“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
Mary Oliver-Wild Geese
As I reflected on this month’s CEC theme of ‘community’, meaning, at least to me, a human order bigger than our self, another word lifted to the surface: ‘electricity’. A moment later, a vision of my younger self, standing in the lab, waiting for some.
Days before I injected RNA into a frog oocyte and was waiting for the proteins to find their way to the cell surface, at which point, I would detect a faint electrochemical current, life’s signature.
Can you feel it? It’s often easiest to glean in your lips, fingers and toes. All those nerve endings, sparks coursing up and down. If you like, you can close your eyes and try for a few seconds. That buzz is the feeling of ‘alive’, what connects to each other, all living things.
Did you know that the leading hypothesis for how electricity arrived in us is a few billion years ago, one cell ate another and discovered an eternal agreement that more beautiful things are built together than alone?
Do you know that inside every mitochondrion, those cellular furnaces where glucose and oxygen become electricity, lives the genetic legacy of that ancient coupling? And that all of us, no matter our parents or where we live, share the same mitochondrial DNA from one woman in Africa about 200,000 years ago, before this mitochondrial Eve marched north to build the Taj Mahal, then paint the Sistine Chapel?
It soothes me to imagine we are all connected like cells in our body are, shifting, moving, being born, dying, in service to a wholeness larger than ourselves that we can feel but not see. It’s hard to believe at times, with wilderness in retreat and the visions of war falling into my eyes from far away, but I think that’s just part of it. I might not believe this as strongly if, on that afternoon in the lab, the cathode hadn’t startled me with a faint hum of current where before there was none.
It is why I sit. I want to hold the open position from which I can take the essential into the future and build on it, shedding a layer that once contained me but no longer confines me. At least for a few minutes, I find something bigger than myself.
My late friend Dave Courchene once told me “When settlers arrived to Turtle Island, they looked at my people, watched us bow to a crow, and said, ‘These heathens have no god…they will worship anything!’ But we only have one god, same as you, but we don’t stand above anything in creation, so we bow to the crow, we bow to the river, because they are our relatives.”
In meditation, we remember our community. It is each other. It is our ancestors and the people who will be walking down our street long after we return to our solid place in the ground. Our community is the family of living things, and we are carried by the same current.
This is why we built the CEC. To sit with each other in that ever-flowing current. To give and receive the encouragement and feedback that lets us know both which way to grow and if we are. It makes for a much better party. Now that I think about it, that is the main reason we built the CEC, why we are all-in on this ‘wishing safety to all living things’ thing: it’s funner. So after we remember, we dance about it.
In that peculiar, symbiotic way, at a time when the world needs CEC, we need something of the world. We are in the middle of a fundraising drive to help us maintain, even expand, our programming. More meditations, more speakers, more retreats, more dancing in the streets.
To the many who have joined our sits thus far, we bow to you. To the donors who believe that this connection to all living things is worth practicing and gave generously such that we can continue creating space for it, we bow to you, our relatives. To those of you who have some funds to contribute, we bow to you, and are honoured to devote them to keeping this signal strong, making a place where all people, regardless of belief, can sit in peace.
In these times where things can feel like they are falling apart, let’s keep up with that love buzz.
Can you feel it?
Dr James.