Sangha of Auspicious Companions

Inspiring Links of the Week

June 26, 2023

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Sarah Peyton: Connecting with the Music & Breath of Life

In a special Awakin Calls workshop held in 2022, longtime Nonviolent Communication trainer, Sarah Peyton explained resonance in the context of her cello. The cello is shaped like a human body, almost the same size, and, “We actually place musical instruments in our brain in the same area that holds people. So our body, our brain thinks of a cello as a person as well.” When we play a cello and there is another cello sitting next to it, the second cello vibrates with the same musical tonal quality as the cello being played. Humans do this too. Our bodies notice what is happening with bodies around us, “and the music that gets played on human bodies is the music of emotions.” So emotions in one body creates vibrations in other human bodies. “If we live in a world, a family, a home, a community where there’s a lot of trauma, and where there has been very little resonance, very little acknowledgment or co-vibration, so to speak, then what happens is that it becomes unbearable to resonate with the other human bodies that are in our environment.” But we can’t actually stop ourselves from resonating, just like a cello, so “the way that we turn off our information about our resonance is by turning off a part of the brain called the insula.” Watch the recording of the workshop, or read nuggets from it here. { read more }

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Learn more about Sarah and her work here. { more }

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June 25, 2023

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Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet

“Conjuring the movements of migrating salmon, cranes, and butterflies, cultural ecologist David Abram intuits the sensory exchange that guides them across the wider body of the Earth. In a series of drawings woven throughout the story, artist Katie Holten illuminates the deep intelligence that enables collective movement at all scales of life, even in the microscopic cells of our bodies.” { read more }

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For more inspiration, check out this essay, “Waking Our Animal Senses: Language and the Ecology of Sensory Experience,” by Abram.
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June 24, 2023

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Poetry is an Egg with a Horse Inside

“Our concerns as adults and as children are not so different. We want to be surprised, transformed, challenged, delighted, understood. For me, since an early age, poetry has been a place for all these things. Poetry is a rangy, uncontainable genre–it is a place for silliness and sadness, delight and despair, invention and ideas (and also, apparently, alliteration). Giving children poems that address the whole range of the world, not just the watered-down, “child appropriate” issues, makes them feel less alone. Corny as it sounds, if children find poems that express things they have themselves thought and poems that push them beyond what they have themselves imagined, they’ll have a friend for life. This is the story of how I found that friend. In the first poetry workshop I ever took (my junior year in college), my professor, Henri Cole, handed out a page of quotations about poetry from luminaries such as Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens. One of them read: “Poetry is an egg with a horse inside.”– Third grader. I have no idea who or what that third grader grew up to be (I’m guessing a poet, miniature-pony breeder, astronaut, or molecular gastronomist), but I still remember the thrill I felt seeing that quote included. I don’t remember the quotes by those beloved poetry stars, but decades later, I include that third grader’s quote in my handouts, and it seems to surprise and delight my students as much as it did and does me.” Poet Matthea Harvey shares more in this piece that urges us not to underestimate what happens at the intersection where children and the mysteries of poetry meet. { read more }

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Take a moment to answer this question with the spontaneity of a third-grader: What is poetry to you? For more inspiration, check out this piece on “Ars Poetica,” the Art of Poetry, that includes an image of the photo Harvey created inspired by that anonymous third-grader’s memorable definition. { more }

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June 23, 2023

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On the Edge of Life & Death

The hospice community of Joseph’s House in Washington, D.C. believes that no one should live or die alone. Perched on the very edge of life and death, it is a place of belonging where people are lovingly companioned all the way to the threshold of death. Grace and mystery abound in encounters between people across racial and socioeconomic differences where they meet and love each other. People are welcomed as who they are, receiving comfort from physical pain along with respect, affection, and someone who truly sees them. { read more }

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Answer this question from the video for yourself, When did you last stand still enough to truly see someone?

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On the Edge of Life and Death

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June 22, 2023

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Leave No Child Inside

“As a boy I pulled out dozens — perhaps hundreds — of survey stakes in a vain effort to slow the bulldozers that were taking out my woods to make way for a new subdivision. Had I known then what I’ve since learned from a developer, that I should have simply moved the stakes around to be more effective, I would surely have done that too. So you might imagine my dubiousness when, a few weeks after the publication of my 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, I received an e-mail from Derek Thomas, who introduced himself as vice chairman and chief investment officer of Newland Communities, one of the nation’s largest privately owned residential development companies. “I have been reading your new book,” he wrote, “and am profoundly disturbed by some of the information you present.” Richard Louv shares more in this piece about the growing movement to reconnect children and nature, and to battle “nature deficit disorder.” { read more }

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Learn more about Louv’s work here. { more }

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June 21, 2023

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In Praise of Fallibility, Everybodyism & Confusers of Certainty

Where universalism maintains only that “all humans will be saved, whatever their sect or non-sect,” essayist Amy Leach’s everybodyism espouses a more playful and radical redemption for “not just all the human rascals but also all the buffalo rascals and reptile rascals and paddlefish and turkeys and centipedes and wombats and warty pigs.” While Leach’s admiration for Earth and its inhabitants is seemingly inexhaustible, it is not unaware. Her essays surface, often in lyrically satirical ways, the inconsiderate and often unconsidered impact we humans — with our conquests, our categories, our need for control and our appetite for consumption — have on this finite and fallible world. The trajectory of this essayist’s writing is not predictable like an orbit, but incalculable like a dream. It seems to follow an inner impetus, bent only on discovering what happens when the writer’s thought breaks free of habit, and encounters itself and this shape-shifting world. “There are not just cliches of phrases and words,” Amy maintains, “but cliches of thought too, and that is something worth fighting.” Part of this fight on the page involves “an exorcism of personal and cultural programming.” To root out, so as not to simply reproduce conventional thinking…Says Amy, “A lot of the things that I’m celebrating,like babies. music and donkeys, are really beautiful confusers of certainty….” { read more }

Be The Change

Come miss the boat with us! Join a conversation with this astonishing and enlivening writer, one who celebrates all things “speckled and plain, perfect and imperfect, indigo-feathered, green-skinned, orange-toed, squashed of face, cracked of shell, miniature of heart, young as ducklings, old as hills…indigenous to Earth.” More details and RSVP info for her Awakin Call here. { more }

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June 20, 2023

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Aluna: A Journey to Save the World

“In 1991, in the last edition of the original Beshara Magazine, we published an article by journalist Alan Ereira about an extraordinary people living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the north of Colombia. The descendants of a great civilisation which fled to the hills as the Spanish took over their lands, the Kogi had lived for 400 years in isolation, led by a class of priests called the mamas. They asked Alan to help them make a film in order to communicate with us the younger brother and warn us about the ecological destruction we are wreaking upon the earth. The result was a BBC documentary and a book entitled The Heart of the World. Thirty years later, the Kogi are making another attempt to communicate their wisdom, this time through a regeneration project, Munekan Masha, under the auspices of the UNESCO Bridges initiative. Alan talked to Jane Clark and Richard Gault about what it involves and the unified vision which underlies it. At the end of the article we include a video of a recent talk he gave on the project which you might want to watch before reading the interview.” { read more }

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You can watch “Aluna,” the powerful film Alan Ereira made here. { more }

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Inspiring Links of the Week