In the beginning human beings lived in a participation mystique with all of nature. About 6,000 years ago they left that garden within which there was only being without knowing. They didn’t leave because of shame or guilt but because of curiosity and the desire to know the real. They have been differentiating from that original mystique until now.
 
Perhaps something went awry. Or perhaps to know the real they had to know fear, anguish, terror, and suffering as well as loveliness, harmony, being well-cared-for, and peace. The real is a harmonic tension of opposites. They learned that they themselves were of all that they experienced outside themselves. They fell into the mystique of self and lost balance—too much of a good thing. They became mesmerized into a dis-eased state. Now human beings are suffering the final stage of that disease—late-stage individualism.
 
The cure may be found in We. All of us here—neighbors, pets and plants, both wild and tame, the weather, the planets, our suffering, our leaders, psychotics, and sociopaths.
 
What will future human beings say of the ones who went before? That they so hungered for personal self-interest they ate themselves into oblivion? That they became so preoccupied with individual obsessions, though they’d set out to know the real, they lost their way and couldn’t see it? That they spent thousands of years searching for the truth that was always right in front of them—in the cat’s purr, the potted shamrock’s resurrection, in the wildness of weather, in the myriad answered prayers that so often went unnoticed?
 
Or will they say of those who went before that only when humanity itself was threatened by extinction they finally accepted that love, the connective tissue, is the real.
 
In the series The Americans, about KGB agents living as an American family, what continually breaks through the ideologies—both American and Russian—and the violence, the subterfuge and deception, is each character’s humanity, their conscience, their love.
 
In the series Transparent, what breaks through all the gender confusion and neurosis and severance from ancestral lineage is each character’s humanity.
 
What is it to be simply humane? What if we each were to become laser focused on love. To have our heart simply relax open, put down old traumas and grievances and grief. To atone, become at-one with our race—the human race. And with our planet, thus far the only place we can survive as bodies.
 
What if each healthy cell (the individual) of this diseased body (the human race) was to assert its strong force, love, toward each diseased cell?
 
What will future human beings say of those who went before? That we were on the brink of annihilation and pulled it back? That each one of us took up the responsibility of Frodo and Samwise, and with all our humanity, love, and focus carried that ring that held the disease to the mountains of Mordor, endured our Golems to the end, and in the final hour flung the ring and the Golem into the eternal fire wherein the disease could be completely unmade.  
 
No longer mystified, now knowing this human life is a divine mystery and we each are a relevant component. We are being asked now to actually be real and awaken from the neurotic figments of our individual imaginations.
 
*Thank you Summer Wood for the writing prompts

​Dear Immune system,
I’m sorry for the toxins in the air we breathe. I’m sorry for the genetically modified foods that I do everything in my power to avoid, but nature has no real boundaries, so it’s possible we get some in our diet. I’m sorry for the depleted soil, for the polluted water. Please forgive me. I love you immune system. Thank you for doing the best you can, for enduring this onslaught, for your faithful service to keeping this body going.
 
We are a spirit who has come into this body, this world, this life, at this time for a purpose. The natural world is suffering and you along with it, for you are nature. I am doing everything I can to help you under these conditions. You are not alone. The food I give you is of the highest quality available to me. It may not be pristine as it was in a primordial age, but it still carries nourishment, and I feed it to you with love and care. Please accept this sustenance. You don’t have to fight against it. In this time, the 21st Century, in this place, this is what we have. Please accept this nourishment in the spirit in which it is given, with love and care for your continued wellbeing.
 
Though this time is a difficult one for you, I offer the remedy of just letting go, relaxing, and accepting the love and sustenance that comes. Please know that I am doing the best I can to help you in your efforts to keep this body alive and capable of fulfilling the purpose for which we’ve come into this life at this time.
 
Thank you immune system. I love you. I’m sorry you have to struggle so much. Please forgive me.

I am walking through our local health food market without a list, feeling for what I will want to eat in the next few days. A woman whom I don’t know passes me and says, "I saw you and thought you were Ann Bancroft. But then I thought, no that can’t be, she's, you know."

"Dead," I say. I'm not timid about the great wonder. We both chuckle and then I say with a smile, referencing one of Ann Bancroft's great roles, “I used to be Mrs. Robinson.” (When I was married.) We both chuckle again and walk on.

Later I revisit the incident in my mind and I am reminded of a visionary experience I had years ago that came on the wings of the theme song of that same Ann Bancroft movie, The Graduate. I wrote about it in my memoir and now I feel I am being reminded by the Greater Mind that there is a love that never stops loving us.

Excerpt from Love on The Brink of History:
"One afternoon before I became involved with the Gnostic church, I was out doing housewife errands and pulled into the parking lot of a home-improvement store. I parked my car on the burning, midsummer tarmac, and as I walked toward the electric doors to the air-conditioned vastness of nuts, bolts, and lawn chairs, I passed a store employee. He was setting up some potted plants under a mister at the front of the store and boldly singing out a familiar song, paying no attention to me passing by, “And here’s to you Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know.”

When I married, I took my husband's last name, Robinson. I was then Mrs. Robinson. Spirit often speaks to me through seemingly random incidents like this, which reveals an open portal for “presence” eternal. Occurrences like this are always guidance for something I’m puzzling through, or just a message from spirit to remind me of who I am and where I belong. Carl Jung called this synchronicity. I’ve recalled this experience over the years, and each time it is a real and comforting reminder of my purpose in this life."

Struggling to discipline myself to stay with my writing (I’ve begun a work of fiction), I nevertheless still need to take breaks from sitting. So after an hour at the screen I decided to do something physical which would not take too long.

Five years ago someone left a funky table across the road from my casita. I thought it was junk but hauled it over to my patio to use as a surface for potting plants. After a year of sun, wind, and snow the veneer had curled up and I was ready then to junk the table. But some salvage sensibility made me pull the veneer off. It was just press-board underneath and I bought a colorful printed piece of Mexican oilcloth to cover it. I’d overestimate the length and had a strip of the turquoise with red/orange flowers left after I'd stapled the oilcloth around the table, from the underside. The table  served to brighten up the patio and protect the raw press-board from weather.

The other day, feeling spring, I decided to replace the now rotting turquoise oilcloth with a new color.  I bought a red flowered pattern with blue and green, but this time I underestimated the size, and the piece was too small. I pulled out the leftover turquoise piece from two years ago and thought I'd go wild with two different colors and patterns. But it still wasn't enough. So I went back to the fabric store the next day. The proprietor had a yellow piece he'd sell me for half price because it was less than a yard. So now I had three colors.

My neighbor and I agreed that using all three colors looked the best. Now, during my quick break from writing, I began to staple-gun the three colors to the table (wrapping it under and stapling from underneath). Pressing the gun from that twisted position got more and more difficult each time I applied the stable gun to the under side of the table. Then the gun ran out of staples. I went rummaging for more staples, filled the gun, and then one staple got jammed. Now I needed to pull out my pliers. My break from writing was extending beyond my intended time.

I finally fixed the staple-gun but it jammed again because I couldn’t get a purchase against the underside of the table. I only needed two or three more staples and I could get back to my writing. But I just couldn’t get it, and without these last clinchers, the turquoise piece would not hold. So I turned the table upside down to lay it flat so I could staple it from above with more leverage. As I turned it over, one of the legs crumbled off. The underside of the tabletop onto which the leg was fastened had turned to sawdust. I noticed a black widow nested in the corner by another leg and an old wasp nest stuck to the underside. I didn't bother them and  now realized this table is really and truly junk—finally ready for the dump. So I got a screwdriver to pull out the staples and save the oilcloth.

The black widow was getting agitated and then a wasp appeared, buzzing around my lengthening project. I assumed she was saying, "What the hell are you doing?" Eventhough I was sure that wasp nest was old and dried up. Why would she care about it? Now I believe I was right in my translation but perhaps not in the way I’d believed at the time.

I apologized to both of them for causing an earthquake. I tried to scoot a  dustpan under the widow to take her to a new location, but she resisted; went and hid. I pushed that leg off the rotted tabletop to coax the widow out from underneath. The leg leaned off its bearing with ease, and the widow came with it. So with her riding on the table leg, I walked her out across the street to an area where I dump weeds. I apologized to her for making her a refugee.

My neighbor helped me carry the pieces of table out to the trash from where I’ll eventually have to take them to the dump.

When I told my friend this story she prized me on my mindfulness. "You could have been stung by the wasp, or bit by the black widow," (something that never really occurred to me. I was more concerned about not shooting myself in the face with the staple gun). "I'm sure it was because you did not become aggressive or loose your temper that they didn't hurt you." I suppose because I did not feel aggression or fear, to them I was just an act of nature. I guess meditating each morning really helps.  

Post Script:
This morning when I went to open the curtains the wasp was sleepily clinging to the drape. I went and got a card and a glass, as I do with spiders. I spoke gently to it and told it I would take it outside. It came along willingly as I apologized again for disrupting its nest. Then I thought to look up what wasp means as totem:

Go to work on your goals and your goals will work on you. All the good things we build – end up building us. Make a plan, keep working towards it and let nothing get in your way.
-Wasp

Perhaps the wasp was saying “What the hell are you doing? Get back to your writing.”

The reunion of four friends after months of traveling was joyful. Conversation, always intelligent, ranged from psychology to hairstyles, from politics to typography. “Oh, that’s just my ego,” one friend said to a round of laughter. “I’m not sure I even know what an ego is,” said another. More laughter. We all agreed that there should only be one space after a period, not two.
 
Later I stayed with the question what is an ego, and this image came to me of the ego as a kind of guardian of the soul, which is a gateway. We are vulnerable beings and we have all in some way been wounded by a world of harsh dualities—loving parents who loose their temper and treat us harshly; playful friends who terrorize us with their games. And those are just the benign wounds. We all know it can be much worse.
 
The ego is that part of us that bears the wounds. Protecting our vulnerability, it receives the blows and shows the scars. It makes valiant attempts at what it believes will avoid any further wounding. When one moves one’s center of awareness from the guardian of the gate to the gateway itself, one can laugh about the foibles of the ego, because as a conscious adult one can decide how much vulnerability one wants to share or not.
 
There is not a soul incarnate in a body that does not suffer. The only child suffers from loneliness. The middle child of three suffers from rejection by her siblings.  The mother suffers that her daughter wants nothing to do with her. The childless woman suffers for not having had children. We might believe that the grass is greener on the other side of our suffering but the truth does not bear this out. A deeper truth is the certainty that no matter how it looks from the other side, each person bears some degree of suffering. When we grok this we come to compassion—the deep recognition that we are all inside a conundrum of challenge that is in many ways painful, lonely, hurtful, fearful, sad…
 
Coming to the recognition that this is the condition of being human gives us the password to enter past the guardian-ego, past the gateway-soul to our spirit which has never been wounded, is not insecure, is not condemned, not fixated on pain, but whose whole enterprise is union with other spirits in the re-cognition that we are all one great glorious whirling unity.

My Bishop used to say, “Choose one path and stay with it if you want to reach the top. Switching pathways only keeps you wandering around the base of the mountain.”

The question hung in my being for two weeks. Have I just been wandering around the base of the mountain? I’ve not stuck with one path. I left the Gnostic Church after being ordained to the priesthood. I did stay with a wisdom teacher for twenty years at which point I felt I’d received all I could from him. Since then I’ve explored many different avenues, each of which could have been a life’s work: various forms of meditation, energy healing, mind/body techniques, front lines in neurological and epigenetic exploration. I’ve explored how hereditary traumas can pass down to later generations. I learned that the egg from which I was first formed was in my mother when she was just an egg in her mother. Have I just been dabbling? I certainly have no material position or platform in the world to show this is who I am and what I do.

I sat in meditation feeling the pain in my body until it called me to the bathtub. The water was not hot enough when I got in and I had to wait for the tank to heat again. I dove into my being with all the tools I’ve learned, Vipassana, Presence Process, tapping, hooponopono, accepting, watching, seeing… My immigrant maternal grandmother’s trauma revealed itself with more fullness than I’d seen up to this point. I felt its impact on my mother, witnessing her familiar characteristics as part of that pattern. I saw in turn how the patterns passed to me, and how I passed it along to my children. I saw anger, resentment, and bitterness. I saw how I carried what didn’t really belong to me but lived and had effect in me nevertheless.

I saw that the patterns and people at whom I pointed my finger were mirrors of myself, and I drew my attention from out to in. By the time the water became hot enough to stay I’d surrendered to my shadow. Metaphorically down on my knees I heard Leonard Cohen, “When they said repent I wondered what they meant.” Now I knew. I was in a state of repentance. I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you.

I felt I’d just experienced another Baptism (we can have many over the course of the years). I got out of the bath and returned to sitting. With spine erect, hands in meditative mudra, I felt a halo about my whole body. It was a mandala of wholeness made up of all the various studies and practices I’ve learned, all the pathways I’ve only partially taken. Each one was crucial to the whole, none were false starts or errors, and I’d abandoned nothing. Each avenue of exploration contributed to this moment of recognition—I am whole. I allow my life to be what it will be. I am not in error needing to be fixed. I am not sick needing to be healed. All that I’ve loved, hated, been disrupted by, resisted… all are my teachers on this one pathway to the summit of this life.

Whatever you can say about anything, the opposite is also true. We don’t just inhale we also exhale—both parts of breathing constitute the whole.

My sister shows me her Israeli Identity papers. She points to her name in Hebrew letters that fill in the form; then to our parents’ names, then her children’s names. She smiles, her heart swells to be living in a country where the state recognizes her identity as blood lineage. I say, “It gives me the creeps.” We are two of a kind from opposite sides of the whole.

I sit in silence each morning noticing my breath, noticing my thoughts. I experience this life as a mystery that cannot be defined or limited by identity. Whatever you can say about me, whatever I can think about me is only an incomplete restricted frame, a partial construct.  True science is the art of looking and our science has seen, through honest looking, into the mystery that in reality there is no there there. I’ve seen there is also no me here.

In the language of mathematics there are both integral and differential equations. The first breathes in, the second breathes out. The entire cosmos both integrates and differentiates. A star bursts into being radiating outward bright with elemental fire and eventually fades dull into black, sucking in everything around it.

One day I feel a void so empty I can see no reason for being. The next day the scent of pine, the smile of a baby swells my heart to golden light full of meaning.

One administration comes in with a confident stride of hope and a can-do enthusiasm that ignites the feeling of connection to all life. Then comes the attitude of building walls, fear of otherness, turning the equation from expansion to contraction.

I feel the entire cosmos expanding and contracting with the life force that animates this body, this life, and all being. I am that, beyond tribal identities or personal delineations.

The grandpa outside playing with his 18-month-old grandson teaches him, “up and down, up and down”

I glance at a printed article on my table entitled, “Beware of False Dichotomies.” I haven’t read it yet; don't know what it concludes; have no argument with it. I live in a world in which false and true are but two angles of vision divided by one mysterious mind.