Only Everything
The buzzing of bees;
the rising of seas.
Thousands, illuminated—
worlds of pollen dance,
intimating, your heart:
its vastness.
Our life, this movement
from world,
to root,
and back again.
Light envelops you; again, you rise.
To meet it—
your task.
It will only be known
as everything.
The pebble lodged in my sandal as I paused to furiously flail my foot in an effort to remove it. The flies, of course, gathered in the heat of the summer morning, taking great interest in my now seeming stillness.
Wherever could I go? For all my walking, I am only ever here. Little pebbles and flies interrupt my mind and force me to remember that life is always a dance of forces I can know, and those that I do not. And what I do not know, I often experience as fear, frustration, interruption. My ideas about what must happen, or what I’d like to happen, make me view this event as alien, other, enemy. I hate the flies.
Something within this, though, calls out to me. What about the flies annoy me? Do I view myself as insulated from the world, able to live without perturbation? A wiser voice within me speaks to these flies lovingly, and still protects my space. Can I be this wiser voice?
Light is coming and envelops the day; we are called to be revealed alongside the world. And so, like those parts we do not know and fear as other, what the night has covered and kept revealed can now be seen.
✶ ✶ ✶
So it is with our suffering. Who is not wounded by this life? And yet, it is the last thing we want to acknowledge. To acknowledge it is to realize our meekness in the face of life. To see that the world does not fit neatly into our fixed notions of comfort, and that we are often called into a greater acceptance of this fact by our own pain.
The pain can be hidden or quite obvious, but either way, it is made clear in the way we move through life. Like the flies and pebbles, this pain often comes unbidden, seemingly disrupting our path. It emerges as a word spoken out of anxiety that wounds a loved one, or a sudden pulling away after closeness. Seeing the harm this causes, our tender hearts feel regret, sadness; we long to heal and be whole.
Sometimes, we may not be ready for the work required of us to integrate and heal our pain completely, so we learn how to live with it and make half-steps toward wholeness.
Sometimes, it comes like a cascading waterfall upon our hearts, and all we can do is stay conscious and witness the opening of old wounds as they unwind and resolve.
I remember, several years ago, after some spiritually opening experiences and a lot of time in psychotherapy, the unbidden sobbing and wailing that arose one evening, at the unlived life I had never been able to grieve before. It was not planned, and no technique could have caused its arising. Rather, it was the long and slow process of deepening and unfolding through my own mysterious layers that led to a ripening; ripening enough for the unconscious to reach out and show me what it had been patiently holding in its hands all along:
my wholeness.
✶ ✶ ✶
It is painful, and scary, and feels completely out of our control at first. And, slowly, we begin to invite this old pain in, even to see the sacredness of its place in our lives. Woundings become openings, and their disruptions are opportunities to increase our awareness and move toward wholeness.
Yes, the question becomes: “How can I love this?” instead of “Can I love this?” And that makes all the difference. We come to realize that pain is a part of this dance as much as our joy, and that we want to be whole; to be all the way alive. Mere anesthetization is not life. It requires our willingness to suffer with grace.
So we dance.
And sing.
And love, and cry.
Because every bit is worth savoring. Beautiful, even.
That was what struck me the most about my unbidden wailing years ago; amidst it all, I felt how indescribably excruciating it was, and I also felt how beautiful it was. All at once. They were both true. I could not reconcile one into the other, and I could not turn away from it. I had to meet them in love.
And in meeting them, the beauty and my tears were all the more, for my soul had longed for such acceptance. For such a meeting. To stop running away from the pain of life and the courage it takes to fully live it.
Because, wherever could we go?
The sweet smell of trees in the heat of summer,
the sight of the ocean’s majesty—
only everything is singing
of the wild and infinite
mystery.
You meet it,
again—
it shimmers,
with a thousand tiny
untold graces.
Yes, my love,
your heart is the world.
Your joy and your pain.
As vast as it is,
only everything is.
The Butterfly On My Forehead
I see dragonflies all around!
My ink will run out
before I capture how
rapturously
this Beauty abounds.
I remember a day, many years ago, where I decided to attempt “manifesting” an idea into reality, a notion I had gathered from the book Illusions by Richard Bach. In the book, the main character, Richard, is taught by a retired messiah that, as long as he wishes and believes with strong clarity, and then lets go, his vision will come.
Richard chose to manifest a blue feather, which did, indeed, manifest synchronistically for him, exactly how he envisioned—just on a milk carton.
My idea: white butterflies. The ones that lilt about in summer. Every time I saw one, I’d smile at my foolish belief that such things were possible, but hid a secret satisfaction that it really did work.
A year later, however, I started regularly encountering what seemed like flocks of them, and spotting them as signs and paintings and tattoos, all in the same two-hour walk. My rational mind said it was selective perception, but then one day, it was too much to ignore. They were everywhere, in several flocks of four and five across a bridge in the small town I grew up in, and I had just passed several houses with them as decoration. I laughed uncontrollably. “What is this?” I thought.
“No. This is too much for me… It’s a little… eerie.” I had said. And I sort of stopped it right then and there, perhaps.
✶ ✶ ✶
My point is not about manifestation, or even synchronicity, though they are beautiful and mysterious events that, regardless of their origin (spirit, chance, psyche), bring a sense of joy and wonder to our lives. Rather, my point is about what I did when the Universe gave me confirmation that it was listening, that it wanted to help. Because I think we all do this, to varying degrees, with that which causes joy.
There is a shutdown; a laughter that we cannot control (a deep joy), and the following fear that catches our breath. “What just happened?” “Am I not in control?” and, subtly underneath, “I don’t trust myself to hold this beauty, or joy.”
Some don’t have such a response, or at least not as directly. I applaud them. Indeed, it takes great courage to open to Joy, though we might not think it at first. Especially for those deeply wounded by life, or who have had their joyous hopes and wonders crushed by the waves and rocks of existence.
It takes time. Patience. Eventually, we come around and can begin to open to joy and the many ways the Universe surprises us.
I find it helps to breathe. To take it all in: my joy and fear, both. And to have compassion for the one who learned it was wise to armor against the possibility of gladness rather than accept.
In time, it shifts.
✶ ✶ ✶
A few weeks ago, as I was biking around my town, zipping underneath the hot summer sun, I noticed the white butterflies again. My mom was in the hospital, and life had found a precarious new meaning. It mattered more, how I embraced myself and this life.
So I decided, then, to open to them again, and let their fluttering abound in waves of joy and delight. And it was subtly scary, like invoking an old magic that I had forbidden myself to use. Perhaps that’s exactly what it was.
But not too long after, one flew right into my (probably too fast) path, and though I swerved my bike to avoid it, it slammed right into my forehead, between my eyes.
It was a somewhat poetic event, I guess, laced with a cosmic humor and an internal fear that it was the Universe now telling me all my hopes and dreams were dead. I thought I had killed them in my haste.
But I do not think it so.
If any meaning must be assigned, it was more likely a psychic rebirth, the death and subsequent return of my deeper self, of my willingness to open to the mystery and stand in my power.
This is what is required of us if we are to return to joy. That we choose to open, to be afraid in the face of the Universe’s intelligence and still see the wonder and beauty inherent in it—perhaps because of its wonder and beauty, we are afraid, you see?
I like to think the butterfly kissed me before it died, blessing me and my choice to open again to life. And that its power gives me wings, strong enough to take me to heights where I can hold all with grace, my fear and doubt, my love and joy.
✶ ✶ ✶
Beyond all this, these are just moments, coalesced into a crystalline story of remembering that we are bigger than our fear.
Life is just a series of such moments, where we get to choose, again and again, to remember the sacredness of that truth.
And one day, soon, perhaps, we will hear it reflected in the chorus of birds in the morning, in the jarring sound of crow calls, bringing us to presence.
We will feel our joy made manifest in the grass beneath bare feet, and the breath of the wild heart that is our nature.
And perhaps it is not we who find this vision.
It is this vision that finds us,
sudden as
a butterfly
slammed upon your forehead.
So quick!
Before your ink runs out—
paint the sunset Eternal!
Suddenly,
you are;
Beauty,
abounding.
Natural Proposition
Proposition I:
This world is far more beautiful than our hearts can perceive.
Proposition II:
We are the world.
Proposition III:
All is Beauty, coming to Be,
even through the stony walls of tragedy,
and through the opening of our heartbreak.
As I open to the sky, the vast statement of the Universe’s grandeur leaves me rudderless against waves of wonder and hope.
If Beauty such as this so clearly is, then what are we as humans doing, when we could so clearly be tending this beauty, partaking in the unfolding of life rather than its destruction?
Yet, we are the world. Are we, somehow, part of the unfolding beauty of the cosmos, regardless of our conscious participation? Is this some undeniable part of a natural cascading of ordered events, as lawful as the water’s movement to the Sea?
What I’m speaking of is our place in the Cosmos, so seemingly disrupted by our own pursuit of comfort and pleasure that we have forgotten what true contentment is. And so we seek perfection, a state of idyllic being where there is only comfort, only a dullness to the world we live in—but there is control, or the semblance of it.
You see, humanity still lives, to a large extent, in an omnipotent fantasy. As intelligent and powerful beings, we have allowed ourselves to pursue knowledge and power immodestly, rather than to deepen our relationship to what is.
Perhaps it is too much to say we believe we are omnipotent—but we are certainly striving for it. It would be our insurance against the turbidity of life, in all its mystery—dangerous, beautiful, alluring mystery. And, as soft, vulnerable creatures, our search for this knowledge is natural.
It is natural because fear is natural. It is natural because love dictates our wish to protect. But it is also misguided in the sense that it never truly protects or insulates us from the world. Instead, it puts us at odds with it, seeking subjugation and control instead of relating, listening, co-creating.
✶ ✶ ✶
Leaves are patterned. Water falls in forms that indicate a profound mystery. Clouds form and roll across the sky.
When we pay attention, Order is revealed. It is only birthed, however, from the Chaos we fear. A Mystery runs beneath Chaos; an intelligence, a soul-like point of brilliance, more primal than chance.
Is this, perhaps, why nature is so healing? We find our longing for sense, for intelligence, for Order out of Chaos, met in the way trees shimmer with wind and sunlight—only chaotic beauty at first, but we soon sense its Truth.
I would say it is poetically true. It reaches us in a way, a space, beyond the constantly problem-solving mind that seeks comfort and safety. Light trickling down the forest onto skin, dappled like the night sky, is chaos that makes sense. It feels right.
Likewise, perhaps, from some higher vantage point (a perspective I cannot always attain), our human struggles make a beautiful sort of sense—even the ones where we are causing our illness, and the planet's destruction.
But I am human, and my vantage point is only as high as the mountains I can summit, and the quality of my sight is only as clear as my heart.
✶ ✶ ✶
For Oceans will rise and fall, and our Earth has been formed and re-formed, like the minds of those who seek to love more fully, more skillfully, more beautifully. And perhaps our death is not a thing to fear, but that which we must embrace.
It could be said that our pursuit of comfort, of safety, of security, is all insurance against death. Against a lack of control. And so we seek omnipotence in that light. To create something perfect, where we will finally have freedom.
But to do so, we must be able to meet our endless desires. That is the requirement for perfection. For humans, we constantly crave something new, and so we must live in infinite possibility, an omnipotent fantasy.
Heidegger said, “Death is the possibility of absolute impossibility.”
And we are afraid to die.
So lies the crux of our current cultural malaise. I know it well within myself, too. We cannot choose. Every choice is a commitment that necessitates the death of all other possibilities. In our desire for insurance against the uncertainty of existence, and to live in perfect comfort, we do not feel we can shut the door on any potential path. We want it all.
But wooded paths must eventually part. Our choice to try not to choose is just that: a choice. While those paths may meet again, far along, they travel vastly different territories—those who walk them are shaped differently.
Nature feels beautiful, right, resplendent, because it knows the direction in which it travels: wholeness, life. It chooses, again and again, to accept its conditions and adapt to them.
Importantly, adaptation is not control. It is relationship—harmony with mystery. That is our medicine, but it can be a bitter pill to swallow.
And so we find ourselves here, with our propositions in hand. You see, don’t you? This world is more beautiful than our hearts can perceive. We cannot know it. It is a mystery.
We are that mystery. You can’t separate us from the world.
And when you get that, when you really, truly get that, you see that all is Beauty, coming to Be.
Because there is freedom. There is choice. The world is wide open! It is just that often, in our thinking we are creating more possibilities, we don’t see the trap we are setting for ourselves. This too, though, is a strange sort of beauty.
And we do not know where it will lead. That is our first principle, after all.
I leave you with a poem that I feel encapsulates the endeavor I am on, and many other brave souls:
What is required of us in our time
is that we go down
into uncertainty
where what is new is old as every morning
and what is well known is not known as well.
That we go down
into the most human
where living men have vanished
and the music of their meaning
has been trapped and sealed.
What is asked of us in our time
is that we break open
our blocked caves
and find each other.
Nothing less will heal the anguished spirit,
nor release the heart to act in love.
—From The Sound of Silence, by John Baughan
Building Bridges, Tending Soul
An interdisciplinary essay introducing Building Bridges, Tending Soul—how quantum uncertainty, depth psychotherapy, and contemplative practice can restore an ecology of care in the AI age.
Essay #1: Introduction
My hands are soil—
earth, water, Sun.
Your heart is the root
from which the universe
springs.
I am hiking through the Columbia River Gorge. Sunlight is streaming through leaves onto water, flowing down on its long journey to the sea. The rocks hold my feet steady upon the Earth; though I have walked this path many times, somehow it always feels new. I am new, the world is new, and everything is constantly flowing.
Holding this knowledge is a sacred task. It is to see that all is interdependent—all is unknown—and this mystery contains and creates more than all our knowledge could ever hope to craft.
Indeed, mystery is creation, in its fullest and most generative sense.
In our age of artificial intelligence and growing technological prowess, it is necessary to remember how mysterious life is. Without consciously tending to the mystery (that is also ourselves), we grow evermore disconnected from community; from living in harmony with each other and the earth.
Meaning fades like a dream; we wake confused, wondering how we got here, and we keep trying to fix the world instead of recognizing the mystery that we are—the only real path to healing. As the Tao Te Ching states, “Subtle wonder within mysterious darkness: this is the gateway to all understanding.”
This is the current problem in society: disconnection from the archetypal mystery of our fundamental interdependence with all of existence. This essay series will explore how quantum physics, depth psychology, ecology, and spiritual practice can weave together and help explain the root cause of our collective malaise and potentially offer a path forward, or at the very least questions that will help guide those who read to their own insights around their unique path forward. Only such an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach can meet the complexity of our times.
Some of my questions are: How are our psyche and consciousness related to the insights of quantum mechanics? Is it merely a useful metaphor, or is there a deeper correlation? How can the principles of interdependence and the observer effect relate to the work that happens in therapy and healing environments? What can Hakomi and other somatic modalities offer a world in ecological crisis? Can the principles of quantum physics be a bridge for people to enter into a new paradigm of aliveness?
That is what I want to map.
Part of that mapping must start from not-knowing and seeing how our inability to be certain is the first step towards wisdom. In Zen Buddhism (which I am quite shaped by), “beginner’s mind” is the foundation of all spiritual practice. Every moment we meet afresh, as if embracing a spirit of not-knowing for the first time. There is a koan in the Soto school of Zen that speaks to this:
Dizang asked Fayan, “Where are you going?” Fayan answered, “Around on pilgrimage.” Dizang then asked, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?” Fayan replied, “I don’t know.” Dizang said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”
Science is slowly approaching a similar kind of understanding; its tentative steps growing more assured. Though to be certain, it still wants to know, and I must be careful not to equate the scientific endeavor entirely with the mystical stance of Zen. The realm of quantum physics, however, does pose the possibility that there is only possibility; that uncertainty is a fundamental, universal logic.
As Stefano Calzati and Derrick de Kerckhove write in their 2022 book Quantum Ecology: Why and How New Information Technologies Will Reshape Societies, “humanity lives in uncertainty… it is constitutive of life, ontological. This… is what throws humanity—especially secularized humanity—into disbelief… ‘Doubt, in this alternative register, is felt, lived, and sensed as embodied reality.’ [(Amoore, 2019, 149)]. Doubt then becomes a grounding principle that permeates experience.” (p. 182)
Put simply, doubt is not human error; it is the very fabric of our universe.
Indeed, this “epistemological disposition” is necessary to make progress. Concurrent with this emergent scientific understanding of mystical realities is the related truth of interdependence. “Life erupts and it is entangled: it connects by implication, it subsumes, reverberates through, and reflects the whole of which it is an instantiation.” (Calzati & de Kerckhove, 2022, p. 183).
As in Indra’s Net of Jewels, each part reflects and is the other. We are a beautiful facet and instantiation of a web that glistens in the light of dawn. Webs are incomplete without the unity of individual threads. What arises from seeing this is responsibility—the recognition of the necessity to tend to the world. Indeed, as one’s self and the universe are inseparable, genuinely caring for oneself is to tend to the erupting life of which one is an intimate part. Care of the world is care of the self, and vice versa.
“An ecology of care is one in which subjects—individuals and collectives—freely orient their own quest within and through the world, rather than being taken care for. And they do so consciously. Freedom requires responsibility precisely because it implies a degree of uncertainty” (Calzati & de Kerckhove, 2022, p. 183).
Recognition of our connection with the web of life, of our entanglement in complex and constantly emergent systems, allows us to let radical freedom guide us toward responsibility, not away from it. And, if you’re anything like me, it can be easy to feel a pull for everyone in the world to have this recognition, so that we can move forward together. This is where science does not offer us much value since wisdom is not a principle of observation, and patience is not encouraged (though many find it) in scientific endeavors.
Coming to this embodied recognition takes patience, acceptance, and letting go of the self. This is where the world of mysticism, therapy, and healing can help guide us.
In the book The Quantum and the Lotus, Matthieu Ricard, a molecular biologist turned Tibetan Buddhist monk, says, “There are many signs of success in the contemplative life. But the most important is that after a few months or years, your egoism has lessened and your altruism has increased. If attachments, hatred, pride, and jealousy still remain as strong as before, then you have wasted your time, gone down a blind alley and fooled other people.” (p. 11).
This offering is my reaching out to the world, hoping to bridge the gap between our hearts and our heads. I don’t have answers, only questions and ideas.
Because mystery is not solvable, it is sacred. In honoring its sacredness, we enter into a relationship with it. Only in this relationship will it reveal its truths.
So, from here, I will explore:
The Embodied State of Not Knowing in the world and how this not-knowing leads us to a deep sense of responsibility and interconnectedness. How does this show up in our lives? How does it show up in working with clients? What exactly about this way of relating to the world and others is useful?
Then, ideas of Entanglement, attachment work, and healing trauma. This will hopefully lead us, through some of Donald Kalsched’s work, into the archetypal realm and potential view of this as being a harmonic space with levels of energy we can access in different ways. Part of the question here will be somatics, and how these subtle energies live in the body. The metaphor of the observer-effect and wavefunction collapse may become useful here.
Importantly, the final two parts of this are Ethics and Ritual.
Ethics is the grounded stance of responsibility, explored more explicitly than when discussing the embodied not-knowing stance. This is crucial for humanity to have a sense of, and essential for my work as a therapist.
Rituals and Integration. How rituals have disappeared, what they are, and what they mean for our Psyche—individual and collective. What would a restoration of ritual look like in our modern era? How does this integrative orientation help?
In conclusion, I hope to offer a holistic framework that people can start to work from, helping to bridge gaps between seemingly disparate fields of human being and experience. Only this transdisciplinary approach can honor the complexity of the times we are entering as a collective.
You’re invited to join me on this journey; to contribute, challenge, and reflect.
Such acts are the first steps toward this soul-ecology of care.
Post-Reading Invitations:
Take a few deep breaths right now, feeling the pull of gravity on your body. Feel yourself alive in the world. Then, ask yourself gently: “What is the nature of my experience right now?” Notice what, if anything, this does to your felt experience. Do you know what the nature is? If not, what is that like? If you do, how do you know?
Ground again into your body, paying attention to your breath and sounds. After some silence, gently ask, “Do I really know who/what I am?” Notice any narratives that come up around this question. Notice any feelings it evokes. You can then ask of these narratives and/or feelings, “Is this me?” or, conversely, gently recognize, “This is not me.” How does this shift you? Play around with this for as long as you like.
Write a few sentences about places in your life where you feel you could soften your stance on knowing in the world, and that you would benefit from doing so. If you can’t find anything, how does your knowledge help you? What about it helps?
The Sun is breathing, but,
only for a moment.
The Mystery of Life
has no solution.
It is alive in the way
wind moves the clouds.
In how your heart
opens
to the vast, intimate
World.
- A Desert Wind
-
Ricard, M., & Xuan Thuan, T. (2004). The quantum and the lotus: A journey to the frontiers where buddhism and science meet. Crown.
Calzati, S., & de Kerckhove, D. (2022). Quantum ecology: Why and how new information technologies will reshape societies. MIT Press.
Singing at the Edge of Water and Darkness
Standing on the edge of what we do not know, we call it darkness.
Before the raging river, without a bridge, we call it dangerous.
And if we stand before the rapids in the dark of night,
we may find we call it wisdom.
*****
My voice is not devoid of self, though I long to, as much as possible, listen and receive what wants to come through me. And so, this is a practice in sharing a voice that has received something from the world that it wants to share. In some ways, it scares me. Because I don’t always know what this voice is or where it will take me, and yet its pull upon my heart moves me forward.
What we do not know, we often fear. We are afraid of the dark that lies beyond the mind. Still, a part of us knows that we cannot grow without the sightless holding of Earth and womb. Though it seems we are afraid of what lies beyond darkness, we are really afraid of the unknown journey towards it. The current of the journey runs beneath our knowing, and we inevitably find ourselves pulled along—in the flow of a river—whose destination we have only ever heard by name: the Sea.
But what happens in that moment before you enter the stream? The anxiety, profound. Your heart: racing. And yet, and yet.
Something pulls you along.
You could call it a deeper knowing—a knowledge beyond knowledge, one that transcends fear with a deeper, truer known. It is this—when listened to deeply—that we call wisdom.
Mind you, I am not advocating that we blindly jump into raging rivers at night.
I am advocating for myself, and for all of us, to listen to that deeper knowing. As a society, we are standing at the edge of water and darkness, and we know that we do not know, and we fear what lies ahead. But we have heard of the Sea, and our hearts pull us forward. If we could, I would invite us to stand exactly where we are, and sing to the night and the waters, and the stars up above. To sing our not-knowing and cry out with longing. Even if it is only in your heart.
It seems to me that only this can move us forward: to be attuned to ourselves, receiving the waters of our own soul, standing firm upon the Earth even within darkness. This is trust, and it is where every endeavor must begin.
So I have received.
I am to journey forth, at the edge of water and darkness.
Come, join me.
I have sung here the first note, and I will be here singing for a while.
-A Desert Wind