everything
everything
How do you experience the everything of this moment?
Back in the Summer of 2013 at the Venice Biennale, I stumbled upon an exhibit of the Everything Museum in an outdoor park. I recall with fondness a series of playful and wonder-full interactions. Yesterday, I felt my feet upon those cobblestones in that park under a canopy of trees.
I love when something from long-ago shows you how it’s here—right in front of you—now.
Eleven years ago. Forty years ago. Three lifetimes ago. Five lifetimes to come or adjacent or again. The time of things is porous now. We can see and be with and breathe through the pores, once upon, ever after, more.
Of everything.
A glimpse is still a glimpse. It’s also a full scene embodied, memory in skin.
Whispers still whisper. They also sing, rumble, and roar.
Dreams still dream, yet they don’t need to drift in sleep. No longer far away or of reaching. They’re simply here—birds perched on a wire looking straight into our eyes.
We are the chants of our enchantment. It is so. I found this remembering two years ago. Then is now, and I am the holding. You are, too.
The everything of this moment also includes endless ways to see and talk about things. There are multiple modes of access, frames of understanding, languages of seeing, explanations of what and why and how.
And the everything shows up differently for each person: flood of ideas and fiery plans; intensity of desire; constant uncomfortable noise; swirls of motion as if being swept up and away; deepening connection, commitment, focus; or… and… something else.
You know what’s true for you. And also, none of this is for you, or for me.
We aren’t on individual journeys. The individualist frame, the you-need-to-heal-yourself frame, the if-this-then-that frame; these keep us away from the everything. Let them go.
This isn’t even a journey. We are here.
What is “us” and who is “everyone” is also part of the matter of everything, with endless frames of what and why of community, world, collective, future, justice.
It’s not about the “right” climate policy agenda or the “best” health care option or the “better” financed candidate on the ballot. None of this is about either-or, better of two options, you’re right-they’re wrong, do this first-then that, this is how it has to be.
It is much more than this—more alive, more connected, more love, more true.
I know not everyone sees it this way.
This is the everything, too.
What I see and know may be different than you.
This isn’t about objective vs. subjective truth. Let that old frame go, too.
We are multiple. Fluid. Simultaneous.
It’s all real. It’s all matter. It’s all here.
But what does this mean?
I stand on the sidewalk and talk with a neighbor who is inside the everything just like me, and who is also in a completely different reality.
This is happening more and more.
We are living side-by-side, with very different experiences about the what and why and how of our realities. And many humans are still gripped by ideas, agreement, taking sides, and apt to cancel and separate as a way to “belong.”
The multiplicities, the contradictions, the simultaneous, and… the divisions, the holding on, the wanting to fix—
all of this is the everything, too.
Sometimes I hear my heart beg: Oh, why can’t they see?
I’m always returned to my breath, my plea circling me back home to remind me that everything is already one.
And I recently found this gem, from John O’Donohue:
Everything that is alive holds distance within itself. This is especially true of the human self. It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance. There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. (Eternal Echoes: Exploring our Yearning to Belong, 1999; also quoted in The Marginalian).
A bud on one branch of one tree.
The rose, open-petalled with all her thorns.
Colony of bats who read sounds of sky.
Stretch of flesh and dream as footstep.
Glimpse as forever as before as now.
It’s all closeness of distance, the dynamic circles of it all, the aliveness of everything at once.
Slowly, one step at a time, layers of story are breathing their ebb and flow with me.
Leading me—traveling, dreaming, returning, remembering, seeing anew—into an expanse of longing.
There are stories to tend in longing. Tenderness of what wants to unfurl, awaken, rejoice. They are calling.
And there is magic here.
The kind of magic that feels like falling and being held at the same time.
Magic that feels immense beyond the skies and as the smallest pebble.
Our longings—especially the wisps and fragments that feel lost, partial, or incomplete—are waiting for us.
They want, too.
Want us to see that they are the place—they playground—for creation with the everything.
Want us to stretch and wonder in their landscape, go into each morsel of soil, and attune our hums to every small thing.
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as delight, Melissa
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Listening into Longing
There is powerful potential in the landscape of longing.
How do we access the fragments of dream, memory, and wish that visit us in moments throughout our days (and might feel fleeting or faint)?
How do we practice deepest listening to what wants to come through?
How do we stretch from the big picture of what we want into noticing each small wisp of yearning for the gem it is?
We will practice together on Monday 18 March at 4:00 ET.
Bring yourself. Bring your longings. That’s all you’ll need.
[Weekly subscribers will receive a zoom link in next week’s post.]
February books of nourishment:
And this. Oh, this. Oh Justice.
If you care about justice, if you work for justice, if you use the word “justice,” if you yearn for justice, if you weep that there may be justice, this episode is for YOU.
I promise: It will sing your heart open and remember you home.
It is worth every breath of its three hours of listening.
Highest open-hearted recommendation.
If you like reading about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and educator practice, here’s a new essay I wrote for the Fred Rogers Institute: It’s like breath.
Learn more about me and my work: www.melissaabutler.com
Find me on Instagram: noticingmatters
I see you… reading all the way to the end. :)
Thank you for your attention. And thank you for being YOU.