A leaf falls near me, reflecting light brightly, and it is this light which catches my attention. My mind says it’s reflecting off a falling leaf, but if I can push, let that thought go. The light is still this miraculous light that is flowing past the corner of my eye. It is miraculous. It is as amazing as a comet fleeting across the horizon at night. As I walk through the forest and I want to meditate and breathe with my heart, feel the waves of energy which I’m walking through, which rub against me just like the tall grass and wildflowers that continually reach across the path and touch my arms and legs, it’s not the objects. It’s not even really my sensation of them. It’s the quality and delicate moment of being, just the sense of communication occurring of a shared message that everything is okay. There’s no need to think it through. There’s no need to draw a conclusion. A conclusion is like a bad poem. Now there’s life in the poem and a gnat in my throat. It is less a poem, perhaps, than a story. For if this is about communication, especially with communication that will bring people together, heal their divisions based on logic or reason or even dogma, a story told can be interpreted so many ways. And the storyteller is not the one who does the interpreting. So when we meet people who feel so differently about things than we do, there’s a couple of things to remember. Number one, they feel the same as we do about most things. Number two, we have to use words or examples to reveal our stories to them. We have to listen to their stories and attempt to accept their conclusions for the moment. What I mean is we can’t react to their conclusions. The best we can do, or hope to do, is impress them with the story so that at some point in the future our story comes to their mind, or their story comes to ours. When we’re in some moment of, not necessarily communication with another person, but communication with ourselves, and suddenly we’re able to interpret that story. Its meaning is revealed to us. It’s as if their landscape and our landscape, where they intersect, suddenly merge and their ideal, their common ideal, is revealed. If we’re a good communicator, this might happen on the spot, in the present moment. I believe this is what happens when we walk through the woods, that when we have a conversation, especially a crucial conversation, our stories are better left out to ripen a while. Then we can return and celebrate them as we taste them together, share them together at another time, tomorrow, next week, next year, who knows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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