September 2023
- Candace Cave
- May 3
- 3 min read
Updated: 7 days ago
Qualities of Relationship
I live in the mountainous woods of So. Oregon. I am fortunate to be able to walk quietly through relatively wild nature every day, usually accompanied by two canine companions, Ruby Tuesday and Copper (both Red Australian Heelers).
My daily nature walks are an important part of my contemplation and meditation practice, and my relational experience.
In nature, fundamental consciousness can be experienced as reflecting the essential aliveness of everything it pervades. The aliveness of being is illuminated within the spaciousness. A human can feel kinship in aliveness.
“Fundamental Consciousness is a dimension of wholeness. We cannot experience the fine, unified transparency of this dimension unless we open through our whole being, in all the qualities.” Judith Blackstone
The past few weeks the valley in which I live (the Rogue River Valley in southern Oregon) has been inundated with very heavy, unhealthy wildfire smoke. Even with a 95N+ mask, it was mostly impossible for me to leave the inside of our house. The quality of my experience in the world began to shift.
During these weeks of confinement inside my home, albeit well suited to my comfortable life, the space that pervades me mostly only pervaded an environment constructed by humans rather than the spaciousness of nature stretching everywhere around me.
Philosophically I argued with myself that all the material in the sheetrock and wiring, interior and outer structure, was made up of materials originally from nature. But there just isn’t the contact-full response from the wall studs or the window glass, no subtle vibrancy of aliveness that the spacious stillness reflects in the irregularly rippling grasses and leaves, the unpredictability of birds and insects, the steady relentless gait of rocks and mountains.
I am grateful that attunement to the ground of being allows me to see/feel through the space pervading the walls and floor, and I have foundational grounds that help me settle enough to find a core point below my torso in the earth. There are lots of windows in my home, and through the windows I cultivate my experience of the transparency and the reflective luminosity of aliveness. And inside my home there is reliably the alive intelligence of beloved spouse RG, plus Ruby Tuesday and Copper.
Maybe that’s a reason people seek to live in tall buildings in big cities. Maybe that’s why loneliness is comforted by plants and pets. I think it might be harder to feel kinship with aliveness if we couldn’t experience beingness pervaded by the transparent expanse of fundamental consciousness and ground the unified relational field in the qualities of being that pervade our own and other evolving forms.
My heart aches for humanity when I think of RP friend Dave B’s tale of bringing inner city kids to a wilderness adventure in Maine. It was the first time they’d seen the stars. Imagine that! Living surrounded by concrete and light, not even truly experiencing darkness. How then can we know the essential qualities of the luminosity reflected from within us if we don't know the stars? What poor lost creatures humans have become.
It will soon be the planetary equinox, light and dark mostly equal length. In this next quarter year, equinox to solstice (longest night in north hemisphere; longest day in south hemisphere), if you are able, please walk outside every day, inhabiting your whole body including your feet. Find the space of fundamental consciousness pervading your body and your environment. Attune to the quality of aliveness in your own body. Experience the quality of aliveness pervading your body and environment at the same time. Allow the aliveness in your body to be kindled, reflected by, the luminous spaciousness of fundamental consciousness that pervades and supports you and everything else. Namaste...
Awaken a clear “felt sense” of the ground of being
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Expect to cultivate the quality of physical sensation at the same subtle refinement level with which you cultivate the quality of awareness in meditation and the quality of emotion in the healing/relational ground. Need not be in class to participate. Some partial scholarships available.
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Saturday, September 23, 2023
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