Still Moving, not a Still Frame

(trying not to forget that we are all creatures may be very important right now)

Where is the edge of me? (painting, Nora Bateson)

Moving

We who are alive today, are here — dripping with sticky clumps of yesterdays, and slippery wisps of tomorrows.

The time labyrinth is pressing the tubes of familiar existential by-products of the pasts, up against the membranes of twisting immanent confusion. The stories of before and forthcoming are digesting each other.

What happened? What will happen? What is happening? Each curvature in the day touches the sides of time, absorbing, transmitting through the membranes that sculpt the water we see our reflections in.

In this movement our bodies, our hearts, souls and minds tangle and whisper at the edge of possible futures.

We are the line that is the horizon. And it is not a line, the horizon only appeared to be a line.

We are a forest of trees reaching our roots into the dark nutrients of the soil, and our branches into the sunlight and wind.

We hold the sky; we are held by the earth.

Anyone alive now, is here for this era of movement –so much of life is in the balance. What would they say, our ancestors who shaped stones, cured animal skins, and stayed close to the fires where stories were sometimes told in long silences?

To be in silence together is to be in just as much, if not more communication than to converse in verbal language. Silence is a full spectrum of expressions — at times panicked, or angry, it is aloneness, it is profound, it is boring, it is loving, it is deep connectedness — not alone. Our communicating machines will never be able to surveil the entire conversations that we can have in absolute silence. Even as I write these words they say as much about what has not been said as much as what I have written. Even as I read these words there is much in what I have not said.

There, in that place of being alive, we are digitally unreachable. I am not afraid of technology. I am more concerned that you and I will abdicate our humanity, and our creaturely dignity.

The invitation I am offering you today is to re-member yourself into your aliveness, even as we are exploring the possible…