how are the connections?

Skara Brae Buddo, human figure carved from whalebone, c. 2,900 – 2,400 BC. Discovered at Skara Brae, a Neolithic settlement located in the Bay of Skaill on the Mainland, an island in the Orkney archipelago of Scotland

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The Native American notion of All My Relations views all of reality and life as related and interconnected. Every aspect of life is seen as part of one intrinsic family. 

In the Blackfoot tribe, when people meet, they don’t say 'How are you' but 'Tza Nee Da Bee Wah?' which means, 'How are the connections?' 

If the connections are in place, we must be all right. If the connections are not in place, then we need to tend them first. 


—Mark Nepo

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Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. 

We are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts—so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up. 


—Richard Rohr
Falling Upward, excerpt

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Rather than to ask what is the meaning of this universe, we would have to say that the universe is its meaning. As this changes, the universe changes along with all that is in it. What I mean by ‘the universe’ is ‘the whole of reality’ and what is beyond. And of course, we are referring not just to the meaning of the universe for us, but its meaning ‘for itself’, or the meaning of the whole for itself.

Similarly there is no point in asking the meaning of life, as life too is its meaning, which is self-referential and capable of changing, basically, when this meaning changes through a creative perception of a new and more encompassing meaning.

You could also ask another question: What is the meaning of creativity itself? As with all other fundamental questions we cannot give a final answer, but we have to constantly see afresh. For the present we can say that creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate unfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite — that is, this meaning goes to infinite depths.


—David Bohm
Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialogue with David Bohm

 

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