Connection

Do you notice how some words suddenly go into high rotation in your life? Like they’ve been spat out of the zeitgeist into your little stream; a shimmering gold leaf that eddies around for as long as it takes for you to notice and eventually scoop up for closer inspection?

Connection.

A very broad word. Ten letters with so much breadth of circumstantial usage but in every scenario the same inherent meaning: the coming together of two or more things. Connection. I would say that I live in a state of deep steady connection with nature but in an eclectic state of connection with humans. I’ve learned to love other humans, learned to converse with them, I’ve even got quite a palette of learned social human nuances that help land me in a little less hot water with humans but by and large, humans have never been an easy place of connection for me. Fascination, yes, connection, challenging but disconnection? No.

In many a conversation I’ve had over the years with Indigenous Elders and friends, connection has come up time and time again. An understanding of connection so vast, it leaves out nothing. The understanding of connection to all things. Every leaf, every grain of sand, person, animal, cloud, earth, river, everything. Nothing slips by or through this life alone. NOTHING.

Connection.

Everything is connected. In nature it is so clear, the cycles that link things together – if you were just to spend a lifetime studying water, you would spend a life learning about connection. From the headwater to the river to the sea to the sky to the earth to the river to the sea again and again, of how the story of what one person is doing with land a hundred kilometres away will eventually be told by the river, by the sea, the coral, the plankton and by the whale. How a volcano in Tonga, creates a flood in Australia. The connection between rock and water, neither dominant both affected. Connected. It’s all very easy for the eyes of the modern world to see, eyes that have made the Earth so small, so accessible for viewing from a million different angles and in amongst it all…

Connection.

From the slide beneath the microscope to Jupiter in relationship with the sun. Connection.The finest of webs, to the boldest of bonds. We are always in connection. So where then is all the pain born? Why such feelings of loneliness when it is impossible to be disconnected? A feeling of disconnection is nothing more than the clouds of the mind; I-ness, desire, aversion and fear, these things do not break connection but they do obstruct it. Clouds made of nothing but can obscure the light of the sun. The mind puts connection under strain, distorts it, forces it to bend and to re-route. The mind carries corruption on the threads of connection. Even war is connection. Connection corrupted by I-ness, desire, aversion and fear. We cannot break the bonds no matter how hard we try, we can only decide what quality the connections will carry..

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