“There is no substitute for going through things together. There is no way to ‘language’ what two whales share who swim around the world together or what binds two friends who climb through a forest of years in each other’s steps.”
~ Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
“… in the end, it seems to me, the real purpose of language is not to communicate; it is to get close to things, to be in relation with them.”
~ Carlo Rovelli, White Holes
To be in relation.
To travel together.
To access the hidden valves between me and thee, where our us-ness flows freely to and fro, where our Us-ness reminds us that there are no mes alone, and furthermore no thems at all.
It’s a holy task: learning over and over and over again that the whole point is union, us together, you+me, us together with the great spark of life. Just one life. The whole point, impossible to grasp.
How do we practice the binding together of lives, the weaving of relation? It takes some serious intention to swim the world or climb the years together. To lift the barrier between any two lives takes a solid investment in time and vulnerability and care. It can be a slow game, requiring much.
In the day to day, the realm of our physical lives, it might look like setting up that playdate we’ve been pushing off for 8 months. Making it happen. Taking the time. It could be setting aside an afternoon for a walk or a talk, or it may require pushing ourselves over the hump of dialing the phone, to offer our voice, to invite another in. Sending our love on the wires and waves, digital intimacy as only we of the 21st century can imagine. Reaching out. Or it might look mysteriously like opening our eyes to the humans closest to us, noticing them, awakening to them, allowing for a freshness between us. Yikes.
But what of the other 8.2 billion people, those outside of our innermost circles?
It is a rare day when we can make a meaningful connection with more than one or two people, a rarer day still when we expand our circles, when we manage to reach beyond the usual suspects. It is no small thing, the care and keeping of our small personal flock of folks, and not to be devalued. But we can still dare to hope that the ripples of our lives might jump orbits, that we might find ways to reach out our open arms towards more than just the folks who physically pass through our days.
Maybe you make public policy and are fighting in the trenches of Trumpdom for a better world. Amazing.
Maybe you volunteer hither and yon and make a point to touch lives beyond yours on the regular. You are my hero.
Maybe you have a public podium, maybe you find yourself mildly famous, maybe your words are listened in on whether you like it or not. My condolences, my blessings, and my awe if you find ways to use that platform to connect the dots of our hearts.
Maybe you’re a teacher. Maybe you fight fires. Maybe you care for inmates or kiddos or sickies or the elderly. Maybe you build and fix and do. Maybe you further the slow creep of science, day by grueling day, bringing us slowly into an ever-expanding enlightenment. You are the bomb.
Maybe you’re retired and patching together a loving tapestry of service and community and care and action, wildly different each day, exactly the same each day. You make the world go round.
How do we–all those folks listed, all those not, and all of us who live in varying degrees of hermitude–cultivate relations, promote us-ness, encourage one another, and strengthen the web?
Enter art, I suppose.
I mean, just for one example.
Me, I write, so that’s the best of what I know. I aim to build relation, to build experience itself, not only from the concrete interactions of the day in and the day out, but also–as if out of the ether–from the tenuous medium of words. To write, to make art, is to dream beyond the confines of time, space, and the rules of direct experience, and to share life through a more flexible conduit. All forms of art poke through to a different level of connection that fuses hearts and minds in ever-newer, ever-ancient ways. Subtle undertones and lovingly built fences surrounding the things that can’t be grasped directly. Coming in from different directions. Back doors. Sneak attacks.
There’s a guy in Bandon, Oregon who rakes out labyrinths in the sand at low tide and invites folks to come and walk them. Hands them rakes and puts them to work or just welcomes them into the winding journey inward. “I love tricking people into meditation.” Art as sneak attack is the best.
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
~ Mary Oliver, Upstream
Writers, we stab at truth and wholeness with our words, with digging deeper and deeper into the wonders that the universe presents us with on the daily. We struggle to communicate the vastness of our fleeting vision, we long to share the glimpses we’ve been given. We stand in the flow best we can in hopes that the jolt that rewires our very beings might pass on to those in our closest orbits, or even slingshot further on down the line. We do what we can to keep the channels open, willing and grateful receivers waiting for the next transmission to arrive, from you to me, from far off places. Insert any other form of art and the story might be much the same.
It all sounds, on the surface, like nothing.
For words alone get lost, words alone can’t get there.
“It’s not unusual for science to catch up to art, eventually. Nor is it unusual for art to catch up with the spiritual.”
~ Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
But as with all the numberless forms that art can take, as with life, the goal is to close a gap, the hope is to build one slender and rickety bridge over which we might usher each other closer in. Even our jarring and imperfect words can sometimes, when paired with just the right helping of grace and gravity, break through from one heart to the next, a synapse of love.
They can, sometimes, forge the path.
They can, always, plant a seed. And with a seed the possibilities are endless.
“What you see with your holy eyeballs and report with the holy twist of your tongue has weight and substance.”
~ Brian Doyle, The Thorny Grace of It
So for all of us.
To come to task.
How will we forge the path, how will we plant the seeds?
Let us soften our gaze and gentle our ears
Let us ever be on the tender lookout for us-ness
For where we find the Us-ness, the synapse is already firing,
The connection will happen, will deepen,
through art, through service, through community, through action.
It can’t help but flow forth, when the reality of our relation surfaces.
And so…
As we go through our days, as we wade through the masses,
As we face the moments of our lives
Through dread and exhilaration
Through boundless hope and exhaustion
Through all the wild states of mind and heart
May we see in each the invisible thread there
That ties us to the whole
May we know that there is no new thing
But only a shared and shining pool of greatest pain and greater love
May we feel that tug from within, a tug from every feeling,
Connecting us to the one beside us, the one next door,
The one 8,000 miles through mantle and core
The one we love, no matter how far,
The one we loathe, no matter how lost.
May we feel with a deep and soothing burn,
Our Us-ness,
Our One-ness,
Our shared star-stuff swirling.
And from that place,
May we send our love,
With no care for form or delivery.
A Small Hotel
When a match touched
the edge of the page,
my poem filled with smoke,
then a few words
were seen to stumble out
in nothing but their nightgowns
with no idea which way to run.
~ Billy Collins, Musical Tables
“The closeness uncovered by kindness turns to light in the body, until [it] makes a lamp of the heart.”
~ Mark Nepo, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen
Time to love louder. Louder. LOUDER.
Tucked happily into the gorgeous hills and woods of Wisconsin, I write about life, faith, and the humor that both require. 
Tales From the Nexus 
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