seeing essence

More on essence:


"I think of what Doris Lessing wrote in The Four-Gated City: 'In any situation anywhere there is always a key fact, the essence. But it is usually every other fact, thousands of facts, that are seen, discussed, dealt with. The central fact is usually ignored, or not seen.' And a sentence of Yukio Mishima's in Spring Snow: 'To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style.'" - Michael Ventura, in We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse by James Hillman and Michael Ventura.

This lovely stained glass seems related to these thoughts, somehow (detail from Laura Fuller's Tree of Life, photo by Amanda Painter of Planet Waves). Even if just because they both caught my attention this same day.

noise and chatter

"Essence doesn't mean a little part hidden somewhere in us, the little teeny kernel of essence. Essence means the totality, the whole thing. Essence means the truth of you as opposed to the untruth of you.

"Essence isn't a small thing, essence is an immense thing. The essence of you is everything you ever see, taste, touch, and experience. Everywhere you go, every step you take, every breath you take is actually happening by the essence, of the essence, in the essence, and to the essence. All the rest is noise and chatter."



~ Adyashanti
 

seeds of the future

December 30, 2009: I've moved over to Posterous (and duplicated this whole blog over there, though unfortunately without the comments) - come visit me over there!

(1 17 2011 - changed my mind AGAIN and I think I'm going to come back and play with this format some more...)

(6 9 2011 - Okay. Never mind. I really have moved: http://lifecultivatinglife.posterous.com - come see!)

Happy New Year!

inescapable interrelation

"All I'm saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. 

Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

This is the interrelated structure of reality."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

fish clouds

Bastyr University courtyard fish (and frog and turtle) pond, taken with my iPhone last summer.

moon-lit desert yuletide

My friend Will Engelhardt is a medicine man whose healing ways include body work, exploration and transformation of mental and neural patterns, and the creation and sharing of beauty. Here is a Christmas offering from him:

strategic alchemy

A dedicated team representing staff, faculty, students, administration and Trustees of Bastyr University has been meeting and working for almost two years to shape input from the whole university community, including neighbors and patients and colleagues, into a strategic plan that will powerfully pull us forward into realizing our mission of "transforming the health of the human community."

I have gotten to work primarily on the first of the 6 strategic initiatives, all six of which were officially approved by the Board earlier this month. Now our bigger work begins, and we'll be looking for support and participation.

The first initiative, beginning with its preamble, is:
A university is defined by the power and beauty and reach of the ideas and perspectives that it gathers together in the spirit of open-minded inquiry. Bastyr University is committed to the work of transforming the health of the human community, and the daunting complexity of that work calls for us to think and talk and work together with many other people from many disciplines who share our commitment.
Because of our capacity for honoring the whole and all of its parts, and our unshakable trust that the parts are already threaded together even when the connections are as yet invisible, we are uniquely suited for hosting a confluence of rich and diverse explorations that lead to wise practice and action.
In the best academic tradition, Bastyr will welcome the meeting, meshing, and even the clashing of ideas that expand our understanding, seed our own programs and initiatives, connect us to effective work all over the world, and help us to accomplish our mission to transform the health of the human family.

Strategic Initiative #1:
Convene essential generative conversations that inform the cultivation of practitioners and influence policy decisions that contribute to restoring the world's intrinsic health.
There are objectives and goals and things to be measured, too, which I can tell about another time if you'd like, and another five initiatives which all have to do with creating or adopting, and living up to, standards of excellence in all our own particulars of who we are and what we do.

Many thanks to Bill Toliver and his team at The Matale Line for their deep careful listening and skillful alchemy, cooking us down to the real essence of what is ours to contribute to a healthier future.