Beloved friends, this week I'm trying something new. Here is a way to hear me reading this to you. I'd love to hear what you think!
The drawing above was taped to the inside of my bathroom closet for many years. It is by E.H. Shepard, from A.A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner, 1926. Beneath the drawing was a sentence from Chapter 6, "Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you suddenly know everything there is to be known."
What do you know when you watch the river? I think the answer is: life is change. The river is everpresent, always the river, and yet the river is always changing. 2500 years ago, Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."
This week I was in session with someone. We were practicing yoga together over Zoom and talking about life. She was just kind up to her eyeballs with living, you know? I was looking for an image to nourish her in a sense of grace and flow, gently, and this little bit of Winnie the Pooh came to mind.
I love this image as a way to think of meditation, too, and have woven it into my teaching this week: meditation doesn't have to be, and isn't to my way of seeing, trying to make thoughts stop. Meditative contemplation is the natural state in which we sift and sort, learn and grow and plan, digest our living. Yes, there are types of meditation in which we can train to steady the mind. There are also types of meditation where we can do healing visualization. So much is possible! Fundamentally, though, the thing that I hope people gain from meditation is the experience of being able to stand on the bridge rather than just getting tossed around in the rapids. Meditative presence helps us relate to the river of our lived experience. We can choose to jump in – or climb out, sit back and watch it flow for a while. All that living. All that feeling about, reflection upon, integration of, and planning for our living. This is the natural work of the mind.
If we make space for the natural work of the mind, befriend ourselves internally, anxiety can lessen. The whirr can lessen. Space can open up for reflection and pure presence.
I'd like to be clear that I say this as someone who has a busy mind by nature, who has a tremendous amount of lived trauma, and who once, at the beginning of a silent meditation retreat, was so terrified of several impending days of being alone with my own mind, wept silently until my shirt was wet with tears.
At that retreat, we sat for 50 minutes on and 10 off all day, with breaks to eat and an afternoon rest. 10 hours of meditation each day. When the bell rang to end the session in which I'd sobbed myself soggy, I went outside, used the restroom, and in the few minutes left before returning to the meditation hall, sat on a rock and turned my face to the sun. I felt the sunlight on my face. I felt the sunlight. I felt light. And then there was no me, no sun; there was only light.
Light, light, and more light.
This is what the yogis call samadhi, absorption: when the meditator disappears and there is nothing but that to which we were bringing attention. It is a state we all have access to in different ways: some people lose themselves in gardening, some melt into surfing or skiing. Natural doorways to meditation are in all of us!
One of my favorite parts of this particular experience for me is that I wasn't trying. When I was trying, I was miserable! Because I was striving for control. When I let go of control, brought my whole-hearted attention to the light, and let go, there it was: nothing but light. It was just a few moments. It was forever.
It's funny; I didn't mean to tell the story of this little glimpse of samadhi. When I first reached for that day in my mind, it was the frustration with my inner experience and the horror of realizing I was going to spend 10 hours a day alone in my mind that I meant to share. I wanted to say: when I speak of the grace that can come in practice, I say it as someone who walked a long way to find my knowledge of that.
Another thing that's been weaving into my teaching this week is a bit of Wendell Berry. Molly sent it my way. I was happy because it's just what we'll be feeling into in The Story of Belonging – then I realized that Wendell Berry's words were afoot in the world because he had set his body down. An ache in this. But oh, when someone of wise words sets their body down, isn't it incredible how they go to seed, like a dandelion, and their words spread and spread?
"The fragment of the earth
that is now me is only on its way
through me. It is on its way
from having been a tree,
a school of fish, a terrapin,
a flock of birds. It will pass
through all those forms again."
I plan to memorize this one, so it can pass through me. Like the river. Like the light. Thank you, Wendell Berry. I am thinking also as I tell you these stories of Mary Oliver, in The Leaf and the Cloud, when she says
"I will sing for the veil that never lifts.
I will sing for the veil that begins, once in a lifetime, maybe, to lift.
I will sing for the rent in the veil.
I will sing for what is in front of the veil, the floating light.
I will sing for what is behind the veil – light, light, and more light.
This is the world, and this is the work of the world."
Recently I gave The Leaf and the Cloud to a friend for her birthday. It's a book-length poem. We were camping together and part of the gift was reading her the poem. I began in the morning. A couple of times she asked me to pause so she could digest, so I proposed that I'd pause after each section and she could lift her hand when she was ready for the next section. It takes an hour, usually, to read this book aloud – we'll be doing so in The Story of Belonging! – but that day, it took all day to read the poem.
Beloved friend, I hope that these musings offer you places to muse for yourself. I hope that they offer you a sense of how you might climb out of the wild waters of the river to sit on the bridge for a time and also how you might melt into the waters and into the light dancing upon them when those are what call you.
If you'd like to consider doing that with me-and-us in the autumn Workshop for Living, you'll find what happens there very much like this missive. Here are details for The Story of Belonging: Myth, Meaning, and Meditation.
Love,
Dahlia
Resources
HONK
My beloved is a creature with amazing research skills and respect for artists, and last week after he read my newsletter he came running downstairs shouting "Oh no, I should have told you!" It turns out that the bumper sticker that last week was themed around, the one that says "HONK IF YOU ARE LETTING THE SOFT ANIMAL OF YOUR BODY LOVE WHAT IT LOVES"? He had hunted down the artist who made the original to order me one. Which means you can, too!
"cort hartle is an artist and educator in Philadelphia. Leaning into poetics and intuition, their multidisciplinary practice explores shared memory, storytelling, and place through painting, sculpture, archives, and book arts. They are particularly interested in the entangled relationships between people and their social and material environments, and the narrative processes through which they are built and changed." Their work looks incredible and I've signed up for their newsletter.
Magic for All
The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones is a "dark academia fantasy novel" which got a rip-roaring review in the NY Times: "This Is the Best Book Our Fantasy Columnist Has Read All Year" (gift link). It's a Hogwarts-y kinda place, the protagonist is nonbinary, and that reviewer said it was so gripping she forgot to eat dinner! Sounds like a great read for folks who loved Harry Potter and who have been saddened by J.K. Rowling's virulent transphobia.
Lex Croucher
A few years ago when I led a Community Reading of Becky Chambers' magnificent Monk + Robot duology, one of the things several people said they appreciated was that reading these novellas, who also have a nonbinary protagonist, gave them an extended opportunity to immerse in and internally normalize the use of they/them pronouns in a situation that did not involve any social anxiety or risk of harm. So in addition to being wonderful stories, another reason to check out these books could be to expand your repertoire of social capacity.
Eclipse Report
After four nights of clear, crisp, glorious moonrises, we had heavy clouds last Thursday for the 96% lunar eclipse. The moon was already in early eclipse as it rose, which I was hoping to see at the horizon. I did not. But James and I headed out to the deck and bundled up anyway. We hoped we might catch a little moonrise between horizon and clouds, but: nope! I pulled up a livestream on my laptop and we lingered, had a drink, watched the livestream, talked about our intentions for this particular moment in our lives as the sun, Earth, and moon moved into alignment around us. Two hours into our vigil, at 10pm, the mood suddenly crested above the marine layer. The euphoria! The unexpected sight when it came after long patience made it even more joyful than the night I watched the entire eclipse with a clear sky from a hot tub in Mexico. YUM. Here's a gorgeous roundup of images of the eclipse if you'd like to coo at the moon for a bit.
Good News for Mediocre Runners
Do you run? I love to do... something out there, but honestly, I hesitate to call it running. I've never gotten fast, even when I've gotten out there very steadily; I just plod along with gleeful or stoic determination depending upon the day. These days I like to jog to the mailbox and back, which is 3/4 of a mile each way: it's quick, I need to check the mail anyway, and it gets me a good sweat. A new study supports this, opening with:
"Although running upright has been reported to have positive effects on both physical and mental health, the minimum running intensity/speed that would benefit mood and prefrontal cognition is not yet clear. Here, we tested the hypothesis that a brief bout of very slow running, which is classified as a very light intensity exercise, would enhance positive mood and executive function and increase activation in executive-function–related prefrontal subregions." and concluding, "The results show that 10 minutes of very slow running significantly enhanced mood, reduced Stroop interference time (i.e., enhanced executive function), and elicited left lateral PFC activation. Moreover, head acceleration, the magnitude of up-and-down oscillations, was measured during running, and a significant positive correlation with pleasant mood was found. Head acceleration is a remarkable characteristic of running and may be one of the factors related to a pleasant mood induced by very slow running. In conclusion, the current study reveals that a single bout of running, even at very slow speed, elicits a pleasant mood and improved executive function with enhancing activation in prefrontal subregions. This sheds light on the slow running benefits to brain health."
Now with the Link: We Are the Mystery, Too
Last week I tried a new way to embed the link for an article I was over the moon to share with you. It worked in the preview but didn't show up in the newsletter for you. Thanks to all the folks who were interested enough to reach out to ask for it! Here we go:
This article about paradoxical lucidity, terminal lucidity, and the nature of consciousness blew my mind so sweetly that I read the entire thing aloud to James at the start of our annual two day drive to camp under the old growth redwoods. He kept interrupting me to shout "YES!" I was particularly struck by these lines from Sam Parnia, a brain and consciousness researcher at New York University:
“We are at the cusp of the exploration of a new frontier in science,” he wrote, declaring himself “quite optimistic that the nature of human consciousness — our very selfhood — will be discovered to be a flux of energy like electromagnetic waves that interacts with the brain and body but is not produced by them.”
Here's the whole piece. I hope it enriches your wondering.
Resistance is Love in Action
My suggestions for action have thus far generally focused on resistance to the greed and deliberate destruction afoot in the US federal government. We are, however, people who belong to the planet; borders are both very real and entirely imaginary. I've been appreciating the emails I get from No Business with Genocide; particularly one last week with many actions that could be taken to resist forced labor and genocide of the Uyghur people in China. Here's one of those actions; a form letter in which you can ask your House Representative to support the Uyghur Forced Labor Disclosure Act (H.R.8712). If you are local to me, our Rep. Emily Randall is a co-sponsor of this bill; I therefore deleted the proposed body text and used the form to thank her and affirm that in this she was representing me well. If you do this, you can get signed up for their emails for more.
Emails for more is often what people cite as an issue for not wanting to get active. This is pretty easy to manage. Some people use separate email address for activism. I simply attend to my email – the first time I get an email (or piece of postal mail, or text) that I do not want, I unsubscribe (ask to be removed from the mailing list for postal, reply STOP to texts). For mail I want, I create a filter that sends it to my activism folder so it isn't cluttering my inbox and I can find it easily when I want to choose actions. The smidge of time it takes is more than rewarded with the easeful flow of my attention going forward. If you haven't been managing your email at all, this can seem daunting! But if start where you are and attend to what comes in going forward, you can make it manageable. It's a wonderful feeling.
Here's my doc with more resources for stepping up. Your additions are warmly welcome; just drop me a line!
Supporting me in supporting you
This is entirely human work – my work, done by hand, with my own mind and heart. I do not have an AI and do not use them in what I create for you. The half day I devote to creating this each week is a labor of love for which I earn about $15/hr. You can chip in on giving me a raise with one-time donation, or by upgrading to a paid subscription for as little as $5/month.
If you shop at Bookshop.org from links in this newsletter or my bookshop I will receive a commission of 10%. If you buy any book after starting at my shop I'll receive a commission even if those books aren't in my shop!
Sharing my newsletter is a gift too.
If you are a supporter, thank you; I am honored and humbled by your willingness to support my work in the world.
