Fractured

JP explained that it calms our mind and restores our attentive capacity to gaze at fractals. We spent a long time wondering why this is - perhaps because we evolved around trees and the pattern of light on water, and our mind can zoom in and out at will, finding both complexity and simplicity.

When we look closely, we can find fractals in both our external and internal reality. Within one breath, one thought, one day, one tidal cycle, one moon cycle, and one lifetime, we create, hold, dissolve, repose, and then create again. Gazing at this experiential fractal of coming and going calms my mind.

There are systems at work that benefit from our embodied separation instead of our embodied community with all life. I wonder how these systems and tendencies that exhibit as planetary-level problems are reflected in the patterns of my own boat and my own body. Given our tendency to be calm and focused around fractals, what would it look like if we approach the work to be done as a fractal, in which we would bring our attention “from the tidepool to the stars,” and see how humanity’s centuries-long cycle of creating and dissolving is reflected in your next breath?

I think this too would calm my mind.

On the rising tide,
         I entrust myself to the Ocean
On the falling tide,
         the Ocean entrusts herself to me
Can we do the work and let it go?
Can we find the way in the dust of the way?
When all of the rocks are exposed,
And the snails survive as constellations not as individuals,
The present moment becomes the tide pool that holds us all.