the thread to follow
how we belong
If you could change one thing about the world right now, what would it be?
Someone asked me this the other day, as though it were a casual question.
I responded instantly, without thinking— For humans to fall madly in love with all the other species, to remember all forms as equally intelligent. For humans to suddenly care, so much, that we are moved to protect the beauty we love.
I said it so quickly that tears sprang to my eyes. The longing was so simple and true, as though scripted into my heart. There are many other changes I dream of… but it’s not really about the details of the change itself, so much as the magnitude of your care surrounding it. Our tenderness for one thing is a doorway to our care for everything.
Isn’t this world a co-creative, co-arising landscape? Isn’t this the great ecological gift of humanity, our power to imagine a new way, and to dream it into being? To transform our despair into active care, this is how we belong. The human heart is its own creative universe, an imaginative wellspring. We create our world by loving it.
What would you change? Listen to the first thought that comes. It is a golden thread to your irreplaceable beauty on this planet. Don’t ever underestimate the power of that thread.
The Way It Is by William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
Mostly what you said, for humans to bring themselves to equal tooting with all the other animals. To see that we are animals too. Coming to understand our intricate connection as the web of life for we are related to everything! And to naturally protect, care and tend to those around us.
You quote Stafford, who had a 'late' start to his career. And in the thread of what you said, it is not too 'late' to tend, and continue to tend to ourselves and others. The hidden river of the heart, or perhaps the more obvious one, is to keep going along with it, even if it at times it rerouts. In that spirit, you might like the Swedish-Finnish author Mark Levengood. He wrote a story/book "Hjärtat får inga rynkor." The heart doesn't get wrinkles.