Early morning in that liminal space between sleep and waking. A light appears before me and inside of me, at my forehead. The light takes form and I see Tinkerbell from Peter Pan, the lost boys. Something could probably be made of that symbolism, but I’m not thinking symbolically because immediately I’m carried by a deep breath that causes me to notice I had been breathing much more shallowly before that one breath. And then there is another deep breath, and another. And now I’m breathing deeply to the tops of my lungs and refreshing all the cells in my body. My mind expands to include the lungs of other people, especially the people who are having a hard time breathing now with the Corona virus. I feel myself breathing for all of humanity, not just this seemingly singular body. I feel inspired, inspiration = taking air in.

We are each as single cells of the whole body of humanity. What one does affects the whole. Our human body right now is threatened. There is a lot of talk about respirators—not enough. Industry is racing to devise more and better mechanical hardware to help people breathe. I’m reminded of a Steely Dan lyric, “let’s throw out the hardware and do it right.” I’m not in any way suggesting we abandon our efforts to get enough respirators to the hospitals and patients that so acutely need them. But as Quantum Physics now reveals, all materiality begins in the field of energy that is available to each of us in a very intimate way— within us and around us. What if we were all to begin breathing consciously, not for our own bodies alone but for all those now struggling for air, for inspiration? What if every breath you take, you take for the entire body of humanity? We are learning now through this pandemic that we are indeed our brothers’ keeper. When we keep physical distance, we do so for all our relations. And keeping physical distance, when we are mindful of why we do so, we are brought into closer connection with our fellow human beings. Each one of us is a cell of the body of humanity.

BREATHE for your wellbeing AND breathe for your brothers and sisters.

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

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.
 

With all the intense oppositional conviction in the media about who's right and what's wrong this really resonated for me.

From a new translation of Tao Te Ching by Victor H. Mair based on the recently discovered Ma-Wang-Tui manuscripts. 

 64(20)
Between "yes sir" and "certainly not!"
how much difference is there?
Between beauty and ugliness,
how great is the distinction?

He whom others fear,
likewise cannot but fear others.

How confusing,
there is no end to it all!

Joyful are the masses,
as though feasting after the great sacrifice of oxen,
or mounting a terrace in spring.

Motionless am I
without any sign,
as a baby that has yet to gurgle
How dejected
as though having nowhere to return.

The masses all have more than enough;
I alone am bereft.

I have the heart of a fool.
How muddled!

The ordinary man is luminously clear,
I alone seem confused.
The ordinary man is searchingly exact,
I alone am vague and uncertain.

How nebulous!
as the ocean;
How blurred!
as though without boundary.

The masses all have a purpose,
I alone am stubborn and uncouth.

I desire to be uniquely different from others
by honoring the mother who nourishes.

Those punch cards never seemed to pose a problem in the past, before radically moneyed lobbyists, super delegates, and the judiciary started messing with the process.

I’ve never been very politicized, nor do I consider myself very well educated in American history. But I do know that people lost their lives and fought for my right to live in a free democracy and the least I can do in remembrance of their sacrifices is to vote.

When voting was sacred, your polling place was well publicized and on election day liquor stores were closed, workers got extra time for lunch break, or let out early. Polling places would stay open late to give everyone a chance to have their say in the democratic process. And when you completed voting they’d give you a sticker on your way out – I Voted – in red, white, and blue. You’d walk around town seeing many people proudly wearing their sticker on lapel, or hat, or sleeve.

Today I went to vote. I noticed that on the list of voters only three or four names per page had been highlighted as having voted. That was after it took me several hours to figure out where to go. My registration card said such and such building. I recalled that several years ago I’d voted at that location and it had taken me quite some time to figure out where it was. Today I went straight to it only to find no flag flying and no activity. I had already gone online, been directed to a Facebook page on which this same building was indicated as my polling place but also had no address. Under comments someone asked, “What is the address of this building?” There was no answer to his comment. I finally found a phone number online and called. I’d expected to have to wait, for certainly a lot of people would be calling, this being election day. But my call was taken immediately, not even a menu to have to get through. The very nice woman said, Oh that’s been changed, it’s now at the Armory – where voting used to take place.

As I drove away from inking in my ballot, on which only one vote mattered to me, the one that will cancel out my friend’s vote, I felt a kind of emptiness. We laughed that our votes would cancel each other out; that was not the cause of my emptiness. The hollowness that struck me was more about the “rite” of voting having become as empty as most church services in which candles are lit, and communion is taken but no true communion with something greater has taken place.

Leaving, walking back to my car I ran into a friend. She had just come from the liquor store where she’d mentioned remembering when liquor stores were closed on election day. The older man at the cash register said, that was to make sure that no one got you drunk and convinced you to vote as they wanted you to. The younger man stocking the candy bars said, why bother voting anyway; it’s all just decided by the super candidates. He seemed to feel that no communion between the voter and the outcome was really possible.

But what if every young person did vote? What if it is still possible to restore the tattered threads of the democracy that our forebears so fiercely believed in, a freedom for which they were willing to die? Are our souls so completely lost to the Wormtongues* of our age? I don’t know the answer. But as is said in the current vernacular, “Just saying…”

* Grima Wormtongue, "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”