The season has changed since I last wrote you, and the world is opening up for us all. We’ve seen so many articles about fear of the new realities, however you may experience them, and about the inner changes we have all gone through with the lockdowns. Not to mention the infrastructure shifts and delays, and our now-dependence on mediated connections - like zoom, or this newsletter. But I see now that it is all about connection, and that’s why I’ve finally broken through the little wall I’d built around my relationship with this newsletter.

I’ve been asking myself, what is this newsletter now, and who will bother to take the time to read it - now it’s summer, the world opens and we can talk and be with friends for real??? Lately I’ve skimmed past many of the newsletters I subscribed to over the past year, barely reading.

But then, I read Blackbird Spyplane, that featured an interview with Suzanne Simard, the True Queen of the Forests, author of Finding the Mother Tree. She’s like the Jane Goodall of tree ecology. And the time for her message of inter-species plant communication is now. (The Wood-Wide Web.)

Reading her interview, something clicked, and I recalled these words from the Elder, Abe Burnstick, from decades ago: It all comes down to Love, Relationship, Feeling, and Respect. This is the way to understand, and to live. These four things are the watchwords for me now.

Apply them like a lens to every experience, and become more natural, more human, more connected and loving, with humility and respect. This way of life can approach ALL things in all dimensions, not just uplift and deepen our day to day. We can learn to become better human beings. The message of the 215, and the cries of all the missing children, come to this.

But just after I was writing this, I found I wasn’t following these words, I fell into a hole that tripped me up, metaphorically speaking. Was I really living in love, relationship, feeling and respect? Directing it to myself, but maybe not always to others. That is where Relationship comes in, to intervene and flip the viewfinder. It is not about me, but about opening through Relationship to another understanding, creating a better way of being. That is where the whole crystal of these four components is activated. The meaning of these watchwords is conveyed, revealed and known in relationship. It extends into life with others, seen and not seen, here and not here. Active, clear, true, an ongoing practice.

A trick of light in early morning projects buddha effulgence

Lately I’ve been reading a rather academic book, Mediums and Magical Things: Statues, Paintings, and Masks in Asian Places, on the ensouling of sacred statues and paintings in Korean, Vietnamese, and Balinese shamanism.

I wonder: what else is going on in the early morning, when the light is in play with forms?

Thanks for staying with me on this newsletter, for reading, and sharing.

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