interconnectedness: all one.
"The earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family...We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves."-- Chief Seattle, upon the surrender of his land
There can be no doubt that we are one with the land on which (and off of which) we live.
Who cares? How can some abstract truth like this possibly be practical? How could it enhance my spiritual life?
"The real work is becoming native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that is really the continent we are on, and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves a loyalty that goes back...billions of years. The real work is accepting citizenship in the earth itself."-- Gary Snyder
Interconnectedness is so simple-- yet so BIG, so profound -- it did not become particularly meaningful to me until I read, more than once, a little novel called Siddhartha (by Herman Hesse -- thank you, Michael Arnett). Now interconnectedness is a recurring theme in my walking meditations as I hike in the mountains on an almost daily basis. I have yet to foster a deep enough understanding and appreciation of interconnectedness to speak or write about it in a convincing manner, so I rely mostly on quotes and excerpts on this subject...
The organs of our own bodies, arms, hands, lungs, kidneys, function as a cooperative in order to survive. Humans and animals and trees and the earth are interwoven, integrated as a cooperative. The sun, moon, planets, and stars are a giant cooperative. Awakening beyond our self-interest, we find a natural ecology of mind and nature, fresh, open, joyful, where we are organically connected with all things.-- Gary Snyder
interconnectedness links.
- An Introduction to Interconnectedness
- At one with the land -- Go a little deeper, a la Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
- Shavuot: Awakening to the Oneness of All Being -- a Jewish perspective on interconnectedness
- From numbers to interconnectedness -- Thoughts about globalisation
- World View
interconnectedness: herman hesse's siddhartha.
He no longer saw the face of his friend Siddhartha. Instead he saw other faces, many faces, a long series, a continuous stream of faces -- hundreds, thousands, which came and disappeared and yet all seemed to be there at the same time, which all continually changed and renewed themselves and which were yet all Siddhartha. He saw the face of a fish, of a carp, with tremendous painfully opened mouth, a dying fish with dimmed eyes. He saw the face of a newly born child, red and full of wrinkles, ready to cry. He saw the face of a murderer, saw him plunge a knife into the body of a man; at the same moment he saw this criminal kneeling down, bound, and his head cut off by an executioner. He saw the naked bodies of men and women in the postures and transports of passionate love. He saw corpses stretched out, still, cold, empty. He saw the heads of animals -- boars, crocodiles, elephants, oxen, birds. He saw Krishna and Agni. He saw all these forms and faces in a thousand relationships to each other, all helping each other, loving, hating and destroying each other and becoming newly born. Each one was mortal, a passionate, painful example of all that is transitory. Yet none of them dies, they only changed, were always reborn, continually had a new face: only time stood between one face and another. And all these forms and faces rested, flowed, reproduced, swam past and merged into each other, and over them all there was continually something thin, unreal and yet existing, stretched across like thin glass or ice, like a transparent skin, shell, form, or mask of water -- and this mask was Siddhartha's smiling face...and Govinda saw that this mask-like smile, this smile of unity over the flowing forms, this smile of simultaneousness over the thousands of births and deaths -- this smile of Siddhartha -- was exactly the same as the calm, delicate, imprenetrable, perhaps gracious, perhaps mocking, wise, thousand-fold smile of Gotama, the Buddha, as he perceived it with awe a hundred times. It was in such a manner, Govinda knew, that the Perfect One smiled.
No longer knowing whether time existed, whether this display had lasted a second or a hundred years, whether there was a Siddhartha, or a Gotama, a Self and others, wounded deeply by a divine arrow which gave him pleasure, deeply enchanted and exalted, Govinda stood yet a while...
Incontrollable tears trickled down his old face. He was overwhelmed by a feeling of great love...
