October Meditation

I love the darkening of days, as slowly I find again a meditative rhythm to daily life.    I love how the mornings are shouts of color- cool walks through a wood path strewn with fallen leaves.  The sound of a running brook delights, as do other unnamed animal trills, resounding throughout the forest in this scurrying time of year.  I love how the nights are filled now with slow routine- dinner conversations, homework, stories and earlier bedtimes- and I savor once again an evening hour alone in silence.

October is surely a month of deepening awareness. It is also a month of multiple causes, as facebook statuses shout out attention to breast cancer, domestic violence, and pregnancy and infant loss...to name a few. Nature's beckon is quieter; unlike the awareness posts, it does not leave me overwhelmed but centered. (Although even nature has a cause....as it is also National Squirrel Awareness Month!) In opening my eyes to the fuller dance of the season, I sense something much closer to my heart than the myriad list of abstract causes. I sense my place in the interdependent web of connection.

Fundraising and advocacy have their place in this web as well- they provide real ways to turn contemplation to action. Behind every cause is a human hurt and hope; and there is no true awareness which is not followed by compassionate response. But masquerading on social network sites, both cause and response become abstract. Liking a cause or changing a profile picture provides an easy solution in place of the real depth of caring which comes through relationship.  It is not the charge of human hearts to care for causes; it is our charge to care for one another. In the family of things,  there is no charity- no accounting of the give and take. There is only a deep sense of belonging which calls forth the generous heart and the receptive hands;  giving and receiving are a natural flow of heart within the circle of relationship.

This is the meaning of Mitakuye Oyasin- All my relations- that most sacred of Lakota phrases spoken in ceremony. The meaning of these words become real for me in meditating upon the real people who struggle and hurt and hope.

The interdependence of all things is in delicate balance.  Who can blind themselves to the daily acts of evil which rend the sacred web? Today a co-worker tells me how a beloved uncle was murdered last week at the hands of his plotting wife and her boyfriend. This is no abstraction.  There is pain here, too much.

Each story wakes me: a hoop has been broken,  so many covenants and treaties and vows.

And so in the silence- before an altar of names, a jar of hopes, and other artifacts of our human lives- I pray with eyes open for all my relations:  to restore the human heart and the threads that bind us ever still in a circle of belonging.

You are all my relations, my relatives, without whom I would not live. We are in the circle of life together, co-existing, co-dependent, co-creating our destiny. One, not more important than the other. One nation evolving from the other and yet each dependent upon the one above and the one below. All of us a part of the Great Mystery. Thank you for this Life.  (words from a Lakota Prayer)