Tuesday

Shambhala Touching the Earth Collective – Joining Heaven and Earth

By David Takahashi

The story of Buddha’s enlightenment goes like this. Tired of the same kind of search you’re on, he sat down under a tree, and he didn’t get up. He sat there, night and day, until he found the meaning of life. In the early hours of the eighth day, he looked up and saw the morning star in the east, Venus bathed in sunlight, foretelling the imminent dawn on earth.
You can see it nearly any morning if you wake up in time.
He said, “I, the great earth, and all beings simultaneously attain the Way!” It was an expression of awe and astonishment. What if you suddenly saw through all your fear and ignorance, your restless craziness, and realized that you already possess what you are looking for because you already are everything you are looking for?
The Buddha didn’t see something invisible. He saw something he’d missed all his life:
all of life. Rising up from the deep beneath, covering the earth, reaching the sky,
containing every speck of everything and everyone through all space and time.

From Paradise in Plain Sight, by Karen Maezen Miller

We know that we must reach a zero-carbon world by 2050. We should be looking at 2035 and, failing that, 2040 if we are to have a chance at substantially reducing global greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 degrees Celsius while pursuing efforts to limit the rise even further to 1.5 degrees. Of the 196 signatories, one of them, Gambia, appears to be compliant.

The Bible describes faith as “the evidence of things unseen which are true.” As we read the headlines, watch the news, sit in meetings that turn ugly, witness aggressive behavior everywhere (including kids’ movies), our faith in human goodness can be challenged every day. Goodness can go unnoticed in this current environment, which is why we need faith that goes beyond appearances. But our faith is not unfounded. Daily we receive gifts of generosity that, if noticed, tune us into the deeper reality of who we humans also are. We can be provoked to aggression and hatred, and we can be moved to self-sacrifice and caring.

From Who Do We Choose to Be? by Margaret J. Wheatley

Where the original Buddha found old age, sickness, death, and contemplatives, a modern Buddha will see shrinking resources, global warming, species extinction, and activists who ‘proceed until apprehended.’ We have essentially taken the Buddha of 2600 years ago and extrapolated it to the collective Sangha of today. In a sense, we have traveled from me to we. However, the joining of Heaven and Earth that the Buddha attained remains our task today:

The Buddha didn’t see something invisible. He saw something he’d missed all his life: all of life. Rising up from the deep beneath, covering the earth, reaching the sky, containing every speck of everything and everyone through all space and time.

Over the coming year, I will take you to wide-ranging destinations you may or may not have seen. I will write a short piece like this every month. But each will manifest the central theme of our joining heaven and earth, everything and everyone through all space and time. In the quarters, we will convene Earth Salons around elemental themes, each of these will honor Space as a central element.

I will leave you with a poetic preamble to our journey ahead.

Descend – Of Earth and Sky
Gina Puorro

There are things you can only learn
on your knees 
or in a storm
or when the cracks in the foundation
of this modern world
open a chasm of uncertainty
beneath your feet.

Your discontent
with what has been named normal
is both grief and longing
for what your mind has forgotten
but your body remembers.

You can feel it
in the way a child’s laughter
disrupts your commitment
to what is appropriate
and makes space
for foolishness and magic.

You can feel it
in the way that water
has taught you
how to be a vessel
and how to spill.

Can you trace your lineage
all the way back to salt?
The same that now stains your face
with both sadness and laughter
excites your tongue
and protects your prayers.

You are diasporic. Ecological. Holon.
A vast territory
of many wild bodies
melting into each other
dressed up as human.
Simultaneously living and dying
shaping and dismantling
filling up and boiling over.
Ashes to ashes
stardust to bone.

What language do you grieve in?
What is the mother tongue for that
which twists and contorts your body
wringing oceans from your skin?
The gravity that pulls you
down to your knees
forehead to ground
broken open
at the altar of all you’ve lost
and how much you’ve loved.

Can we fall apart together?
Make a commitment
to search for the truth
but promise
to never find it.
Let myths and stories
be the cartograph
for what is both
primordial and brand new
because the present moment
is promiscuous like that.
Compost ourselves down
into the dirt beneath the dirt
and tend the chthonic embers
that light the ancient fires in our bellies.

When the fault lines open
and your mind is grasping
and you don’t know
where to go from here;
prostrate
trade rapture for rupture
let yourself spill
and descend.

https://ginapuorro.com/2021/04/11/descend/

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This post is an excerpt from the Shambhala Touching the Earth Collective March & April 2023 Newsletter. To read the complete newsletter please click here.