What We Bless, Blesses Us

J. Ruth Gendler

We live in a reciprocal conversation with the world. There are so many ways to say this. The poet Ghalib declared, “It is the rose unfolding that creates the desire to see.” Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and then they shape us.” And in Anatomy of a Rose, Sharman Apt Russell writes, “Flowers smell so good because insects smell so well,” going on to describe how a honeybee might visit 500 flowers in one foraging trip.

Pay attention. Whatever we work on (music, creek restoration, teaching, gardening, cooking) works on us. It is all a dialogue, a conversation between the cook and the vegetables, the gardener and the plants, the artist and her materials, the bee and the flower, the body and the soul.

Call it mutual use or symbiosis, the golden rule or common sense. An ad for juice says, “Do unto your body as you wish it would do unto you.” I prefer to think of it as reciprocity, a kind of ardent exchange. We could also call it respect, reverence, the path of beauty. What we bless, blesses us.

So much is speaking in and around us if we let ourselves be open to the exchange. The soul blesses the body, the body blesses the soul. The dance of reciprocity between the body and soul is echoed in the dance between the self and the world. The Kogi say, “We are always making offerings to the sun and to the mountains and to the stars. That is why we live here.” The Bal Shem Tov, the founder of the Hasidim, expressed it this way—we are here to sanctify the world. Yeats said it like this—“How but in the custom and in ceremony are innocence and beauty born?’ What a beautiful sense of purpose. Your presence is requested here, now, to be a small mirror to this great beauty.

We can nurture a sense of reciprocity by being quiet and patient, by listening and opening our senses, by letting ourselves receive the world with curiosity and respect. The more we are alive to, the more the world comes alive in us. For some this opens up into a kind of mysticism; for some a more activist engagement. Both responses are important. Living with awareness of reciprocity amplifies wonder and allows us to live in the world with more grace; it decreases our self importance as it increases a sense of belonging. Reawakening a sense of the interrelationships that are at the center enlarges our hearts and expands our vision.

Cultivating the quality of reciprocity reminds us to be grateful for the many gifts and exchanges that sustain our lives.

 J. Ruth Gendler is an exhibiting artist and author of the forthcoming book: Notes on the Need for Beauty. Her website is: www.ruthgendler.com.

Waking in the Cosmos

Catherine De Vinck

 Not alien, yet too vast to imagine this place we call home,

this solitary jewel sapphire on the throat of space.

Do we even have eyes for the patch of earth in the backyard?

Do we feel the power of roots pushing the single grass blade to the light?

Not wrenched out of winter’s grasp: quietly shooting forth its slender green life.

Yet, sometimes an archaic memory stirs us awake.

We remember we are not alone, orphans lost in planetary storms.

We swim breast to breast with other luminous bodies.

Within our blood stars flash their signals,

rivers circuit through our veins, the seas fluctuate rhythmically in our brain

and the dust of dead constellations mingles with our bones.

Turbulence, flux, chaos, a necessity to translate the song of the oceans

to channel into words the orbiting sun, the tides of the moon.

We are the voice of plants, of animals, of stones;

we speak for the invisible galaxies as well as for the common violet,

both sisterly near, both alive, wedded to our fleshy heart.