Beloved friends,
I offer to you my wishes for a gentle and joyful Samhain, Halloween, All Saints' Day, Diwali, and a tender Dia de los Muertos ahead. What a wealth of holy days at this point in the wheel of the year! We in the Northern Hemisphere are turning more deeply into the cooler and darker side of the year. Many people are also intensely aware of the impending election in the United States next week; I am hearing this steadily from you in the spaces that I hold.
I keep remembering the morning after the 2016 election. James and I were living in the small apartment in Berkeley where we spent a year before taking to the sea. I had a hangover; celebratory first-female-president drinks had turned into a numbing against the shock and distress of what unfolded. I was up early anyway because I was having a biopsy. The lump in my breast was a fluid-filled cyst, but I did not know that yet. I only knew that I had let go of my home, there was a lump in my breast, and a hate-spouting reality TV star with no experience in government who seemed quite clearly to be ill had just become the president of the United States. I was stricken, awake in the dark before dawn, sobbing.
Our apartment building had a rooftop deck that was almost always empty. That morning James and I were sitting on it wrapped in a blanket, hoping that sea air and the sunrise would bring solace. The moment I remember comes next: looking through my tears at the gulls careening above us and thinking: for these creatures, it is simply dawn again. Just a beautiful morning.
That moment has been a place of refuge for me ever since, a touchstone moment I return to often in my heart. Connecting with the more-than-human life of the planet offers respite when the human world is hard. This moment resonates for me, too, with the fundamental spiritual orientation which has developed for me over the past few years. This week it finally became the first prayersong of my own creation.
Ram Das' mantra was the seed. He was so dear to me, though we never met. When he died in 2019 I began to play with his mantra: I am loving awareness. It has been a core practice for me ever since. This spring I chose to teach Lovingkindness for the rest of the year in anticipation of this moment, right now: this turning point in human history. I believed that seeing our most recent Republican president on the ballot again would be a traumatic event on a massive scale, so I began to resource those who come to practice with me with the best thing I know: love.
In the Lovingkindness course I shared this mantra as an opening practice. I am loving awareness. I wanted to offer another one because when people feel depression, grief, or pain and cannot connect with positive spiritual teachings, that can feel alienating and deepen our suffering in places we have come to for comfort. I therefore wanted to be sure that there was a more neutral mantra option and offered I am the life of the universe. On another day, as I said these two together, another line arose after them: All of this is the life of the universe. And then, later, another day (because as long as there are more days there are more meditations) one more word came – and the light in the room shifted. My orienting prayersong, friends, is:
I am loving awareness.
I am the life of the universe.
All of this
is the life of the universe
dancing.
I have made two small recordings of this. One is a 5 minute meditation in which the spoken words echo and reconfigure. The other is a tiny song, 45 seconds. I captured it standing in the door of my studio in the brief minutes between dropping my Vote Forward letters at the mailbox and meeting with someone for counsel via Zoom; I'd just sung it for the first time and didn't want to lose it. It arose whole, like the gulls rising up against the dawn sky. I did not know it was coming. I just... sang.
Years have passed since I set down the beloved Sanskrit chants of the yogis in order to call forth something from inside of me, something me-and-now-and-here-and-us, and this week, at last, the music came. You find this prayersong in the Teachings section of my website; it's a tiny recording, less than a minute. There is also a 5 minute meditation in which I gently riff and weave with the mantras in a spoken voice.
My prayersong and the gulls say the same thing to me: that what I-and-we belong to is larger than the United States. The gulls invite me to ground to the life of the Earth; the prayersong invites me to ground to the cosmos. I invite you to share this with me.
Tat Twam Asi, the yogis say: Thou Art That.
I am the life of the universe. And so are you. So, too, are the children of Gaza and of Israel, of Sudan, Ukraine, North Carolina, and Florida. So is our former Republican president, and the people who vote for him, who are half of us. I am grateful to my brother-on-the-path Jivana Heyman for reminding me this week of the famous time Ramana Maharishi was asked, "How should we treat others?" His reply was, "There are no others."
We are all the life of the universe. We all deserve to be safe. What is the way there? How can we best care for one another? Or maybe for you the question right now is closer to hand: How can I get through this?
Together, friend. We can do this together. All of the answers, to my eye, are rooted in love. I will be here next week, life permitting, to hold your hand and raise my voice in song again.
May you know peace and wholeness
freedom and belonging.
May cultivating these things within us
serve all beings.
May they flow through and beyond us.
May all beings everywhere
know peace and wholeness
freedom and belonging.
May it be so.
May it be so.
May it be so.
Thanks to Kirsten for the beautiful photo that heads this week's newsletter. Kirsten joins the Tuesday morning Meditation Gatherings from a park near her home in Minneapolis where she walks and takes photographs. This one, of the reflection of the trees and sun in water on which autumn leaves float, is dedicated to her late father in homage of a similar photo that he once took. May his memory be a blessing.
Resources
Simple Health Support
Here is my third annual reminder that a 2022 study showed an 8.5x reduction in hospitalization among people diagnosed with covid who simply began to practice saline nasal irrigation with 1 cup of water, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda twice a day. It has been theorized that this practice makes the sinuses a less hospitable environment for viral replication, reducing viral load. I began it myself this morning after a friend I saw Tuesday let me know she tested positive today. Here's an easy to read article about the study, and here is the study itself.
The First Ritual
In our 2023 Autumn Course I offered invitations to a small set of rituals. The first was light: savoring the dawn or the sunrise, the moon or the sunset. For many of us that developed into the practice of lighting a dawn candle. I lit mine for the first time this season after returning from monthlong travels recently and finding the morning I woke to so much darker than when I'd left – the light changes quickly here in the Pacific Northwest.
That first day I came into the kitchen groggy and feeling resistance to the darkness. But the darkness led me to remember the light, and remembering led me to light a candle. After lighting the candle I found myself turning the electric lights off again – suddenly the darkness felt tender. The candle is a fact and a metaphor, a symbol, as rituals are. I found this ritual last autumn to offer more smoothness to the usually-lumpy experience of the Daylight Savings shift, which takes place this weekend. A little focal point. At my house, there is the dawn candle and the dinner candle. Some mornings I light the dawn candle only for a few seconds as I pop into the kitchen for water or tea on my way to the day's first yoga session, but oh, what a difference it makes. Care to join me? If you do, I'd love to see a photograph; send 'em my way!
Your Happiness Muscle
The New York Times offers some excellent mental health support in this piece on How to Strengthen Your Happiness Muscle (gift link). "Our drive to seek out happiness is a muscle that we can develop. So is our ability to relish experiences. And almost anyone can learn to amp up their reward sensitivity by training themselves to notice and savor their positive emotions. That’s even true for people with depression and anxiety who struggle to experience pleasure, a condition called anhedonia." This seems especially useful to folks who might be isolating now due to stress. Thanks again to Kirsten.
The Right of a River
What hope I find in this ruling from an Ecuadorian court that the Machángara River has a right not to be polluted! May it be so for you as well.
Transformation for All Things
It's leek season! Usually the tenderer white parts of the leek are sautéed and the tougher greens are discarded. Last autumn I went hunting for uses for some beautiful green leek tops and found this suggestion to lactoferment them in a salt brine. They sat in the back of the fridge all year and recently I pulled them out and began to savor them. You don't have to wait a year! I've been slicing the greens finely and adding them to grains and eggs and beans. I've been pouring the luscious brine into all sorts of things; I poured a little into my mouth after getting this jar out to photograph it for you, in fact.
Hope Comes
Another song for you, sweetlings; this one from those incredible Bengons. "Hope Comes from the place where the hurt comes from."
Thanks
To whoever bought the Photographic Altas of the Moon mentioned in the last newsletter as part of a wider order. Bookshop gives me a 10% commission on purchases from my shop there, and apparently they did so on that whole order since it began with a link of mine. The $14.50 I was paid there is quite frankly the most I've earned for a newsletter so far. If you value my writing and wish to support me in creating and sharing it, becoming a paid subscriber is a direct way to do that. Another great support is sharing my newsletter with others to help spread my reach! Thank you for your support.