Sangha friends, Kath Mitchell, Mark Schrader and Chani Grieve  are facilitating a heart-felt Wangapeka community exploration of ethics called,”Refraining from Harm, Supporting All Life”.  They have invited a number of us older yogis of life and living to participate by way of pre-recorded zoom conversations or presentations.  As I  contemplated these themes in the context of my own situation as an individual, and the collective situation of an evolving planet-wide-ecology, the following verses emerged. 

What We Love

There is a fragility about life.
My left eye is failing.
My biorhythms seem increasingly out of sync.
Cancer whispers within me.
Meningiomas push on my spinal nerves.
Hatred and fear eat up my communal soul.

And the temperature rises.
Seas become hot and acid.
Birds cry out and polar bears emaciate
as icecaps melt
and oceans swell,
and humans plan holidays,
paid for with money earned through making bombs.

And we argue and debate and fervently discuss,
rights, and injustice, and anti-semitism, and genocide, and ecocide;
while despair and sadness and ferocious resistance
and determination to live otherwise burns within.

“Why is this happening to you?” she asks.

I pause,
remembering Vimalakirti.
The ancients knew it well.
We are in this together,
and together
we seem to have lost our bearings;
lost touch with the mysterious awakening heart-of-togetherness.

I sit in the pre-dawn stillness,
horizon streaked with golden red,
spreading into the fullness of a living world,
while quietly wrestling with grief.

All tathagatas,
wherever you appear
in the immeasurable expanse of spacing and timing
I am listening.
All of me/you/us/them,
softening  . . .
listening.

Symphonies of sentience
singings of stars,
and oceans and forests and
moving mountains and flowing waters,
stirrings of something almost remembered,
an expanse of worshipful reverence
– ineffable presence –.

Devastated in beingness,
listening.

A world~cosmos,
increasingly buried in soundbites and screen grabs.
Billions of years of creative endeavour flowering as this!
And still . . .
this opening,
in humble wonderment,
softening in a blessing
of luminous love.

We will only work to save what we love.