Tag: contact zone

“Waking, my hand meets the cotton sheets on my bed, my mouth meets the water I drink as I arise, my eyes meet the morning light, shadows of clouds, the pine tree newly planted in our backyard, my ears meet the sounds of a car two blocks east. Everything I encounter permeates me, washes in and out, leaving a tracery, placing me in that beautiful paradox of being by which I am both a solitary creature and everyone, everything. 

Isn’t this what shapes our days? The paradox accounts for gravity, which is a kind of eros. The great mass of the earth curving space and time around it, the greater mass of the sun drawing the earth in an even circular motion, balanced between fusion and a solitary direction. 

There is an eros present at every meeting, and this is also sacred. One only has to listen inwardly to the histories and resonances of the word we use for religious experience. In Sanskrit the word satsang which translates into English as “meeting” means “godly gathering.” In the English language the word “common” is linked through the word “communicate” to “communion.” And earlier meanings of “common” point to levels of meaning that have been obscured in our idea of the sacred. Gary Snyder gives us the etymology for “common” as “ko, ‘together,’ with (Greek) moin, ‘held in common.’” And he also traces the word back to the Indo-European root mei, meaning “‘to move, to go, to change.’” This “… had an archaic special meaning of ‘exchange of goods and services within a society as regulated by custom or law,’” he writes, as in “the principle of gift economies: ‘the gift must always move.’…” And the gift does move.

 To exist in a state of communion is to be aware of the nature of existence. This is where ecology and social justice come together, with the knowledge that life is held in common. Whether we know it not, we exist because we exchange, because we move the gift. And the knowledge of this is as crucial to the condition of the soul as its practice is to the body.”