Intra-Connection Moment by Moment by Moment

You can watch for yourself Tara Brach’s wonderful conversation with Dan Siegel about intra-connection. Dan is careful to distinguish between INTER-connection (ties between separate, differentiated entities) and INTRA-connection (the innate oneness within all energy/matter/form). 

There’s a rich and exciting consilience about this oneness between Tara’s perspective from spiritual practice – that loving awareness is the ground of formlessness that holds all possibilities and honors all manifestations of existence – and Dan’s perspective from quantum physics that the plane of open possibilities is the reality that underlies all manifestations of existence, including all of our perspectives about existence. 

Both paradigms drop our experience of ourselves and any other selves and any/all of life into an open, spacious, formless awareness that allows us to choose how we want to live with ourselves and with others from that deepening experience of m-w-e.

And just as I was watching the interview for the third time (no kidding) the poem below, Saying Goodbye by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, arrived in my inbox. The synchronicity of the arrival of the wisdom of the poem, to “know the true shape of yourself, which is infinite…to know what the quantum physicists know, how woven with are with each other….” was so delightful that I emailed the poem to Tara, and she was delighted, too.

And I began to notice these synchronicities of intra-connection…learning about the fascinating intra-connection of the human world and the planetary world with the mycelial world of mushrooms through reading Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake and re-watching the film Fantastic Fungi, then walking for hours with a friend through the redwood forests of Armstrong Woods State Reserve in northern California, rejoicing in the mushrooms sprouting with our recent rains.

And in a more somber vein…

Reading through the description of Anderson Cooper’s podcast series on loss and grief, reading the description of the episode Sadness Isn’t an Enemy where he talks about the suicide of his brother and interviews B.J. Miller about the suicide of his sister, and at that moment an email notification comes in from a friend – “Can we talk? My son is suicidal.” 

My friend’s son has made it through to the other side, and I was left with deep gratitude for that, and with awe and wonder at how intra-connected we all are, all the time. And how resources show up as we are open to them, as did Trommer’s poem about the death of her son.

Saying Goodbye

– Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

To say goodbye to one person you love
is to say goodbye to part of yourself.
 
I must have them, you think. You think,
I can never be whole without them.
 
But in that gap of the fabric, that tear made of love,
is a place you can climb into at any time
 
and know the true shape of yourself, which is infinite.
Sometimes it takes the sharp ache of loss
 
to feel into the truth of our interconnectedness,
to know what the quantum physicists know—
 
how woven we are with each other,
with the universe,
 
how woven we are with all that is living
and all that is what we call dead.
 
Though it’s science, it’s also a kind of faith.
And it’s dark. And it’s sweet. And it’s beautiful,
 
and it’s terrifying, this thread that reminds us
just how much we belong to the rest of the world,
 
this thread we can’t untie even if we want to,
this thread that tethers us to one another, to eternity.