We are alive in a world that is also alive.
What does it mean to be living?
At its root, I would say anything that is living has a dedicated energy body.
But then, would that mean structures are also alive? They may be dense, but they still have an energy. It’s just slow-moving.
Looking at the fence in my year. It’s made of wood. Wood that used to be a part of a living tree. Is the wood still living?
So… maybe I would revise to say: anything that is living has a dedicated energy body responsive to the source of life. (But then… what is that? In a physical sense it would be the Sun. What about spiritually? Is it our physical body that gives us consciousness? Or something else? What is the source of the soul? Ultimately. Are we capable even of knowing? Or is that beyond the mind?) (Is it necessary or a distraction to intellectualize? Does it progress us as a species to wonder about our nature?)
That turned out to be quite the tangential path, but where I was going is: wood does still respond to the Sun, so if we consider the Sun the source of life, then wood would still be living, wouldn’t it? Until it fully decomposes, as anything. But if we considered the source of life to be God or a similar concept such as the Great Spirit, would wood be alive? A tree would still apply in my revised definition, both if you considered the Sun the source of life and in many cultures which honor nature itself as a spiritual element of life. So at what point does the tree die in a spiritual sense? Or does it ever?)
Some cultures honor the spirits within structures as well. Would they consider a fence to be living? Maybe it would depend on the fence. It likely doesn’t matter. Or does it? It’s got me thinking… if we are individual representations of the same source of life (because I started thinking about multiple fences being created from the same tree), grounded into the 3rd dimension, what is it that distinguishes us from one another?
A sovereign consciousness? (And where does that come from?)
Transition: energy.
Energy doesn’t lie, but it can be misinterpreted. Our ability to sense the pure vibration of the energetic pulse (in conscious beings, the vibrational pulse would be a consciously-directed energy) depends on how clearly we are able to interpret our own. If we don’t understand ourselves, and the way we process vibrations in our own emotional and mental bodies, we cannot expect to understand emotional or mental interactions with others at their core. The core of their soul or the vibrational pulse itself. We are always either creating an initial interaction, reacting to it (this includes conscious nonreaction) or engaging in the flow. This is for any exchange, a conversation, sports (passing a ball back-and-forth, volleying, spiking, etc.) or even just a look.
Seeing another to this degree requires a clear awareness of one’s own self.
We can hold space for each other. And in fact, we do. Space for shared joy, shared grief, shared experiences, shared anything. Whatever we hold space for within ourselves can be shared. What we hold (both individually and together, or as a collective) is also a choice. This is akin to the law of attraction. As we hold space for a certain energy (not an image, a feeling), we attract the external fulfillment of that.
This began as a post about shared wounds and holding space for shared wounds in others, but I’ll come back to that at another time.