Connection

I keep coming back to these small realizations of how we are so intimately connected.    It is becoming a central observation.     I don’t think much around me is changing, but I certainly am.   Every person I meet, every bee I see on my flowers is connected to me and to one another.    The more I allow myself to sink into this realization the more it becomes apparent and felt.

For some individuals, those connections are so intimate that they persist, almost in spite of me.    I’ve recently been thinking of someone I was close friends with many years ago.     In spite of my neglect of that connection, it has persisted, and shows up in small and unexpected ways.    Some overlapping patterns of our lives have surprisingly popped up.    It is curious that, with no awareness or deliberation, the same names have, years apart, shown up on our first-born boys.

I am constantly reminded that connections go beyond my normal experience.   They exist in a part of my world that is largely beyond my common perception.   They have roots in a reality that I only partially understand.

Sometimes, by keeping an open heart, the connection is something I can experience in an easy manner.   First meetings, brushing against my plants, looking into the night sky can be an easy experience of connection.    Other times it is not so apparent, and requires a focused attention to see the connection.    I have to look deeply with deliberation and with unfettered feeling.

Much of my training has been otherwise.   For me, religion has caused me to feel separate from the “others” and has encouraged me to focus instead on my own tribe of like minded believers.    Instead of opening my awareness to the broad reality, the focus has been on what distinguishes me from others, on my unique imaginary path into the spiritual realm.    Rather than learning to be a mystic, I was taught how to conform.    I, of course, have resisted, though the struggle still comes up from time to time.

Life is, instead, an opportunity for me to experience how I am connected to everything.   I have to let go of all my learned perceptions to allow this to happen.    I seem to constantly search for phenomena that allow me to see the connection, even with people and places I no longer directly experience.    I daily try to reach beyond the superficial ways I am part of a common entity and realize  the deeper, invisible connections.

I am convinced that the only reality is the connectivity, the interaction.   Rather than be caught up in how each of us is different, unique and separate, I want to live in a world of connection.