Meditation (June 2007)

LIFE IS A MEDITATION

"All meditation is about making connections.  Introvert meditation – a  journey inward – is meant to remind us of a connection already made that we have forgotten – namely that God is within us…spirituality is meant to be a peace based on justice which often must be carved out from society that so reluctantly and begrudgingly allows its birth… There is another kind of meditation called Extrovert meditation.  It is centering by way of creating.  As a potter concentrating and communing with the clay, or a musician with notes, scales and sounds, or a dancer with body and body movement and space, or a poet with words, or a lover with one’s beloved, or a baker with dough.  Such acts of utter communion are communions based on activity and birthing.  They are centering processes and they are creative.  They are creativity as a meditation form.  Mary Richards, who has written a class work on this form of meditation called Centering, describes the reality of it… The bodiliness of extrovert meditation is holy, as holy as incarnation itself.  ‘Incarnation, bodying forth.  It is not our whole concern?  The bodying forth of our sense of life?… That is what form is: the bodying forth.  The bodying forth of the living vessel in the shapes of clay.’  There can be no true incarnational spirituality without extrovert meditation.”

Fox, Matthew.  The Case for Extrovert Meditation.  Spirituality Today, June 1978 p. 164-177.

Fox, Matthew.  A Spirituality Named Compassion, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International 1979, p 132.

WHEE-MD Observations

We sculp our lives as our most creative contribution to this world. The clay we are given at birth is shaped by many factors. We make many choices in actions and reactions, and choose many relationships that shape the vessel which is our character and personality and preferences and responsiveness to life. Our potting around is far more than idleness. It is our opening to the random insertions of straw and stray particles of interactive challenges that give color to the raku pot that is our journey through this plane of existence.

Take a moment or an hour or a lifetime and review your experiences as a vessel that you offer to your Spirit, to the world, and to the All.

Blessings

Dan Benor