On Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis

Hi everyone. I'm Josh and this is The Emerald. Currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast we explore in ever changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel in space. Hi everybody. Exciting news here at the beginning. I mentioned on previous episodes that the Emerald podcast was starting a small granting program to support the work of podcast patrons who are doing incredible things to keep the spark of animacy alive in this modern age and really excited to announce that the first round of grants has been given. And I wanted to take a moment to just mention the projects and a little bit about them. And you can find out a lot more about them at patreon.com/theemeraldpodcast. So to me these projects are just brimming with spirit and are exactly what is called for in times like we're living through. And it just fills me to know and to know that the podcast can help support projects like this. And really the process of starting this grant program has shown me how much incredible work this community, the community of Emerald listeners and the community of Emerald podcast patrons is engaged in and it's really meaningful world authoring work. So I just want to say thank you to everyone who applied first of all. We got over 300 applications and I want to acknowledge just the tremendous amount of work that's being done and the heart and spirit and care that is going into it. So one of the projects that we chose to fund is a project which seeks to preserve traditional Shippeebo Kanibo stories by recording transcribing and translating them. Basically there's a tremendous wealth of Shippeebo knowledge that exists within the Shippeebo language and this is an attempt to preserve that knowledge in the Shippeebo language preserving specific myths and stories and animesis. Another project that we're funding is a project called Kindling the Spirit, singing down carbon to sing up spirit and this is a really cool project happening in Australia that is engaging indigenous community with the larger environmental community and sharing traditional understandings of land management through fire while also gathering around a knowledge sharing around the production of biochar and there's going to be a camp that brings together cultural practices of song, dance, story and art and will serve as a prototype for an indigenous led biochar enterprise. I'm so really happy to be funding that. Another one of the recipients is a project called Code of Trauma Traditions of Healing and this is about creating a resource archive and a limited podcast series that will seek to preserve and revitalize Ukrainian grieving practices and grief song and look at ways that the preservation and reclaiming of these grief traditions can help in a region that is obviously torn by grief and trauma. We also gave a grant to a project that is keeping Odawa Anishinabe Wabano traditions alive through the preservation of the medical knowledge, spiritual knowledge and star lore of a particular Anishinabe knowledge keeper and also to a project called Safe House 7 which integrates traditional West African spiritualities into the work of healing and predominantly black communities in Oakland. So it's my honor to support these projects and we couldn't have done it without the podcast patrons who are really making this all possible. So again if you want to know more about these projects please go to patreon.com/theemworldpodcast and a reminder that this podcast runs on patronage and really the way to deepen into this community is by becoming a patron. I say what I say on the podcast and the podcast episodes are like these standalone journeys and to mythic topics but if you want deeper discussion on these topics and you want to engage other people around these topics then the place to do that is the patreon community patreon.com/theemworldpodcast and it costs very little and it's a really rich, vibrant community with a lot of resource at this point. So really happy to make that announcement today and a special thank you to the Fetzer Institute for providing structural support for the Emerald podcast. Fetzer and the Emerald podcast share a common vision of applying spiritual solutions to modern day problems and Fetzer's work is deeply aligned with the work of the Emerald podcast and if you want to find out more about their work you can do so at Fetzer.org ftzr.org. Really deeply grateful to Fetzer for helping make all this possible and it's a good partnership and a partnership that makes me feel gratitude in these times of disconnect in which movements of spirit as this episode explores movements of spirit are vital and necessary and now on with our episode. Good morning. There's a lot going on and here's what's been bubbling up for me for the past few weeks. There's been this feeling that given the general state of things, given the latest presidential election and the turmoil on the streets, exploding cyber trucks in Vegas, firestorms and the palisades, billionaire insurance CEOs gunned down in broad daylight, bizarre cabinet confirmations and dysfunctional governments and polarized populations. There's a feeling that I probably should whatever that means. I should do an episode that goes deep into the nature of the American wound. You know, the American wound. No matter what political affiliation you have, no matter what your reaction was to the most recent election, horror, disgust, fear, joy, exhilaration, indifference, resignation, no matter what you think about it, you can probably agree that this nation is pretty broken. There's a wound, a rift, a wound that is led to such bitterness and blame, such cynicism, such vitriol about each other, such societal bifurcation. What is the nature of the American wound? How deep does it go? Just how deep does it go? But I'm also wary in the midst of it all about being yet another voice of analysis, because I wonder, is more analysis what we need most right now? Another voice saying, well, if you look at this social trend and this voter block and this demographic this way, then clearly the problem is x and if only everyone would see that the problem is x, then everything would auto correct. More analysis like, I know the problem, it's immigration, it's systemic racism, it's the loss of some mythical great nation, everyone's got their diagnosis. There are full time diagnosticians on every major news network, diagnosing away and not content to let the prognosticators be prognosticators, everyone else is their own internet diagnostician too. Instagram is a steady stream of armchair diagnostics and a whole lot of people apparently know the cause, the fix, the cure, the state of the world, it would all be fine, if only everyone would just listen to me. So we've measured the wound in every possible way, we've quantified it, analyzed it, certainly, psychologized it, and O has academia intellectualized it. People have gotten their PhDs, gotten tenure, gotten book deals with exorbitant public speaking fees for their cogent analysis of the wound. There's like a wound-based economy at play in the world these days. We've chopped up and parsed out the wound in a thousand different ways. Quantified it, analyzed it, psychologized it, intellectualized it, but have we simply sat with it together and breathed? Have we sat together, neighbor to neighbor, and breathed? In the space of holy mystery, in the space of I actually have no idea what the f*** to do about any of this. In the space of letting go of all interpretations and explanations, here, now, spirit can breathe. You know what I mean? And sometimes the flood of analysis, sometimes it's like, do we really know anything? How could anyone have predicted any of it? I mean, I remember the first time I heard Donald Trump's name. It was 1988, a full moon night, and a bunch of us were on mushrooms under a big juniper tree. And a friend had seen him on Letterman and was like, have you heard of this guy, Trump? He's like, all about making money. Like, that's all he wants. He wants money on top of his money. And we played around with his name, which on mushrooms was the funniest thing. Trump. Trump. The perfect name for this faraway fairy tale villain, playing in his casino castle, in his golden piles of money. We are not in the world of rational explanations. We are in the fairy tale, my friends. And there are tyrants and young sorcerers tinkering with powers beyond what they possibly understand. And there are ghosts we've ignored that are coming back to feed. And there are actual tangible roving forces of ignorance and greed. And thankfully, like any good fairy tale, there are helpers. There are hawks and foxes and spindles of enchanted string gifted by wise matriarchs that point the way through dark forests. And there are old cave hermits who teach us the right verses to speak aloud to mitigate the thorns in this time of thorny passage. Yes, all along the way there are helpers. And there are omens and signs that call us like they do in the fairy tales, into places of deeper presence, deeper listening, deeper feeling, deeper dreaming. So three drops of blood, red blood in the pure white snow, send the grail knight, Parsable, dreaming of his beloved, and that vision of the face of his beloved frees him from all thought, and guides him to sit and be still amidst the great clamor, and the face of his beloved guides him to act when he needs to act, and guides him towards mercy, and guides him towards love, love amidst the forest of thorns. And all around us through the thick snowy wood the beloved shows her face to us too, and invites us into deep stillness, and spurs us into action, and reminds us all the while of love. And one can dream of the beloved as one stares at snow, as one sings, as one charts their course through this confounding spiraling mess of everything. Tell me, as we navigate the fall out of the American wound, are we called to a path of diagnosis and explanation, or are we called to a deeper dreaming? For there is more at play perhaps than the loudest voices of discourse would have us believe. So along with this feeling of responsibility, I have to address the crisis, and dive into the crap, and be a clear voice in times of discord or whatever, there's something else up for me too. There's another pull that I feel too, and that's the call to sing to the beloved in spite of it all. To sing to the beloved in spite of it all. You feel me. Sometimes when all the analysis has been done, and all the diagnosis is spent and all the right arguments have been made, and all the action has been taken and all the petition signed and phone calls made, and still the world isn't veering the way I want it to, and hey I'm an American, wasn't I promised a lever with which to move the world? I did my part of the deal, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, and now I want my promised agency. Sometimes standing amidst the crumbling debris of my side had all the right rational arguments. We should have won shouldn't we? We explained ourselves way better and we had all the right diagnoses, and yet still the elusive maiden victory walked the other way. Sometimes you have to just drop everything, and sing to the beloved in spite of it all. I've been feeling that pull pretty strongly these days. Have you? Maybe there's even shame around it. I can't possibly pause to sing, and breathe, and place my hand gently upon the bark of that sturdy oak tree. Why? That would be ridiculous. That would be bypassing. Don't people realize the urgency of the situation? But we need to sing to the beloved. Which is why in times of great crisis, this is exactly what people everywhere have always done. Will there still be singing during the dark times, asked Bertold Brecht, who was exiled by fascists and labeled an enemy of the state? Yes, there will be singing about the dark times. There will be singing about dark nights, and about Dostoevsky's bright stars, and how grief brings us closer to a much needed presence. And like peacocks transmuting the poison of the world into sustenance, poets and dimes of crisis will find places of more radiant, imminent policy. For this is what we've always done. In the dark night of the soul says one della Cruz, and this is the very first use of the term dark night of the soul. In the dark night of the soul, he said, bright flows the river of God. Interesting, right? We're used to referring to dark nights of the soul as simply dark nights of the soul. And in the actual quote, those dark times are inextricably linked, with the presence, the closeness, the immediacy of the beloved, with the turning of hearts and songs towards a deeper vaster flow. Towards currents that are always pulsing through this vast web of creation, but who are suddenly more apparent when all distraction is stripped away. And everything becomes very clear and very plain. So when fleeing Stalin, or faced with a thundering horde on the horizon, when navigating drought or fire or flood, or the loss of something dear, faced with life's terrible careenings, we have sung and we have pined and have opened up a lifeline between us and the beloved. Check it out, your ancestors, no matter who you are, in times of great crisis. And trust me, there have been times of great crisis for a very long time. Your ancestors did not spend endless hours obsessing over it on the internet. Wait, I was still writing my Lebanon tribute, and now I have to write my L.A. tribute, and I have to have a hot take on the utter madness that is swallowing the world, or I'll get edged out in the battle to monetize the wound, to gain followers through my astute articulations of the wound. And whatever you do, don't interrupt my process of reclaiming my reactivity and feeding my digital outrage. No, I have a feeling our deep, deep ancestors didn't approach it like this. When all that was to be done had been done, and all that needed to be let go of had been turned over to the prevailing winds, beloved, I have a feeling they sang, they sang aloud to you. I have a feeling they sang to you, so I've been called, called in the midst of it all, in the midst of it all I've been called to remember the beloved. Because just explaining it all isn't going to cut it. Rationalizing it, psychologizing it, analyzing it, medicalizing it isn't going to cut it. Normalizing it, like in a world of collapsing systems and upended priorities and crumbling ideologies and existential angsts and solest voids punctuated by loud pops of shooter fire. I'll just keep my head down and walk to the cubicle and pretend it isn't happening. That isn't going to cut it. And I'll just embrace secular rationalism and its long list of analytical explanations for why we're perched at the edge of a yawning abyss of the heart. And if we were just to follow this simple logical to-do list, everything would be fine as if anything ever unfolded according to logical to-do lists, that isn't going to cut it. And spirituality is of its all bliss and it's all one and it's all good. Probably aren't going to cut it in an age driven by greed and ignorance, and obvious evil. And activism that focus only on explaining societal wounds, and then assuming if you just explain your diagnosis loud enough that this is the same thing as healing divided space, aren't going to cut it. And outrage alone, outrage all by itself that short burning flame isn't going to cut it. Myself, I need a more direct line to you creation. I need to articulate mighty rivers of unmet longing and cry out to great maddening mysteries and sing songs that do justice to a beloved that feels at times right here, and at times oh so far away. The world we want to create at times it feels right here, and at times oh so far away. Myself, I need a practice that meets the intensity of the age. I'm beginning to despair right's Adelia Prado, and I can see only two choices. Go crazy or turn holy. And the times perhaps call for a type of holy madness. They call for songs of beloved lament. They call for us to walk through the rubble of a dying age with our one stringed instruments blazing. Songs of rupture and crisis and blessing reunion on our lips. During these times, these times of what has been called calliuga, times of diminishing light, times of disintegration of unraveling the devotional text say, we don't need a thousand complex practices. We don't need a million new modalities and all the many pseudo varieties of Neo-Tontic breath work. We're not going to address the crisis through a forced sociopolitical linguistics or with abstract ideologies. We need perhaps to get to the very root of what we're actually longing for. To know more deeply what you're really longing for, and give voice to these unmet longings, and turn our attention to the source of all longing and sing aloud its name. So, have I said aloud now that I've been called to remember the beloved? Oh, have I said that I've been called to remember the beloved? The who, beloved? Why? You, beloved? The fount of all waters. I've been called to remember what matters. I've been called to sing to the rivers. I've been called to remember the beloved. I've been called to turn it all over to cast flowers at the feet of the mother. I've been called to sing your name, to sing your name. You who makes necklaces of the crowns of tyrants and spirals new worlds out of the old us from the ashes of great phoenix rises. You who in the midst of planetary crisis receives our songs and returns them in trickled brightness. You. And wouldn't you know it? There's a place where addressing the American wound and singing to the beloved in spite of it all, meet. These aren't necessarily two separate things. And this has to do with understanding how wounds actually heal. But we'll get to that. Let's just say that I've been called to remember the faintest whisper. The little whisper that moves all this. To remember you, thou, the inexhaustible source of here and now, I've been called to remember the place where the space in between us sings allowed. Now. And in meeting there in this time, I've been called to say something like, here we are together, my fellow Americans. And man, we've made a mess of it, haven't we? And it's not just you and it's not just me. It's the maddening, ever-complexifying combinatorials of the tides of history. And is it just me or are you pretty tired too? I mean, are you f**king exhausted too? And are your eyes stinging with the strain of discerning illusion from reality? Is your heart heavy with the weight of the persistently constructed enemy? How refreshing would it be to have the first line from the debate stage B? We've made a mess of it, haven't we? Wow, we've done a number on this place. And we're spiraling out. And the promises have failed us. And we're turning on each other when we're who we need most. There's more distance between us than there's ever been at a time when we need relational connection more than ever before. And that's the real gulf of America. The real gulf of America is the vast divide between each of us and our neighbor, us and our neighbor. What restlessness keeps us from being able to simply sit with our neighbor and listen and breathe. What agitation, what buzz in our heads was it the endless pursuit of happiness? What is it that causes us to be perpetually looking past the one who sits right before us? Sorry, I would have been present, you know, if it weren't for the persistent gnawing of unmet longings. But as it was, I was too busy trying to succeed, trying to climb the corporate ladder, trying to escape Earth's atmosphere, or at least the confinements of familial structure. I was too busy splitting atoms, collecting likes, fishing for followers. I was too busy monetizing lack and amplifying outrage. Too busy trying to convince you of the urgent necessity of you adopting my exact vocabulary. I was too busy running from the vast and terrifying mystery in a world that seeks to take everyone's attention somewhere else, anywhere else other than here. The space between us, politicized, monetized, amplified, weaponized. Welcome to the Gulf of America. The abyss of unmet longings, the wasteland of there was always somewhere else to be. Because to simply sit here with you, as you are, would be to acknowledge the vastness of the world and my own powerlessness to single-handedly fix it. So rather than see you beloved neighbor, as the door through which we walk to the grail castle together, I'd rather see you as a stranger instead, and pretty soon all you're left with is a nation of strangers, and everybody I meet as the old song goes seems to be a rank stranger. They know not my name, and I know not their faces. They're all rank strangers to me. Everybody I meet seem to be a rank stranger. No mother or dad, not a friend could I see. I found they were all rank strangers to me. But if we exhale for a moment, and forget the analysis and diagnosis, and just sit here together, here in this beloved space together, you broken and tired, and I broken and tired too. And I'm not coming to this table armed. How about you? Like really, I'm not coming to this table armed. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, and I'm not interested in telling you how you're wrong. I'm interested in the bread we can break, the music we can make together. Here in this space, you and I breathing together. Here you and I wet eyes in the vastness of time, singing a lie for she cried. Let's see if we can spiral our way to this place, this place of beloved mystery. For rivers don't flow in the place where we already know the answer to everything. Spirit doesn't move if space isn't made for it to move. Remember, spirit. Social movements, elections, live and die on the strength and movement of spirit. Movement of spirit. On where words carry us and what dreams they break open for us, on what far horizons they make close and what uncomfortable closeness is they bring into vaster perspective. This is spirit. This is the place of the beloved. And you're not going to galvanize unless you have a capacity to understand the nature of the movements of the waves. Movements are meant to be movements and the movements with the most movement of spirit will capture the hearts of the day. I spoke with Dr. Omid Safi about this. I feel like the the failure to galvanize in this particular election had a lot to do with what I would call spirit and connection to spirit and a willingness to talk of matters of spirit and a willingness or an ability to even recognize what spirit is and what moves people. To me, a missing call to the beloved really, like, what is this existence about and why am I here? And it's not enough maybe at this point to just keep talking about, like, oh, it's basically fine. And we just have to kind of march on and you know, when our neoliberal way and this kind of things, like, people are longing for something much deeper than that. And you know, I don't agree with how the other party kind of co-ops spirit for their perspective. But, you know, there is like a mystery there and a movement there that just voters tend to go where things are moving. And that life, that spirit, you know, that call to deep reassessments of what the beloved is, I think, for me anyway, I felt missing. I agree. And, you know, these days, especially, I don't certainly know the Republican, but I also don't in any way identify with the Democratic Party. And I think part of it is, you know, on their Republican side, you see this very unfortunate marriage of the name of religion to a kind of racist capitalist nationalism. And on the Democratic side, you know, for lack of a better term, it's kind of corporate centrism, which is devoid of the spirit. And once every four years, the Hillary Clinton types show up in a black church and put on a black accent. And they think that that somehow going to make us think that God is moving through the Democratic Party. No, I'm sorry, God has a lot to do with your stance on war. And God has a lot to do with how you treat immigrants and the most vulnerable. And God is about love and the beloved community. And the thing that people forget is that North America is not Europe. And North America is a profoundly religious society. And there are many people all over the political spectrum who want to see the sacred and the political have a cozy relationship. And if the ones who want to build a just society don't understand that, then it's going to be the people on the other side who will co-opt it and they have. I could not agree with you more. I think that the vacuum of spirit is a big part of the mess that we're in. Even just a simple understanding of, you know, spirit is like the refreshing breath of life that moves through discourse. I mean, people talked about, you know, Trump was willing to go on those three and a half hour long podcast interviews and Kamala wasn't. And you can talk about that in terms of its, you know, PR significance and this kind of thing. But what it gets at is like, you know, the unwillingness to go off script, the unwillingness to really connect to what you could call the mystery of the moment. And in the mystery of the moment, you know, the mystery of the moment is dangerous because you don't have all your talking points. But that's the space where beloved spirit can actually pour through and and move people. We need to feel together the spirit of life again. Remember this world of great currents. Remember how it moves through all of us. Remember how hearts leap to meet those words that invite us to soar into vast spaces. How hearts respond to words that are geographically situated. Like, here's where we are. And here's where we're going. And here's what it's all for. And all this, this world of frantic running, this is only the surface of what human existence can be. And can't we remember together, here, together, that we're longing for something simpler, something deeper between you and me. Remember spirit, spirit. Remember how it flows as water. Calls us to release into something greater. Tells us, listen, listen, once on the shore of a great river, on the shore of the Amuna begins the Bhagavata Purana. The wandering bard, Narada, came across a dejected woman. Forlorn in a state of distress, why are you in such a state my lady, he asks, and what is your name? My name, she replies. My name is Bhakti. My name is Devotion. I am Devotion and the story of my life is hard, and it is difficult to hear. And the word Devotion is tricky in English. Bhakti has a lot more feeling in it, a lot more longing, a loving yearning for source, and recognition of where we sit in relation to that which flows eternal, of which we are in inseparable part, but from which we often feel separate. Bhakti, lacking in this age, this age in which as poet Osip Montelstom describes, our size have lost their source. Our very longing has forgotten what it is longing for. My name is Bhakti, and I have become decrepit, weak, and sluggish in this age of collapse. This age of greed and consumption when beings are concerned only with filling their own bellies, and not feeding the bellies of others, in which people pimp the sacred texts while the dull, witted reign. This age in which the potency of spirituality is diminished because those who aren't qualified claim themselves as spiritual teachers, in which the unrighteous exult and the good and saintly feel constant grief and woe. You know this age? Apparently they were talking about it 1500 years ago. "I am Devotion," she says, "and I have been neglected so." "I have been buted and I've been scorned as the old blue song goes. I've been tossed aside, left to die, trampled over by a hundred feet rushing, always rushing to be somewhere else. Rushing to the office, rushing to the cubicle to the spa, rushing to the Black Friday sale, and rushing to the protest, rushing to save the world, rushing to make sure I make my mark, and my opinion is known and that everyone sees things my way. I am Devotion," she cries, and as Mondelstam asks in his poem Tristy, what rot has reached the very root of us, that we should have no language for our praise, that we would forget to sing the name of the beloved. The beloved. You know what I'm speaking of when I say the beloved, right? I'm sure you do, but we can always use a reminder. In many traditions, in many places, the power at the heart of it all, the force of life, the source, has been referred to as beloved. So some people use the G word, God, goddess. Some are more comfortable saying nature, or time, or universe, but universe and time can be a little impersonal, right? Like universe has a vastness to it that can leave us wondering what our place in it all is. And our experience of living in this cosmos is anything but impersonal. It is deeply personal, this whole being a person in a living, breathing world thing. It's not a monotone experience. It has pushes and pulls and highs and blows and ebbs and flows. It's a dance. And it's a dance with oneself and it's a dance with others. And it's a dance with one could say, the great other, with all that pulls at us, all that we are not, all that we lack and long for, all that we don't yet contain within us. I think people's God language, the God concept, may not tell us a lot about God, but it does tell us a lot about them. And is that conception of God a wrathful, punishing judge and a king? Or is it also a friend? Is it a lover? Is it a beloved? And I think ideally, one doesn't want to have a keeper of the stars who is a teddy bear, right? There has to be an element of majesty and transcendence. But a God who's only transcendent, who's only royal, is out of balance, is out of whack. And every mystic in Islam worth his or her salt always talks about how the absolute majesty of God and the complete incomprehensible intimacy with God are always in balance with one another and that one without the other is missing something. So, you know, you've had a thousand year tradition that says things like, this is a famous Sufi Abu No'am Esfahani. He says, "Oh God, when I'm in public, I call you my Lord, but in solitude, I call you my beloved." I call you beloved, distant stars above which brink in my skin like luminous needles. I call you beloved, great cosmos. In this way, the dance of navigating the cosmos is much like the dance of lovers. There are times when we are conjoined, each of us conjoined to the cosmos in a pulse. A flow so close we are tempted to say, "I'm one with everything." And then the shrooms wear off and the next morning we're left staring at the brunch menu and everything looks gross and we feel somehow hollow and the divine feels far away, you know what I mean? The dance of lovers, distant, here, present, far away. So, in Rindavan, the heart's seed of bhakti practice, everyone addresses each other as rada. Everyone addresses each other as Krishna's lover, as if saying, "We are all lovers of the same beloved." We are all longing for union with the same dark magnetic center. We are all longing for monsoon, rain. Remember what we're longing for. Remember what we're really truly longing for. Deep beneath what we're conditioned to believe we're longing for, the devotional traditions will say, "There's a deeper longing." The longing of all longings, that if fed will make all other longing is a scene but not so consequential. In this way, all of existence is a longing for the beloved. In all our silly little meanderings and pursuits, that's what we were really longing for, all along. So that as much as Mark Andrieson wants to tell us that what we're longing for is to blast ourselves into the stars and start all over again on Mars, we are much more fundamentally longing for something else. What is the poet longing for? The warrior, the stockbroker, the frustrated artist, the ceramicist, around what beloved centered as the dancer were in spirals of longing? Around what does the weaver spin their tapestries and basket-makers pull their reads? In its care for the pillared invisible, Mondelstam asks, "It's crystal temple, all air and otherness." Around what does the spider weave? If the mystics are to be believed, all yearning in one way or another is yearning for union, union with the cosmos as if a form could thank its maker he writes, as if every line of light back to one source were drawn. So humanity rides impulsive waves of want to take us in a thousand different directions, but that wave is seeking ultimately to take us to the place where we are known, held by the beloved in that ever elusive place called home. Love is not a desire for beauty, says Octavio Paz, it's a yearning for completion. And every tamer in bow is leaning towards something, and every rushing river is flowing from it and flowing back to it. And this is devotional path one-on-one stuff, right? Have we understood this simplest thing about ourselves that the heart, mind seeks and beloved? It is always pulsing towards the beloved and contracting away from the beloved. This is how consciousness works. So a young poet wise beyond his years once wrote this quote, "My mind was unable to stay and fled toward my beloved." Was he writing about being distracted by a lover that he was dreaming of? Or was he writing about the very nature of consciousness itself? Consciousness is always seeking an objective attention, a point of union consummation. The mind is architected around this pulse of seeking, drawing towards, consummating, then splitting apart, then seeking again. In the garden of the willow trees, this same poet wrote, "I saw her, lovely as the moon." But when I drew near to embrace her, the wind carried her away. Know that story. We have a vision of the beloved, a person, or what we want for our lives to be. A far off glimpse of a distant moon amidst the swaying trees. A glimpse, perhaps, of unity. We reach for it, grasp at it, perhaps hold it for a moment and then it's gone. The poet was Sangyang Gatsu, the sixth Dalai Lama. Maybe you've heard of him. He was the one who didn't want to be a Dalai Lama at all. In fact, all he wanted to do was to sing to the beloved. So they say that at age 16 while having his hair washed, just before the ceremony of torture, he broke down weeping. They say he wept as they cut his hair. How can they take this lover's herd and cut it off from the world? This temple they want me to live in for the rest of my life is a prison. And yet from that prison temple flowed such poems of longing. And would that longing hard have had the chance to pour forth with poetry? Had it not been sequestered far away from the object of its longing? And would you and I have the chance to love one another if we weren't separated by a vast divide? The vast divide. Oh, beloved, the vast divide. Yet that divide too is beloved. The space between us is beloved. The sometimes seemingly insurmountable gulf between us is beloved. The fact that we don't actually see things the same way and I don't need you to see things the same way I do. I don't need my view to be the only view in the room. This vast divide between us. This is holy. The space between where I am now and the home I have a sense is there somewhere. The vast divide between how we actually are with each other and how it could be if we were to drop the pretension and the programming and simply be. This divide that tugs at our heart that calls us forth on all our many wanderings. This homesickness called existence. This is holy. You the great homesickness we could never shake off. Says Rilka. You the forest that always surrounded us. The great homesickness you feel it. It calls us to leave home. It calls us back home. It calls us to wander. It calls us to last to rest. The pull that won't let go of our hearts. It's lonely to be a human in this dark night of bright stars and we never quite seem to feel at home. And yet it would be lonelyer. Emily Dickinson tells us it would be lonelyer without the loneliness. It would be lonelyer without the loneliness. And so I say beloved not just for the cozy immediacies of life. Not just for the warm embrace of my four-year-old's arms. His moist hands clasping my face. His moon and the Sagittarius smile. I say beloved not just for the light in his brother's eyes. At the mere mention of the word french fries. I say beloved for the loneliness. For all the sweet bitter parts of being a human being who cares in a world of great fracture. Who wants to see us get on better. Who wants to see us work it out. And find a common heartbeat. And to sit in a wise circle again. This too is beloved. The beloved is not only the holy evidence of nature's power. I call you beloved people. Hearts of the people are still just haven't figured out how to work it out yet. Beloved other whom I don't yet understand. We see as things differently than I do. I call you beloved. You. The acute discomfort of actually caring about the world. I call you beloved. You. All that I will never grasp. Never hold. Never be. I call you beloved. You who reminds me of what I'm actually longing for. Remember what we're actually longing for. What if someone were to pause amidst the clamor and take a breath and address what we're actually longing for. What if the words that flowed forth from the town hall meeting weren't diagnostics and statistics or cynical finger pointing but something more like my sisters, my brothers. Can we cut through the clutter? Can we cut through the clutter right here? Can we cut through to the bright bright center? Cut through the clutter and remember together what we're actually longing for. A life that feels connected to the great spirit of life itself. For our labor not to feel soulless but rather part of a great secret wheel. A wheel of deep belonging. In which all have their part to play. In which mothers and fathers and hunters and seekers in which poets and warriors and secret transgressors all have their part to play. Can you imagine a great pan societal dance in which all have their part to play? But that feels far away. And we're left in the midst of a very different dance. This mad dance of America. Oh, the great dance of America. This berserk cotillion, this off-kilter imploding circus, half cooked, half blown open yet still somehow reaching for the stars. Who could have imagined it this great dance called America? This great three-ring reverie repeat with sacred tricksters and shocked jocks and 24 hour commentators. The whole thing pulsing to a beat of railroad engine steaming. Dine, the district's dine, the green. I-40 truck stops six in the morning and the eggs are cracking like America. The whole place rumbling to the groan of hydraulic fracking. The whole thing emblazoned with flags and stars and screeching eagles. Or was it screeching eagles? And overly armed, overly farmed, heavily hypnotized and shapeshifting at the speed of spandex clad olympic sprinter. To the joyous keen of little Louise Cornad as he delivered coal to Storyville's hookers. This panoply of pimps and preachers and great school teachers and here we are in Storyville, America. The whole damn blasted massive stories spiraling around some long forgotten center. What is it spiraling around? What is it emanating from this great reverie? This song of broken longing called America. Is it spiraling around a great wound? Or is it spiraling around you? Beloved. Or is it both? Is it the two? Beloved, America. America, what ails thee? America, beloved land, what ails thee? It's an ancient Indian burial ground. What drives the collapse of the tentacle god of manifest destiny? Was it how we ran from persecution but then just couldn't stop run? How we hungered for freedom but somehow fell in love with the hunger along the way. And that hunger now devours every iteration of our attempts at reclamation. And the moment that a moment offers itself for reconciliation, we choose to profit off that moment instead. But can we zoom the camera out for a moment and remember how we've all been scratching away for something sacred all along? We've been thrown into the cauldron together all along. We've been a seething brew of restlessness all along. Each of us has been the fracture and each of us the fault line. But it wasn't your fault and it wasn't mine. For we were torn up from the roots, you and I. Torn up from the roots. De-contextualized. Had to sell the sacred just to stay alive. Had to sell the sacred just to survive. Remember sacredness before we sold it all away. Remember how sacredness was everything we ran from and our desperate want to start over to chase an elusive freedom and our desperate want to find you. Singing to the beloved in times of crisis means remembering the sacred in a world determined in always to pull us farther from it. But can we remember the sacredness of each bite of food that feeds us? Can we remember the corn plant that grew this country from nothing that served us, fed us as we were busy looking ahead to far horizons, the one whom some call the corn mother, her facets like nourishing jewels, the glass gem to suki white and hoping. Can we remember you? There are songs for when she sprouts pale green in the desert soil, for when the late summer light dances through her tall stalks rustling. Songs for her pollen like the golden dust of dawn. Remember the forgotten corn fields of our belonging. I remember the corn rustling. I remember you. Do you remember gratitude for our food? Singing to the beloved isn't about invoking some far off transcendent God. It's as simple as honoring our food. Saying thank you. And not just thank you performatively on Instagram. Saying thank you by slowing down and actually cultivating things over time. That's embodied gratitude. That's how we say thank you to nature. Remember how to cultivate things. How to do the long, slow work of cultivation rather than rush to harvest before we've even planted. I remember long, slow months of cultivation. I remember you. Remember the harvest how we harvested together. So many months later, harvest at all that we had planted. I remember the harvest. I remember you, beloved. Remember the sacredness of the table at which we sit. Of time shared together. The original meaning of holidays beyond the consumerist fervor. Remember sacred elders, sacred mother, sacred father, sacred other, holy other. Whose differences for me allow me to better know myself. Remember the anchor points that hold us together. There are anchor points that hold us together. That hold consciousness together. That hold families and communities and ecologies and nations together. And we're busily gnawing away at every single one of those anchor points. In fact, we're monetizing the erosion of those anchor points as fast as we possibly can. So we're in the business of deteriorating the anchor points of our own consciousness, our own attention, our own ability to navigate. We're in the business of encouraging minds away from presence. We're in the business of exacerbating unmet longings and monetizing divides. We're in the business of dangling the far away beloved in front of our very own eyes. And saying, look, that thing you've been longing for, that sacredness is way over here. Go chase it. But wait, the hunger never lessens, never abates. I kept chasing, chasing, and I'm still unsatiated. Where is the sacred thing at the center? Where is what I was promised as compensation for all the hours I spent scratching for this life of great divides? And this isn't partisan. This is the ocean of late capitalism in which all parties, all bodies swim. And I'll tell you from what I've seen, people across the political spectrum are feeling the repercussions of the loss of the sacred, the selling of the sacred. And bodies are reeling and pointing fingers and seeking to piece something together as best they can. And as we search for immediate fixes and immediate answers, the easiest thing to do is point out the hypocrisy on the other side. So we do it happily and hungrily, and that too is monetized space. Tricksters favorite racket, in fact, making millions pointing out other people's hypocrisy. Good gig if you can get it. And if you don't mind never having to address the reconciliation that needs to take place in your very own soul. So on all sides now cynicism is deeply incentivized. Democrats desperate for answers are like we've got to go darker. We've got to go more reckless and take the piss more and above all we've got to win the meme war. And so hashtag darkwoketransfer like 20 minutes in January 2025. And then three days later is already being written about in the past tense as something that flared up and then just as quickly died. But winning the meme war isn't going to get us to you. Beloved, it isn't going to get us to you. The new DNC vice chair David Hogg says to capture young hearts and minds we've got to have quote tsunamis of content more content drown them in content. What about the content of our hearts? What about as MLK said the content of our character? All that other stuff is a desperate surface scrambling for spirit. It's scrambling for a true movement of spirit. It's searching for deep authenticity in a world that has relegated itself to be trapped forever in immediate impulsive waves. And sure it's easy along the way to point out the hypocrisy of those who claim Christianity and twist love thy neighbor to mean no foreigners here. It's easy to point out the hypocrisy in visions of Christ nationalist and our lady of the tradwives. But pointing out hypocrisy is not the same thing as healing divided space. Discourse that simply points things out doesn't open the doorway to the beloved. Doesn't allow for the movement of spirit to pour through. For singing to the beloved beloved means recognizing the beloved and the other. Not just the other that we already love. Not just the hypothetical immigrant that is easy to hold up as an example of our unconditional love. But the other that we have a harder time with. The other that we rub up against. That one annoying person in the circle of the intentional community. Yep, you're right. It's you. And guess what? I'm the annoying person too. And as tough as it is, I see the beloved in you. Singing to the beloved means me here with you. And regardless of our affiliations and our baggage and our preconceptions and the differences in how each of our unmet longings has been monetized, I see that you're struggling too. I see that you're wounded too. I would venture to say that more people than we sometimes imagine are deeply aware. Of the modern spiritual malaise. They may just be going about addressing it in vastly different ways. Remember this. Rumigain says whenever you see a ruin, suspect a treasure. When you see a ruin, suspect a treasure. Can we look out on the ruins of this post-modern age and see too the treasures? The treasures it brings. The invitations to closeness to the raw immediacy of love. The story isn't just that this is a time of ruin. The story is that this is a time when the stars, the flowing waters are close. The breath of life is closer than it's ever been. And can we see the treasure in the ruins of the other? Even in the ones who seem ruined. Any addict knows that often the most ruined people carry with them the deepest longings. Can we meet each other as treasures rather than ruins yelling at other ruins? Ruins pointing out the ruin in the ruined halls of a ruined world. So I've been called, my beloved, my treasure. Rather than simply point things out, I've been called to remember you. And how when faced with the lure of hardening to meet a hard world. Of doubling down in cynicism to meet a cynical world, you said, no. The invitation here is gentler still. Beloved world, I'm remembering how you listened when I needed to be heard, how you're offering flowers of all colors satiated on articulated hungers. And how within me places of mental harshness, cynical acidities were soaked in your nourishing butters. And how my worries were washed away in your drenching, all providing grain. Yes, in these harsh, harsh times, I've been called to remember how you work and soft and often visible waves. Let those waves go to work on us now, beloved. Let them carry us to the place of your gentlest word, where, as Osip writes, to weep and to sing, become the same quick silver verb. So I've been called, beloved, beyond the folly and the blame and the ascetic refrains I've been called to sing to you. And can we imagine leaders, elders, seekers, healers, teachers who are doing more than simply trying to win the meme war, who understand the deep waves that play beneath the agitated surface tides, who, when met with great fractures and divides, can step into those spaces and listen and listen still. And if finally called to speak, speak at first in a delicate whisper. But a whisper that is so finely tuned to you, beloved, so tuned to you that this whisper against all odds, against all rational probabilities, moves things, movements take heed. There is a whisper of spirit that actually moves things. That is the movement of the embodied verb, filming, the whisper at the very heart of creation and hearts of all affiliations, soften in its presence. This beloved whisper washes us in waves of remembering and waves of forget, like forgetting what we were arguing about to begin with. You know what I'm talking about? You've been in a relationship. That wave that washes over you and it's like, wait, what were we arguing about again? Would that that whispered wave could wash across America today? We talk a lot about how healing comes from remembering, from excavating the historic wound and bringing things buried there into the light. And it does. But sometimes healing comes from forgetting too. Sometimes forgetting is the beloved too. Sometimes we need to allow space for the grace of perfumed breezes that melt away those sideways glances. Like, let's forget about it and move on. America, my beloved, what were we arguing about again in a world in which we're all going to die, in which we're here for a few short decades, passing fireflies in celebration of the great bonfire of life. You, my neighbor, why weren't we cooking dinner? Why weren't we sitting beside the fire? What were we arguing about? See, a good pause, a few breaths together, and we already forget. But the constant remembrance of our outrage has been heavily incentivized. Yeah, it takes a whole lot of reminding to keep us as outraged as we are. And sometimes we simply need to drop the old narratives and be present to the immediate voice of the world. Which I have a very strong sense is not nearly as outraged or as anxious as we. Movements can't sustain on anxiousness, on the reactive response on recycled outrage. Have I felt outrage over the state of things? Of course. Absolutely. Is outrage understandable? Of course. And if you're looking for outrage, there are plenty of places you can go like every major news outlet in the country. If you just want to feel and feed outrage, I'm here to talk about something deeper than outrage. For outrage is also what you could call a narrow band with the emotion. An unsustainable jewel to flash in the band. Movements based solely on narrow band with the motions don't tend to last. It was a narrow band with the motion that powered the Mongols across the Eurasian steps. Guess what? Their empire was gone in the blink of an eye. Fascism rises suddenly and gloriously out of narrow band with the motions. And then it implodes just to spectacularly. It's hard to translate the really volatile emotion into something sustainable. But across the spectrum, we've fallen into the short term addictive allure of outrage. They're outraged at us. We're outraged at them. It's fast burning fossil fuel, you see what I mean. Movements for socio-cultural change these days run on outrage because they've forgotten how to access the depth and texture of an emotional spectrum driven by spirit. We need a movement resourced with more than outrage. We need a movement resourced in spirit. We need whispers of immediacy. Whispers of the breath of life. Healers who stand before the stale corpses of social movements stand over the lifeless bodies of outdated parties and the crumbling modalities of recycled activism and recessitate them with a simple, resonant word. Rise and come forth. Rise and come forth. Movements of heart and spirit and singing across great divides. Rise and come forth real homegrown relationalities. Rise and come forth. Radical immediacies. Rise and come forth deep authenticity. Rise and come forth and be filled with the breath of life. Rise and come forth for I don't want a movement that sneers and snickers. That cheers and jabbers. I want those ancestral fire light flickers that say all may warm their hands right here. All may warm their hands right here. Hard to learn in a weekend workshop. Hard to legislate. Hard to organize. But perhaps we can start. We can do our part just by dropping our chins for a moment and remembering how much we don't know. If there's one lesson these times, this election, these baffling movements of history have for me. Remember what we don't know. Spirit moves in the places of our unknowing. So I've been called to sing to all that I don't know. To all I don't understand about what's going to happen. To all that remains a glorious, deep set, knocked elucent mystery. The beloved has been imagined over and over again as a mystery. Singing to the beloved in uncertain times means singing to the mystery. And contrary to all the anthropocentric projections, contrary to what the experts say and would have us believe, what's coming is a mystery. This life is a mystery. This world is a mystery. No one's got a lock on what the future holds. Remember the earth herself doesn't call this era the Anthropocene. The multi-billion year being called Earth doesn't say that this is the Anthropocene. Why would she? This is her show. So who even knows what the story will be? Who knows what the story of America will be? The fact that most of this life, this universe, the future, the fact that all of it remains a mystery is what? Unsettling, terrifying, but it's also our deepest resource. Remembering the mystery, connecting to the mystery, trust in the mystery, the mystery is our deepest resource. What do I mean that the mystery is our deepest resource? I mean when there is a deep seated connection to and felt understanding of and even trust in the greater cycles of nature and of existence, then we can go about constructing alternative futures that are actually aligned with these long-term cycles rather than movements that are driven by restlessness. Which is why beloved in the midst of it all, in the midst of it all, I'm called to sing to the mystery. For if I want resourced activism, then resourcing involves returning to source, and since source in a resonant universe could be nothing other than resonance itself, resourcing must mean beloved, it must mean singing aloud to you. And the path of trust in the mystery is not an easy road. Trust is never an easy road. I'm not talking about this like it's some easy thing. It takes all the work and sweat and friction and negotiation that trust takes in our relationships with our partners and our friends. Because the relationship with the beloved, this whole singing to the beloved thing isn't about some performative relationship of how we like our relationship to the universe to be. It's about a real relationship. To trust the cosmos means I trust you though I know full well that you will put me through the ringer. I feel held unfathomable mother even as you tear all this apart. And I don't know what the future will hold, but I'm here to ride your sweet waves. You beloved. You who sings to me from the space of everything I'll never change. From the space of you can do everything you can, but you can't do any more than that. In this age of progress we are really enamored with doing. So in times of tyranny and times of upheaval and times of imbalance we set about doing a lot more doing. Doing what we can with the power that we feel we've got, controlling what we can control, getting our ducks in a row. We legislate and organize and well we should. We should do all those things. But the space that we don't control that us transitory humans don't touch. The space of vast cycles. This place of unknowns is where we gain replenishments to do our work in the sphere of the known. It's where we find the deeper alignment that will help us construct a movement beyond immediate restlessness. So I've been called to sing to the beloved and I've been called to lay myself down at her feet. I've been called to drop the anxious search for just one minute. I've even been called for just a moment to give up entirely. There's a paradoxical friction. What if in order to find the place where we never give up, never give up the struggle? We have to have moments along the way where we give up completely. For I've heard, perhaps you've heard, what the old midwife once told me that the moment of giving up entirely is the moment when the birth is about to happen. And it's good to remember that whether we are urgently reaching towards some far off utopian future, or whether we collapse and simply give up and let everything go, the world is still steadily growing its vines. The world is growing vines whether we are surrendered or anxious, and our anxiousness does not make the vines grow faster, nor does it halt their growth. All of this, someday, Dionysus sings to us. All of this will be covered in vines again, growing in vines, flowering vines. And what I know of the beloved, she loves that moment where we give up at last. Have you heard that there's a particular animate force that only arrives the moment we give up entirely? A spirit, an angel perhaps, an exhalation of the trees. She loves that place because there, at last, there's finally space for her to do her work. There's space for stars and rivers to do their multi-million-year work with our hearts. There's space for the ocean mist to wash us with a trillion pinpricks of pearl at dawn. There's space for spider-woman to weave of us her invisible pillars. And what was that line again, as if every line of light back to one source were drawn? And for those who are getting fidgety during this part, don't worry. I'm quite sure you'll pick up the to-do list as soon as this episode is over. You're not in any danger of not doing enough. You're not in any danger of being a bad activist or a shameful neoliberal citizen. I'm inviting you, for right now, to give up. Let the tides of history wash over us. Let all our sacred activism crumble. And all the ways we try to manage the story melt away and seek into deeper bones. For history, some say, is a tide of overturned thrones. Meet me on the beach, among the scattered residue. We'll sing hymns to the beloved, beloved. We'll sing aloud to you, to you. And all the fight, all the resistance, just for a moment. Let it fall. What do we have left when we have nothing at all? When we have nothing, beloved, we finally have space for you. We can then be carried into your dreamings, into your birthing grottoes, into the unforced future. Can I do it? Can I give up for a moment, just for a moment, or am I required to be all on all the time? And tell me, how is the, I have to be all on all the time, vision of activism? Any different from the all on all the time, vision of late capitalism? What difference does it bring to bodies? There will be days when we are called to act, ways in which we are called to act, circumstances in which we might have to act, might even have to act and not post about it afterwards. Imagine that. There will come a time, Erragorn tells A.O.N. for valor without renown. Without renown, for moments of quiet nobility when no one is watching, for grace and forgiving, and who will we reveal ourselves to be? Then there will be times of action, and times of rest, and times of hope and hopelessness. There will be times of presence and absence, times of gritty imminence, and times when all we want to do is transcend. And that's the beloved's pulse. I'm a parent of two really active kids, and I've been kind of lured into this vision of all presence all the time, all my attention all the time, and then I remember Peekaboo, how my kids really like it, how it lights them up when I pulse between presence and disappearance and presence again. And then I remember you beloved how you pulse so close, and then just as quickly you invite me into the vast, unimaginable, magisterial far away. And how what allows me to be more present for my kids are the times I spend, you know, escaping a little bit after a long day. What resources us for presence is often the journey far away. The mystery is our greatest resource. What resources us for presence isn't always a relentless commitment to imminence. Sometimes it's not you must find sacredness in the details. Always show up for the shit, always be in the muck, always what resources presence is our willingness to trust the great mystery and be taken by its pulses into spaces of deeper dreaming. And to return, eyes still wet from the land of dreams renewed. In our struggle for sacredness, in our movements, there are times when we will feel that it is the world. The sacred must be found right here, right now in front of us and will be like, yes, I'm ready to do the work. And there are other time at the end of a long day, when we'll say, Calgon, take me away. Calgon, take me away! There are times when this life will feel like all we could have ever hoped for, and we're a 100% committed to this whole existence thing. And then there are days when we'll cry out, take me as far away from here as possible of it. Cast me on your shore, for I care no more for this world. I care no more for this cosmic blunder, this world of walking wounded. How did it ever come this far? Cast me on your shore, I can't no more for this world. I care no more for life feels hard, and heaven feels far away. I care no more. Go ahead, humanity, if this is the path you want to take, I'm out. I'll be singing of far off shores in better days. Cast me on your shore, I will no more for the behind. And that too is the beloved. You feel me? Cast me on your shore, help me ease. Where would we be without songs of far shores and distant heavens and amazing graces and hallelujahs, and bright mornings when this work is over, and we can fly away? Singing to the transcendent is as necessary as showing up for the immediate, for she is every single part of the wave. And I feel like I've got to insert a little something about bypassing here, because there's a lot of talk about bypassing these days. And let's just say this up front. Is there an issue when people remain oblivious in the face of genocide, ecocide, planeticide, picocide? Is there an issue when people would rather talk about personal wellness and light codes than help feed the poor? Absolutely. 100% there's an issue. When I was a Tibet activist, there were people who were willing to donate millions to build gold and stupas, but they didn't want to hear one thing about the plight of political prisoners suffering in Tibet. Yes, bypassing is real. But now bypassing discourse has turned into some strange expectation that everyone is supposed to exist in a perpetual state of frenzied agitation over the state of the world all the time. Bypassing discourse has turned into, if you're not completely miserable all the time, you're bypassing. If you're not constantly excavating trauma, you're bypassing. If you're not in the depths of the underworld, you're bypassing. And that's an interesting one considering how little time traditional shamans actually spend in the underworld. How they treat it with a whole lot of reverence and respect and mostly don't go there unless they have to. But yeah, it's become like, how can you possibly post about your happy life or about that meal you just cooked? How can you be smiling when L.A. is burning? How? Because that's life. That's the paradoxical goddess who lives in every part of the wave. That's the beloved, the one who lives in the destruction and the creation and his co-present in tears of joy and grief and loss and gain. And one of the most maddening things about her, about you, beloved, is that all of it is simultaneously you. For surely as she is a forest fire, so she is a life-giving river, and at any moment she is life and death and she is rapture and paid. Thank you, beloved, for the friction and the maddening contradiction. Can we find you, beloved, in the difficult places, in the unmet expectations, in the frictions that are invitations for us to deepen? For you are the longing and the consummation. You are here when we feel you near and you are here when we feel you far away. And every phase of the wave is sacred. We've been told and we've been sold that the consummation is the holy part, that the goal is to get from here to point B. And the only sacred part is when we find at last the beloved we've been chasing. When we achieve our goals and topple the system and find at last the utopian disney wedding. And so our searches, instead of being sacred, our searches are impatient, frantic, our longings divorced of sacredness, they spiral into obsession. I have to get there. I have to pursue happiness. I have to actualize the distant future now. I can't rest until climate change is solved. We're left with a movement that, like the very thing that it is struggling against, has only a commitment to relentless movement driving it. The movement becomes movement for the sake of movement. It becomes agitation itself so agitated that it even tries to agitate us back to a return to presence. I mean, for real, have you seen all the frenzied posts urging you back to presence? Neospiritual Instagram is literally post after post urgently encouraging people towards rediscovering the presence and immediacy of a living world. Remember the willow tree. No, I mean, right fuck now. The entire planet is urgently depending on your remembrance of the willow tree. You must achieve indigenous reciprocity now. So we're left, what pursuing presence and immediacy with the restlessness that insures will never find it, and all the while she is right here. All the while you are right here. In truth, says Rumi, everything and everyone is a shadow of the beloved, and our seeking is his seeking and our words are his words. We search for him here and there while looking right at him. Sitting by his side, we ask, oh beloved, where is the beloved? The beloved is right here. We are like fish longing for waters as nearby, surrounded by water, asking, where is the water? Where is the water? Where is the air? And so Rumi comes up with his own quattrain and he says, "My friend, you have spent your entire life knocking and knocking and knocking at the door of God. Sweetheart, you're knocking from the inside. You're already in divine presence and you're knocking at the door being like, why does this not open? You're home. You're home." And so part of the spiritual experience of God as the beloved is to actually go on a journey to realize that within a normal look. But the invitation from Rumi and Mirabai isn't to force ourselves into feeling the immediacy of the beloved. It's to recognize that our exact condition is one in which we long for that which is right here. And so it's an invitation to sit in the charged nascent space of longing, to sit in the unresolved dissonance, but perhaps with new hearts and new eyes, without giving in to the frantic chase. The offering is to be, as Emily Dickinson says, with thee in the thirst, with thee in the desert, she writes, with thee in the thirst, with thee in the tamer and wood, leopard breathes at last. There is the beloved in the space of unmet longings in every moment, which is simultaneously satiation and thirst. The last line of Osip Mondelstom's last poem, before he was captured by Stalin's forces, homes with the friction of this greatest paradox. "It is now," he said. "It is not. It is now. It is not. I'm here alive with you, beloved." Conjoined, connected, as he said in the blizzard of the blossoming pear. "And I'm not here. I'm far away." The world we've always wanted, it's not here yet. I'm reaching for it, but where else could it be other than right now? Right here? Where will we experience utopia other than right now, right here? There is the beloved in the immediate presence of the unresolved thirst in the space of unmet longings. There, with the person who doesn't see it the way I do, there in the space between us sitting in the uncomfortable awkwardness of a family table of varied ideologies, with humanity as it is, juxtapose with all we know that humanity could have been. Feel the loving friction. Oh, all we could have been. What humanity could have been? What we are and what we could have been. There in that friction, the leopard breathes at last. The beloved sings loud. I think there's something about that longing which is so necessary for us to set out on a spiritual path. The Sufis didn't usually use the word Sufi. They used all kinds of other terms and one of the love terms like Seeker or even a lover in Rumi Circle when you would want to begin your spiritual journey. If you're very dedicated, you would be called the lover. I think there's something about that notion of thirst. You know, he's got this beautiful poem says don't seek water, seek thirst because it's the thirst that will lead you to the water of life and it's the thirst that will let you realize, as he says in this beautiful poem, you're already standing knee deep in the water of life with arched lips dying of thirst. So it's like the answer is right here. The beloved is right here, but we won't realize that until we experience that seeking at thirst, that longing, that need, even. This is the real relationship with the beloved. Singing to the beloved doesn't mean blissing out in the midst of the apocalypse. It doesn't mean pretending everything's all love all the time and pretending we're whole and complete and satiated all the time. It means singing aloud all the many facets of thirst. Let us sing the names of the great modern thirst, thirst that feels like thirsting for connection, thirsting for togetherness, thirsting for home, thirst that feels like thirsting for a spring in the wasteland, for a treasure in the ruin that feels like thirsting for rich black forest soil. How I thirsted amidst life's flows, how I thirsted in the sea of ones and zeros. We are possessed by a great thirst and have made our lives untenable just so we can thirst some more. But we haven't realized that we can be resourced through the thirst itself, that we can sit here in the water, in the thirst and sing. So singing to the beloved doesn't mean don't take action. It means finding a deeper resource for the actions we take. It means embracing the full depth of our relationship to what is transpiring on planet Earth, beyond the immediate pull towards anxiousness and outrage. And as we become more deeply resourced, the nature of our actions change. And we may look to long slow alternatives rather than immediate fixes. We may look to alignment to the cycles and structures of the natural world around us, rather than to an activism that agitates only for the sake of agitation. We may commit to equilibrium in the face of spirals of unraveling. Just as we commit to dancing down outdated rigidities, we commit to holding each other in the face of crumbling structures and to cultivating seeds of green potentiality here in the ruins. It means a commitment to the treasure in the ruins, in which we look to the person right before us as a reflection of the beloved itself, rather than the target of our opinions. For each moment is a beloved call to meet what is called for. Each moment is an invitation into dialogue with the cosmos, an invitation not to turn the other way. Some days singing to the beloved means saying, "The truth of it is, I'm tired, beloved, and I'm feeling lonely, and I'm not sure if I'm held in infinite loving arms or I'm about to be dashed to pieces, and I tried and tried and couldn't save the world. I couldn't control the outcome all on my own. I couldn't even make that one lover who actually showed me some tenderness, stick around. It means deepening into the unmet spaces of the world, into unarticulated longings, into openings where spirit can move. And now we get, perhaps, to what actually heals wounds. The story of Percival, the story of the Grail, is a story about wounds, a wounded king and a wounded land, and a young fool who doesn't know a damn thing about life in his seeking his way as best he can. But wonder of wonders, after many adventures, after many stumbling on the pursuit of so many misplaced longings, he's gifted a glimpse, a glimpse of ever flowing water, he's gifted a glimpse of source, of the beloved, the joyous response, her grail vessel pouring forever. He's given a glimpse of love. But that love can only be claimed if he truly acknowledges the world. Seated at a great feast, right beside the wounded grail king, Percival sees the terrible cut in his king's thigh. He stares right into the heart of the world. And he longs to ask, "My king, what ails thee?" But he stops himself. His head is full of all the things a knight should and shouldn't say. He's got his chivalric codes and those societal do's and don'ts. And so he doesn't ask. He doesn't ask what ails thee. And because he doesn't ask, he's made to wander the wasteland for ten long years. The wasteland. You know the wasteland. And the dead tree gives no shelter, says T.S. Eliot, and the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water. The wasteland. The sociocultural wound in the story of Percival isn't addressed through diagnosis. It isn't addressed by rushing to conclusions or forcing interpretations. It's addressed simply by asking, really asking from the place of wanting to know, from the place that truly makes room for the beloved response. What ails thee? The healing of the wound comes from a willingness to drop the explanations and dwell in a kind of radical, spontaneous immediacy. Sit in that place where spirit moves. Feel what I mean. You and I beloved, breathing together. We've spent a lot of sociocultural time over the past two decades explaining the wound. And those explanations have deep validity. But they're not enough. Because only some have been doing the explaining. And there are wounds that have evaded explanation. And what is called for, perhaps, is a lot more time in the space in between us. We only truly address sociocultural healing in the place between us. Not with my opinion or your opinion, but in the space between us. That is animal space. So presented with all the facts, all the facts of social and structural imbalance, of environmental devastation of the relentless drive towards extermination, in a world of strife in which we know there is great potentiality for love and healing if only things could change. What do we do? What did I say was the most maddening aspect of you, beloved, that you are the paradox, that you are the joy and the pain at once. Equally maddening, too, is the fact that once I stare into the imbalances and the divides and know in my heart that love is the answer. I can't force it. And that to actualize your love takes work and it takes time to actualize the reverberant love of a loving cosmos in anything resembling a sustainable way takes time. It may be that the journey of generational social movements is the slow, dawning realization that you can't force love. And the more you try, the more love slips away. And when larger plans and sociocultural movements stall, I wonder, what does a movement look like that truly resonates and reverberates in the heart? What does a movement look like that sweeps through the heart of the world rather than through its brainstem, triggering more than its fight or flight response? How do we find Buckminster Fuller's model that makes existing models obsolete? This may sound overly simple, but I think it starts with food at a table. There has to be an element of it that is me and you sitting down and breaking bread together. Right, you know, that beautiful metaphor of breaking bread. Isn't there something about eating together? I mean, there's a grace to sharing a meal and I sometimes think about, you know, people who see themselves as being quite liberal and then you think about who are the folks that they have invited to their home, especially if you start thinking about, you know, yes, of course, you know, different ethnicities and races, but also in terms of social classes. And I'm as guilty of this as anybody. I was thinking of, you know, knowingly and willingly, how many Trump supporters have I had over to my house for dinner? Some of that is self-preservation, some of that is sanity. But I wonder, I wonder where that fine line is between the bubbles that many of us exist in and perhaps need to exist in at this particular moment. And then, you know, that willingness to be changed and be surprised by the humanity of people with whom we might have some important defenses. My experience with what you're talking about is that when I've been in those beloved meal spaces with people who see things very differently than I do, that, you know, and obviously, there are going to be exceptions. There are going to be people who you don't want to invite to your house or dinner, right? But that they're afraid of pretty much the exact same thing. I'm afraid of they have felt judged. They have felt like they're ridiculed. They have felt like, you know, that there's no openness for them to carry on their particular cultural ways, not all of which are, you know, horrendously vile racism and this type of thing. And that space, I mean, I honestly don't see you way forward if we can't find those spaces together. You know, because the other option, which has always historically been an option, is like, no, you get enough people on your side with your viewpoint and you get enough guns or enough votes and you take the place that, well, what do you do with the 50% of the population? Then that doesn't quite see it like that. And they're still there. And even if you choose to see them as people who have toxic views, that toxicity is still there. And so really the goal is not somehow to roll it off from you, even if it is toxic and even if one word to grant that is toxic, it's to heal it. Yeah, it's to find a way for that toxicity to mend. And, you know, the view like when people are willing to look at the toxicity of others and not willing to look at their own. And again, there are degrees. I mean, you know, like there are obviously deeply toxic subcultural groups at play in the United States right now. But I've encountered a lot of what I would call toxicity and progressive discourse. And if there's not even the slightest willingness to say, oh, wow, yeah, we can be pretty toxic too. I think it starts in systems of mutual holding. I think it starts in the space in between. So why to bring it full circle, back to the banks of the Great Emunar River, why after presenting her diagnosis of all the structural imbalances, all the challenging aspects of the Calde Yoga, why does the woman known as bhakti say that in such times simply singing the name of the beloved is the way. Because the real intricate relationality that comes from a true loving relationship with the cosmos over time allows us to construct a world of deeper alignment, a movement resourced in mystery that is not thrown by the immediate waves of empire but sustains over time. Anything of value takes time. The narrative is always that we don't have any time that time is running out. But here's yet another one of your sweet maddening paradoxes, beloved. Yes, time is running out. And time is infinite. And anything lasting of value that we want to create in a world of urgent rush is going to require us to re-evaluate our relationship with time. You can't rush your healing, says Trevor Hall, and the healing takes time. And this deeper rhythm of time, this baritone force of slow regenerative healing is at play right now. In the midst of all these immediate way of cycles of destruction and agitation, there is healing happening, and there is regeneration, and there is mending, and there is love in the spaces in between. Things are being planted now in each song being sung in the midst of the collapse whose fruits we cannot even begin to imagine. Worlds are coming into being right now whose full expression we may never see. There are hidden gods, hooded and cloaked in the darkness of the mystery, in the cool depths of the healing sanctuary who are continually doing their work in time. That's another name for the beloved, you know, time. And can we pause to remember in the midst of the struggle? Can we remember that all this takes time? Remember, beloveds, that the book of love is long and boring. Remember how we won't topple the system tomorrow, or fix climate change tomorrow, or save the world tomorrow. Nor will we cleanse our borders of those pesky others tomorrow, or achieve some ill-defined nostalgic greatness tomorrow. We won't reach Mars tomorrow, or blast off into some techno-optimist future tomorrow. We won't beat death tomorrow. Nor will the house ever be perfectly clean. Yes, we're stuck here for the long haul, you and I, here at this Thanksgiving table which can be a battlefield or a feast, depending on if we simply pause and acknowledge the beloved space between us together. Here we are seated at the table, beloved, here in the great experiment of making it work over time. And it is work this book of love, and some of it is transcendental, and some of it is really dumb. But I love it when you sing to me and you can sing me anything. It's full of flowers and heart-shaped boxes, and things we were all too young to know. We were too young to know that we couldn't get there. Wherever there is, we couldn't get there by rushing. We were too young to know that there wasn't anything better in one world over, and the grass wasn't actually greener, and that whatever it is we were seeking, we couldn't force it to be. We were too young to know that love was a whole lot about allowing, and that, like Pascal said, being is a constant process of bowing. To be is to bow, he said. But we were all too young to know that this time of tumult and appraced fists, this too was simply a season, and that there would still be seasons to come. Seasons yet unrealized, seasons of grief and remembering, and seasons of joyous forget, and seasons of fire and seasons of gentle breezes, and seasons of realizations and seasons of insight, and long golden summers with sweet shafts of grass between our teeth, and that the recurring reverberant refrain of each of these seasons, these summers and winters, was that the way through was to hold each other. So we did our best, and we lit a fire, and told stories around that fire, and when the fire burned down to ashes, we laid ourselves out on the ground, and we slept. And when it all collapses, and when even the urgency we have around the collapse collapses, and when the vortex rabbit holes of ideological push and pull and sway, become so unreliable as to be utterly unavigable, and when bodies begin to reject the paradigm and unplug from the matrix and wipe the illusory crud away, at that moment all will have beloved as each other. All will have as each other, which is all we've ever had, anyway. All you'll have is me, and all I'll have is you. You, beloved, you, the portal to the eternal, is through the one who stands directly before us, the treasure in the ruin. You. So when things fall apart, as I hold space for their falling, and sing of their falling, and weep for their falling, and laugh at the ludicrous specifics of the collapse, as I scramble for the pieces, and then just as quickly let the pieces go and shake myself free, you can be sure, beloved, you can be sure, that as tyrants rise, and tyrants roll, so they inevitably inspect accurately fall. And the world's great capitals and shopping districts, it's literal and metaphorical Dubai as grow once again with Dionysian vines. You can be sure, beloved, in the midst of the tumult and torpor in the aspits of Lord, or in the meadows of Dionysian fields, in hell and high water, whenever it comes after. You can be sure, you'll be singing to me. You can be sure, you'll be singing. Do you? Do you? All I want is to sing your name, sing your name, sing your name, sing your name, sing your name, all I want is to sing your name, sing your name, sing your name, sing your name, is to sing your name. A lot of shout outs and thank yous are necessary for this episode. First of all, I want to thank Dr. Omid Safi, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University for joining me for this episode, and you can find Omid on Instagram at Brother Omid. That's Brother Omid. This episode features the music of Janay Elita. She's findable at Janay J-E-U-N-A-E underscore Elita EL-I-T-A, and there's lots of other musicians who participated in this episode as well, so let's dive in. Leah Song and Chloe Smith performed a version of the song "Rank Strangers" by the Stanley Brothers, and that's a sneak peek of something that is going to be released on an upcoming album. The guitarist Sonny Reinhardt from Nekra played a break from an old led Zeppelin song called Carousel Ambra. Duncan Wickel, who plays with Leah and Chloe Quate regularly, did the beautiful Rhodes keyboard lines, and you can find more of Duncan's music at Wickelbuckle.com, w-i-c-k-e-l-b-u-c-k-l-e.com. The song "Cast Me On Your Shore", written and performed by an old friend of mine named Forrest Son, produced by Forrest Son and Goaine Matthews with Harmony Vocals by Lara Louise. Find more of Forrest's beautiful music at ForrestSon.com. Forrest spelled like Forrest, and Son spelled like the thing in the sky. The song "The Book of Love" by the magnetic fields was performed by Haley Young, aka Humbug. That's Humbug, if you want to find her on Instagram with two M's, two B's, and four G's, naturally. CD Bay also sang on this episode, and you can find CD Bay's music all the places where you find music, and she's on Instagram as well. It's S-I-D-I-B-E. Almost all the Divas sang on this episode. Maria Stark sang on this episode, and you can find her music everywhere you find music. And you can also check out her work at Temple of the Muse.com. Serena Bixby sang on this episode. Find her on Instagram at Serena Joy Bixby S-E-R-E-N-A-J-O-Y-B-I-X-B-Y. Thank you, Serena. You've been waiting a long time. This episode featured a beat from B-Zen. That's B exclamation point, Z-E-N. This episode also contains reference to a whole lot of books, poems, songs, films, etc. First and foremost, the poems of Osip Mondelstam, who was a Russian Jewish poet, who once performed a poem, Critical of Stalin, and it cost him his life. He wrote really powerful poetry, and a good translation to check out is the book Stolen Air, which was translated by Christian Wyman. The book, Percival by Wolfram Bon Eschenbach. The Late Show with David Letterman. Malcolm X's December 1st, 1963 speech at the Manhattan Center. The Bhagavata Purana. The poem motto by Bertold Brecht. The Dark Knight of the Soul by John of the Cross. The poem serenade by Adelia Prado. Two books by Christian Wyman, My Bright Abyss, and he held radical light. The double flame, love and eroticism by Octavio Paz. The songs of the sixth Dalai Lama by M Tats. The turquoise B love songs of the sixth Dalai Lama by Rick Fields. The Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke. Emily Dickinson, poems number 405 and 209. The Dene Kornpollen Prayer. The story of Lazarus in the Bible, John 1143. A 1987 commercial for Calgon soap featuring the line Calgon Take Me Away. One Whisper of the Beloved by Jalaludin Rumi. The Wasteland by T. S. Eliot. Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Sorcerer is a Prentice theme from the film Fantasia. The Lord of the Rings by J.R. Tolkien. The Old Spiritual I've Been Buked and I've been scorned. And of course Tree House of Horror, an episode of the animated show The Simpsons.