Marie Taylor, Ink

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…. any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” John Donne

Go into any bookstore and you will see the shelves filled with books on relationships- how to begin them, how to end them, how to get more out of them, how to change them, how to recognize when you’re in a bad one. But relationship is much larger than finding the right mate, forgiving your parents or learning to love yourself.  When we talk about relationship, we are talking about all of life, not just familial ties or romantic aspirations. 

World teacher and mystic, J. Krishnamurti stated that all life is relationship.  Jewish philosopher Martin Buber described the I and Thou.  The Zen masters have said everything we see is the mirror of our own consciousness.  Relationship is everywhere and everywhen.  It is impossible not to be in relationship.  To breathe is to be in relationship with the air.  To watch a sunset is to be in relationship to it.  In modern physics, the observer helps to create the observed.

Relationship is an exchange of energy between the actor and acted upon.  And at each micro-millionth second, the watched becomes the watcher.  This constant ebb and flow of mutual “response-ability” sets up an oscillation, a dynamic tension, a cosmic tuning fork of vibration in which galaxies are born and die. 

To observe relationship is to observe duality. Relationship is us and them.  It is the foreground and background; it is the yes and the no.  It is here and there, the this and the that.   It is the positive and the negative; it is the up and the down, the in and the out, the hot and the cold.  It is water taking the shape of its container; it is two people making love.  It is the Alpha and the Omega.

When we release our role as observer or observed and let go into this exchange of energy, we become Relationship.  By simultaneously being the observer and the observed, we leave time and enter eternity; we leave matter and enter spirit; we leave separation and enter unity.

When we enter into relationship, to see the other is to see ourselves.  Our culture, our family background, the friends we make, the people we marry, the schools we attend, the companies we work for, the pets we live with, the trees we plant, the doors we slam, the spider we step on, the bodies we use and abuse – we are in relationship to all of them, part of them and they are part of us, indivisible. 

When Jesus the Christ said to love one another as ourselves, was he not really saying to love one another because they are ourselves? We are, all of us, the sum total of everyone we have met and everything we have touched plus an indefinable “something else” that is our own unique scent of individuality.

The Hindu’s say each one of us is a point of light held within the Net of Indra, reflecting back each other’s light unto infinity.  In the webs of our own lives, by making others a part of ourselves, we insure that they will never die as long as we live.  And so, we pass on, one to another, these sparks of spirit and life and intelligence and love down the generations. 

The stories I am posting are my Net of Indra and they have captured some of the people, places and things that chart the stars in my individual heaven. Perhaps you will see some familiar figures in this landscape.