had a week of sunshine. Oh, the color of the sky! That gradient stopped me in my tracks, quite literally; I stopped the car at the edge of the driveway to nab this image to share with you. The life of the Earth is beautiful every day. The life of the cosmos is a glorious mystery and wonder every day. And you are that, friend; we all are. From this we can gather strength, together.
Love,
Dahlia
Resources
I'm still reading from Mary Oliver's Red Bird in my sessions. This week:
Invitation
Oh do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy
and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles
for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,
or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air
as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine
and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude—
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing
just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,
do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.
It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.
We are not alone
One of the great joys of my life is watching our certainty about what makes humans unique among creatures fall away. Language, we used to say. NOPE! Emotion, we used to say. NOPE! Self-awareness? NOPE. Using tools! NOPE! The latest animal to be documented using tools is, I am utterly delighted to say, an Austrian cow named Veronika, who uses brooms to scratch her bug bites. "Flexible use of a multi-purpose tool by a cow" was published in Current Biology on Monday, is the first scientific paper to describe tool use in cattle. In an article about the work which led to this in the NY Times, “We haven’t been looking well enough at these animals,” Dr. Auersperg added, noting that humans have been living in proximity to cows for thousands of years. “Perhaps the absurd thing was not the absurdity of a cow using tools, but the absurdity of us never thinking that a cow might be intelligent.” (gift link)
All of this is the life of the universe
If my words got you hungry for cosmic connection, Scientific American's 10 Most Stunning Space Images of 2025 will be a delicious thing to contemplate. My favorite is dark molecular cloud Chamaeleon I, captured by the Dark Energy Camera, "a powerful survey instrument mounted to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile." WOW.
Resistance is Love in Action
In the streets
There is a nationwide set of actions taking place under the name Ice Out for Good over the next few weeks. You can learn more here from Indivisible, including finding actions near you. Many organizations are joining in this effort. I'm committed to being part of the Safety Team at our local demonstration on the 31st.
In song, In Minneapolis
A beloved community member who lives in Minneapolis sent me an article featuring the songs coming out of her city right now. You can see them all in the article, but I am going to call out my favorites here. Jeremy Messersmith's "Fuck This" mixes whimsy and rage in a glorious combination. Cloud Cult's "Compassion" does what it says on the tin. The shining star for me is Hilary James' song, whose name I cannot ascertain; when I first met it I listened over and over. We all put up walls in our hearts so that we can get through the day. It is vital, if we wish to continue to have access to our feelings, to feel them. If we stop feeling our pain, we stop feeling feelings, and then we gradually just... feel less. It is vital in living to make space to feel the pain, to let it motivate and orient us in our living. This song lets me open up to the sorrow in exactly the way I needed: with a sense of connection and resistance. I've got it on in the background as I write and I'm weeping again, gratefully. "We are not afraid. We are not afraid. We are not afraid of you." Thank you to every artist raising their voice right now. If you listen to Hilary and get your sob on, here's your unicorn chaser for the other side: Margaret Killjoy, trans author, musician, & podcaster, reporting on what she's seen in Minneapolis. "I've never seen a population more united." Thanks to Kirsten
In love
On Monday a few of my local students and I joined our Marine Science Center's day of service for MLK day, digging invasive beachgrass out of a sand dune by the sea in a state park. The grass was planted to stabilize the dunes, and it does, but it turns out that the native plants and creatures who live in these dunes expect them to shift and cannot thrive when they get too stable. This is a metaphor for so much about colonial actions toward land our ancestors tried to control without understanding it. 65 people answered the call to dig. There were white-haired folks wielding shovels and cub scouts gathering the grasses we'd dug and carrying them down to the truck for disposal. Did my heart to good to get dirty in the service of the natural order of things, side by side with friends. Sure is a weird time when supporting the parks feels like resisting the government, but here we are, and it gave me fuel to make more calls and write more letters.
Getting local
My daily actions are in month four, and at this point I'm taking action on both the state and national levels. In my blue state, Washington, there is a tremendous push by all sorts of groups for protective legislation. I've got an email folder where the activism messages land so I can choose when to dive. Do I read it all? I certainly do not. But when I'm choosing daily actions, I've got a lot of options I can skim to help me orient, and it's easy to unsubscribe from anything you don't want to give your attention to. There is so much good to be done, loves! I'm sticking to national resources in sharing, but there's so much you can find near you, too.
Resistbot, 5calls, Chop Wood, Carry Water, Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible, Vote Forward, Working Families Party. This was off the top of my head just now. Got more suggestions? Send 'em my way.
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