I Wept

I’ve been around awhile, 70 years now. I’ve experienced my share of the rough and tumble of life. So imagine my surprise when I opened a section of last week’s “New York Times,” stared at the picture, read the copy and wept.

The photo was a full page rendering of the skeletal remains of a large building and the now missing, essentially pulverized, 100 people who were attending a funeral in Yemen - another so-called tactical error of modern war. A camera ad; a news source ad. It read, while you stared at this scene:

in spectacular 360° video

with your own eyes walk through the aftermath of a deadly airstrike in war-torn Yemen where more than 100 people were killed during a funeral reception.

The New York Times is using Samsung Gear 360 cameras to place you in the moment, right at the center of our stories.

   Delivered every day straight into your life.

Every voice of Love I’ve ever heard or read, be it that of Jesus the Christ, Mohammad, Buddha, the Advaidic gurus of India, the Yogic sages, and on, has offered the same message: Oneness is the Rule and Truth of the Cosmos. Even our science has now encountered this realization. But human beings still misunderstand, and so it seems to us right and necessary, in the name of security, to view one another with distrust. Living within this ever-growing fear, we are easily manipulated into agreeing with how the world is being presented to us.

Were I asked, I would say that for me the real terror of this age is not what someone might do to me, but what I am doing to myself if I accept this view of life on earth. Forget the so called enemy. What will we have left and who will we be while having it, if we don’t speak a new prayer in our hearts, an intention that we will know what it truly means when we agree to love our neighbor as our self, then hold on to that intention with all our might. And may we never, never underestimate the power of intent when it comes through the human heart. 

Why I Write – Revisited

It was one of those mornings where when I started my morning pages, I did so in the shadow of doubt once again. I asked for the umpteenth time, will I ever find a community of people who read what I write? I’ve had this conundrum going for a while asking: If my life is truly committed to awareness of the reality of self as lived on this planet, why do I care if my books are read or not? Is there a lie in there that I’m unwilling to own? My morning pages offered a place to investigate that question once again: Why do I write?

Quite clearly it came to me that I do not write out of a desire for success, meaning sales, or I would have packed it in a while back. Nor am I seeking recognition. I’m not one who requires kudos to keep going with something I’ve chosen to do. Though feedback is pleasurable and appreciated, being a judicious person by nature, I feel capable of assessing my work. As well, I find much satisfaction from doing it the best I can. So if not that, what then draws me to write?

But of course… First and foremost, I am drawn to sharing ideas with others who, like myself, are curious, thought-provoked and open to seeing things anew. There is no more beautiful moment in a day than when I recognize commonality with another, be it through their writing or in actual meeting. I write to continually clarify my own awareness about issues we deal with as human beings and with the anticipation I will end up sharing this exploration with others doing likewise. Nothing is more delightful to me than a group of people in earnest discussion over what matters to them. Since I am not naturally social, especially at this point in my life, books represent a marvelous bridge to a greater whole and especially now to an international whole with all the  broadening possibilities that offers from those with differing perspectives. In my heart of hearts, that is why I write. Not to inflate my self image (had to look at that one closely) or to corroborate my ability, but to connect. My entire life has been one long exploration of connection or failure thereof. I know of no grander experience than when I can share a moment with another human being where we both realize we’ve touched each other deeply.

Such an occurrence can happen fleetingly in the check-out line at Kroger’s or longer within the heart of a meaningful discussion over coffee or for a lifetime if we meet the right mate. But the point is connection reveals to us the greatest of all truths – that there is only One – in endless, vibrant, creative, wondrous expression, adding a dimension of awe to life on earth. When we meet there, as Rumi attests: When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase, each other no longer make any sense.

I read authors who provide that opportunity to me, and I love them

for it. I write to do the same for others, to present a story they recognize and ways of interaction within it that can give rise to examination and perhaps discovery of new ways of seeing. At the same time, there is a shared moment of abiding connection, a starting point for dialogue, which if we intend, can last a lifetime. And with each meeting, we are reminded that the most precious of all human experiences is to re-ignite those embers which flame into everlasting recognition that we are all one-and-the-same, yet mysteriously unique. Such a memory is fraught with an unparalleled sense of peace and joy. That’s where I live. That’s why I write.

I’ve started a discussion on my Author’s Page to explore our mutual experiences of human connection. Click on the link below and add an example from your life. I put up one to start things off. The discussion is entitled: Human Connection. Looking forward to hearing of your deeply held moments in life.

Click here to share your experiences of connection.

Then scroll down to Christina Carson Forum

Interconnectedness is the Law of the Cosmos, Isn’t It

I’m not enamored with rubbing my face or anyone else’s in our less than thoughtful acts as human beings. This video, however, redeemed itself for me from its otherwise frightful message in this way. It demonstrates simply and graphically the consequences of our misunderstanding about how our world, and the universe in which it exists, operates. Every act of every human being upon this planet creates effect, the majority of which is usually unknown to us unless we have something like this video to capture even part of it. But here’s the enigma. On the one hand, as we see it, we are but dust motes in an infinite eye, yet on the other hand, every event of note through our history tracks back to the powerful endeavor of single individuals. How can we live effectively in a world in which we see ourselves and our acts as both inconsequential and of great consequence? What is the frame of reference that can accommodate that conundrum, the one that might allow us a view much more integrated than thinking only in terms of this or that.

I see only one myself. It’s a quantum step literally. It starts with an avid curiosity about and then a nurturing of the notion: Interconnectedness is the law – recognition that everything we do affects something or somebody somehow. It makes “the breeze off butterfly wings in Tokyo creating a typhoon for California”, a popular description of quantum effect, seem child-like up against this intricacy that can only boggle the mind of reason.

We can object to this concept of interconnectedness but then there are scenes like Midway Island, 2,000 miles from the nearest shore of any other country, to bring us back on point. And the underlying beauty as well as the ultimate irony is this:  to live from this cosmic law creates the very life that dreams are made from—whole, serene, satisfying, engaged and significant.

Rumi understood. Let him tell us:

Out beyond ideas of

wrong-doing and right-doing

there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase,

each other

no longer make any sense.

We need to meet there more often.

With thanks to a dear friend, Ralph Miller, for once again exploring the net and sharing his finds with me. Much appreciated, Ralph.

How ‘Bout Your Small Adventures

I have been fascinated most of my days to see the commonalities of life regardless of where or into which culture I peer. I guess as a young person I was fooled by the outward trappings of new and interesting places into believing those who lived amongst them would somehow experience life differently from me. Through spending a summer in Colombia as a 16-year-old, moving to the Canadian prairies, sitting on a stump speaking with a Cree Native about 21^st century life for his people and asking a Vietnamese fellow traveler on a boat ride from Saigon to Vung Tau how he can be so civil toward Bert and me, I realized we are capable of relating to one another in a productive and meaningful way, regardless of those seeming differences. The deciding factor is our attitude – do we choose to rise above our differing beliefs and cultures to reach a common ground.

The beauty that is us, we as human beings, resides in us at a level I call reality. When we touch that place within ourselves, we rise beyond the petty, confining views we’re taught to use in looking at the world and begin to sense the nature of what connects us. When we open to the possibility of connection, our conversations, our associations change, and we behold one another in a way that lets us see through the superficial to what’s real. Those moments bathe us in such clarity that we cannot forget the richness of the experience; those memories are ours to treasure forever. I’m sure you too can remember moments where everything clicked, when you and someone else unexpectedly shared from that beauty, making you unafraid to just be yourself.

I was set on this course of reflection upon reading a poem from an unknown Inuit reviewing his life, one most of us would consider as radically different from our own. I wanted to say to him over time and distance, regardless of the worlds that separate us: I have

been where you have been. How good of you to remind me of this eternal connection we have with all things. The poem’s title was: “I Think Over Again my Small Adventures.”

I think over again my small adventures,

My fears,

Those small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things
I had to get and reach;

And yet there is only one great thing,

The only thing,

To live and see the great day that dawns

And the light that fills the world.

In the late ‘60s, I meet a teenage Inuit girl from Banks Island. If you look on a map, you’ll see that’s up near Santa Claus. I was fresh out of University and had lived on the US east coast all my life, so stories of her life fascinated me. Her people were still connected by their old ways, even though “civilization” had invaded their domain and called them into the 21^st century. I can’t remember what I expected to hear from her as we wrote back and forth to each other, but aside from going to a theater to see a movie, something she’d only heard about, we talked about life as if we were sisters. I had taken cross-cultural training at that point in my life and had finally surrendered to the realization that our actions across cultures, our responses to overt acts could indeed be very different, even in primal relationships like mother to child. But I know now that that teacher had not spent enough time “sitting on stumps” to realize that when we dig deep enough, there is only one great thing we all share, the light that glows within us and around us, which we can all recognize due to the underlying fact of our inborn connection with one another and all things no matter who we are or where on this earth we abide. And then I further understood that it is not our seeming problems that create trouble among us, but rather the lack of honest desire to get clear about our nature - to see our adventures as they truly are.